The phrase "you've got a lot of potential" is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it is certainly an encouragement to know that you have talents and abilities that are just waiting to be unleashed.

On the other hand, a lot of people allow their "potential" to become an excuse for complacency.

The key, I believe, is to use potential as motivation to work harder as opposed to using it as an excuse to get by on natural talent alone.

I believe the church I serve has almost unlimited potential. Because of our location, size, facilities, and congregational DNA, we have kingdom-sized impact just waiting to be unleashed. Whatever success we have had to this point only highlights how much more we are able to do.

That's why we are pretty relentless is trying do things better here. More focused. With more simplicity. And greater impact.

Because I don't want us ever to be the kind of church or people who had potential . . . and then didn't live up to it.

Our pastoral staff spent Sunday night and all day Monday in Blowing Rock, NC.

It was a time of retreat, renewal, and connection.

It was also a result of my commitment to be more focused and diligent in my leadership of my friends and colleagues on the staff.

As I've posted here before, I am in general a better leader of the congregation than I am of the staff.

Of course, as I now realize, the staff is part of the congregation!

But in leading the church as a whole, I am usually organized and disciplined. In contrast, my leadership of the staff has been haphazard and reactionary.

The prayer is that 2009 will be different. By setting the staff schedule on paper, by clarifying expectations, and by contronting difficult issues rather than wishing them away, I am trying to make our lives "behind the scenes" as healthy and impactful as the worship we craft in public on Sunday.

Because the people who work here deserve nothing less.

Not long ago, I ran across a two part quote that I'll actually touch on this Sunday:

Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in them (the leader).

Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.

Whoa. In my dealings with the other staff here at Good Shepherd, do I want to inspire them to have confidence in me or in themselves? In my leadership of the church body as a whole, do I want to inspire people to have confidence in me as a pastoral leader or in themselves as Jesus followers?

I wish I could say with simplicity and clarity that I want to inspire people to have confidence in themselves. But reality is neither that simple nor that clear. I can have mixed motives when it comes to exercising leadership and inspiring confidence.

But now that I have this new way of looking at the issue, I know what question I'll be asking myself each morning: who can I inspire to have confidence in themselves today?

I am blessed.

That might be an odd first sentence for a post with the title "Addiction Epidemic," but it's true.

It's true because people trust me with some of the most serious areas of their lives. That's quite an honor.

And the thing that keeps coming into my office is . . . addiction. That's what people bring to me when they trust me with the most serious & urgent areas of their lives. Addictions of all kinds: to drugs, gambling, porn, alcohol.

With that in mind, here are the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

There's a lot of Gospel there.

I believe pastors and church leaders should be aware of and in conversation with recovery groups and recovering people. Because there seems to be no end in sight for the addiction epidemic.

The great thing about the church is that we have a name for the "God of our understanding" from Step Three. We try to help people understand God as the Father of Jesus.

Like I said, there's a lot of Gospel there. Because we are all powerless over something.

Usually ourselves.