Allan Kelsey: Strengfinders Training

Allan Kelsey // Strengthsfinder Day

Beginnings matter.

The seed put in the ground dictates what will come out of the ground later. 

Speed reading test story. A university did a test on students reading abilities. The survey showed that some students could read 90 words/per minute while others could read 350 words pre minute.

They then put the students through a test to try and increase their reading levels. After 6 weeks of trying to increase people’s reading abilities. The students who were reading at 90 words per minute could afterwards read 140 words per minute (a 60% increase). The remarkable thing however is that the students who were reading 350 words per minute, ended up being able to read 2970 words per minute. The test realised the impact of natural talent and ability on a persons ability to improve an ability.

Dr Clifton then devoted his life to discovering people’s strengths. 

After extensive tests they realised that there are 600 natural talents in humanity. They then boiled that  down into 34 categories/ideas.

The human brain takes 40% of all the energy created by your body. The whole literally exists to serve the brain.

The brain has 100 billion nodes. If you made a £1 a second you would become a millionaire in 11 days. At the same rate it'd take you 11 years to become a billionaire, that's the difference between a million and a billion. The brain has 100 billion nodes.

‘There are enough zeros here for us to have a bubble bath!’

The human brain ‘specialises’ around the ages of 35-37. Up until that point you can experiment with all sorts of things but around 35-37 the parts of our brain that aren’t used as much will begin to shut down and resources reallocated to the areas of your brain that are being used. God wants us to be ‘about something’.

Brains are filled with connectors. The ones that are used the most get ‘fatter’ than the thins ones. The difference is like that between a coffee straw and a fire hydrant hose. 

When we add: skill, experience and knowledge to an existing skill/talent that we have moves it from a talent to a strength, from something we’re good at to something we’re excellent at.

Strengthfinders is like a mirror we hold it up to see ourselves to see our gifts/talents. Just as we can’t see the whole of ourselves with only a mirror (we need others/video recorders) so it is with our strengths. We need others to help bring us out of ourselves. 

When God’s in something it grows exponentially. He isn’t into addition but multiplication. 

X-Factor works because it harnesses strength and looks to develop it. 

Our brains release seratomin when we do the things we’re made to do. 

Redemption isn’t something that God does, redemption is something about who God is.

Hosea 4:6 ‘my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge’

Boxes:

Talents - you did nothing for it, God gave it  Body /5 reward = happiness

God - God tells you to Spirit /5 reward = contentment

Skill - you acquire because you chose to Mind /5 reward = satisfaction

Decisions:

‘I’m not feeling content or fulfilled in my role’

On a list: 1-5 how much are you operating in your talent, call, skill, role, reward, 

______

The law of pinnacle attraction: The height of something is most attractive to the largest number of people. ie. the better you are at something/something is, the more people will be drawn to see you do it. Vice versa it’s true as well. 

Talent, spirit, passion: these three are the biggest driver of who you are. 

interlocking circles. The place that all three circles align is the ‘sweet spot’.

Talents: DISC, Strengths, Myers-Briggs etc.

Spirit: Spiritual gifts, promises of God, particular scriptures that ‘do something to you’.

Passion: Areas in your life that constantly always motivate you.

______

Who am I: you cannot answer this outside of relationships. We answer who we are by answering it relating to who we know/related to and what we do.

What am I here for? 

Two ways to lead people:

Your vision, your idea, your instruction - now I need to find the right people.

God will provide all my needs. If God is supplying all my needs, what’s in supply now?

Praise vs Affirmation

Praise is about what you’ve done and do

Affirmation is about who you are.

Affirmation is missing in our society today. Your strengths are fundamentally about who you are more than what you do. Whatever we do we bring our strengths to bear on them. To affirm people, recognise who they are, not what they do.

Praise can be ‘lobbed over the fence’ and it works. Affirmation must be accurate or it hits the floor. If you go for affirmation and miss it makes people feel ‘played’ and ‘politicianed’.

In relationships:

If we talk about ‘opposite’ and ‘different’ it moves to conflict in relationships. Instead we must talk about ‘complimentary’. When we recognise their strengths it means that we work toward a ‘healing’ of one another.

Every strength that exists, also has a counterfeit:

We have an adversary. To understand this we need to understand the difference between truth and facts. There is a constant tension between truth and facts. The tension sets up the opportunity to choose. You can choose and whatever you choose is also the place you’re going to reap. It sets up this opportunity to in our lives.

People with belief have non-negotiable for each area of their lives. They are usually morally and ethically based and they are non-negotiably important. People with Belief are like Lighthouses. They are steady, strong and secure. People form relationships with these people very quickly and ‘go deep’ quick as well. People then ‘move on’ from those individuals. The person with ‘belief’ is not broken but knowing this helps them to put their relationships ‘in the right box’.

The whole of the strengths conversation revolves around two ideas:

the strongest contribution of your life 

how you feel about doing your work. 

Eph. 2:10

‘created in Christ Jesus for good works that he prepared beforehand that we might walk in them.’

Input: learn about one particular channel of information, or about one idea.

Learner: fascinated in a wide variety of things. Love the Discovery Channel.

We all tend to minimise our strengths and project our strengths onto others. 

Authenticity:

The most authentic you is to be the person that God has made you to be. 

Beat the counterfeits: 

You can dismantle the counterfeit by explaining the real motivator is for your behaviour.

Zoe has: connectedness and belief. This means she has quote ‘superhuman faith’.

Quotes:

When we become Christians all of the promises of God are ‘sent’ from heaven and ‘dumped on our grass’.

To do with our gifts and talents: The best of who you are is the best of the one who made you, inside you.

Seek first to understand before seeking to be understood. Steven Covey

Psychologists Hunt & ?? say that when you find your mate you ultimately find the one who will ‘heal you’.

‘sameness’ pushes us away from each other (like in science). It’s opposites that attract.

melts my butter

fires my rocket

The 10 most influential things on church from past century

From: http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/247118-10-influential-church-trends-last-century.html/2

The following have influenced and shaped the church and her thinking more than anything else in the last 100 years:

1) The birth of the charismatic movement. Starting at Azusa Street in 1906.
2) The house church movement in China
3) The interacting of people (Internet and interstate), creating multiethnic churches
4) The largest church in history (The Full Gospel Church - 750 000 strong), cell movement.
5) The Southern Baptist Convention. A denomination that began in 1900 and became the largest protestant church in the US, based in large part on the motivating of lay leaders and their adult Sunday school visitation
6) The Scofield Bible and Scofield's approach to exposition
7) Willow Creek and the Seeker model/emphasis
8) Worldwide development of praise-worship music
9) Church embracing advertising and media to help with the message
10) Churches willing to adapt their style to embrace baby boomers a generation of children massively different from the pre WWII generation.

We broke the categories into four realms: (1) inward for spiritual growth, (2) upward to God, (3) relational to other believers and (4) outward to the non-Christian.

Parenting Children For a Life of Faith: Rachel Turner

Rachel suggests 4 ways of helping children understand 'relationship with God'.

• Create windows
• Verbalise more
• Invite
• Overcome the fear

Create windows:

Make opportunities for your children to see what happens when you spend time with God. Read the Bible with them around, leave your notebook open, leave the door to your quiet time ajar. 

The Universe:

Here, a collection of facts and illustrations about the universe/creation to inspire worship and wonder: 

Think Theology/Liam Thatcher/Carl Sagan & Psalm 8. Talking about how mankind is the 'icon' or image of God that leads us to worship rather than the universe, he points first to the magnificence of the universe:

Creation has a way of making you feel small, doesn’t it? Last Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 8 and this fact hit me again. Compared to this universe, I am really pretty minuscule.

There are around 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone… give or take a few billion! Just last week scientists claimed to have mapped the universe to within 1% accuracy and believe they have counted over 1.2 million galaxies. 1.2 million x 400 billion. Do the maths… That’s a lot of noughts.

How tiny does that make you feel?

Light travels pretty quickly. In fact, it moves so fast it could orbit the earth 7.4 times every second. Imagine light setting off at that kind of speed in a straight line. One light year – the distance light travels in a year – is about 5.9 trillion miles. If you tried to walk a light year at an average pace of 20 minutes per mile, without stopping for food, rest or any other comfort break, it would take you 225 million years to complete your journey – and who’s got time for that? The average pair of shoes lasts 500 miles, which means you’d get through 11.8 billion pairs on your journey and the average adult burns 80 calories a mile so you’d need about 2 trillion energy bars to keep you going!

In short, don’t bother…

To give you an idea of distances, the sun is less than a light year away. A lot less. In fact, it takes light 8 minutes and 19 seconds to travel the distance from the Sun to the Earth. So if you set off on your light year journey you would reach the sun relatively quickly and then you’d be a bit disappointed after that because the next closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.22 light years away from the sun. And in the grand scheme of things, 4.22 light years isn’t even very far, since scientists believe they have mapped the universe up to 6 billion light years away.

How astonishingly minute does that make you feel?

A link to an article with an incredible photo of space and some facts about it:

http://www.churchleaders.com/daily-buzz/246666-nasas-new-largest-picture-ever-taken-will-overwhelm-praise-worship.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=clnewsletter&utm_content=CL+Daily+20150201

Buckets: News items

On loss of free speech in UK:

MPs who claim to support the right to free speech should be invited to carry 'I am Harry' banners in memory of Harry Hammond, a street preacher convicted under the Public Order Act for carrying a banner in Bournemouth saying: 'stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Jesus is Lord.' He was fined £300 and ordered to pay £395 cost, and died soon afterwards. -- The Spectator, 17 Jan 2015

Joel Virgo: Seasons in Leadership Development

God trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle -- Psalm 144:1

Accept the reality that God will be working a lot more in us than he will, through us for long phases of our lives. Being faithful with much and being entrusted with much comes providing we don't stay at the level of only having God working in us. We get stuck here because we don't learn the lessons God aims to teach us when he teaches them to us.

He is my steadfast love and my fortress -- Psalm 144:2

Seasons of leadership development:

1. Formation of core convictions.

Why is this important?

• As people come into the church we will serve them best when we lead them with clear convictions. When we're persuaded about things in our soul we don't need to argue or get emotional with people about them.
• Because our culture is losing its Christian convictions and needs Christians who hold to authentic Christianity.
• Because more and more are not showing the level of conviction and evangelical clarity as they ought to. 

When we are persuaded God can use us. We become an effective tool in God's hand.

Billy Graham had a friend Charles Templeton. Charles Templeton was cleverer, sharper and more able. Templeton yielded to liberalism and eventually lost his faith. Graham wrestled with this and the sadness of his (more brilliant than he) friend's demise. It was against that backdrop that he made the statement on a walk once : 'God I will trust this book and what you say.' He came out with clear and strong convictions as a result. 

Doubt pretends to work on our reason when actually it's working on our emotions.

Find core disciplines that help form the core convictions. Do not just live by emergencies, develop consistencies.

A lot of real growth is formed behind your back.

The times when God is building deep foundations in you are also the moments that are characterised by costly decisions and crisis points.

We can't live on the encounters with God of others, we need to encounter God for ourselves, personally and powerfully.

2. Silence from God.

The Bible talks a lot about the wilderness and the way these seasons form us and develop us as leaders. To handle that: maintain your post. Keep doing the thing God has said. Carry on faithfully and trust that he is mightily at work.

We need to be able to walk through seasons where we're getting on and doing what God has said even if we're not enjoying it anymore. 

As a generation we have a dreadful weakness for not being able to stay the course. This comes when we associate the activity of God with adrenaline. 

Learn to be a good reminder of yourself. Have some way of calling things to mind.

Who is that coming up from the wilderness,    leaning on her beloved? -- Song of Songs 8:5

As believers we too often become tempted to look for crisis encounters with God and believe that we can live on them. The two ways we grow as Christians:

• Crisis
• Process

 We need both. If one is stronger than the other, God might, for a while put a patch over one of them (like correcting a lazy eye).

3. Obscurity 

Seasons in our lives where we feel like everyone else apart for us are being used. It hurts more for some than it does for others. For some their sense of self-importance is more closely linked to public profile. 

Bible figures who have to go through this: Joseph, David, Jesus (Isaiah 53)

An important principle to understand is that you are always under the spotlight in heaven. There is never obscurity before God. God uses obscurity to purify our hearts from an idolatry of public ministry.

Keep your eye on the main thing. If the main thing is acclaim, you're quite useless when you've got it. There's a big difference between wanting to be President and actually doing President. 

 

Your ways are not hidden from the Lord, you are hidden with Christ in God. God's gifts to us are thoughtful and carefully chosen. They're not like pyjamas from a distant relative who sends you the same thing every year without giving it much thought. 

Joel was given a prophetic word in the early nineties from a prophet who said: you and I will meet again in 7 years time at which time you will be at the heart of a festival of thousands of young people. It looked improbable even 6 years later as he was still employed as a school teacher. 6.5 years later Dave Devenish sat him down and asked him to leave his job and start New Day. 7 years from the prophecy Joel bumped into the prophet at an event that neither of them knew the other was going to be at.

4. Singleness & Marriage

You are called to be single or married. If you're single, you are called to be single - right now. 

What if marriage doesn't work? It is supposed to be a challenge. Marriage is two sinners living together, it isn't going to work in the way Hollywood presents it to work.

5. Sexual Purity

Jesus said: the pure will see God. What an incentive for pure living. 

Bible lists sexual selfishness and impurity and says 'because of these things the wrath of God is coming.' 

A church leader of many years fell sexually 3/4 years ago. Overtime his family was restored to him and his marriage is on the road to recovery. Joel sat with him and asked the question: What happened? The answer: Discouragement is dangerous. Keep searching for joy and delighting in God and seek pleasure in him.

6. Decision Making

Remember your core convictions. What do you know already? God's commands in scripture come first. If you're living a sexually immoral lifestyle, it's no good asking God which job to take when you're clearly disobeying a command of scripture.

God gives you a compass, not a map. He tells you the way to go and says 'get there'. We want an ordinance survey map, he doesn't give us that. Paul gets told by God 'I'm sending you to the gentiles.' Which is everywhere in the world! He then has to work out the more specific details in that.

Remember guidance comes in various ways. God speaks to different people in particular and specific ways. 

The deity has dignified humanity. Using your God-given faculties is still a viable and valuable way that God speaks to you.

Be honest about what you think God has said and what you think we should do.

7. Key Ministry Relationships

The relationships you have in ministry are very varied. To be fruitful we need to work out our different status's and stages with our relationships. Am I a father, a mentor, a brother, a follower, a son...? 

Understand gift alignment. Be yourself, who you are and where/how you fit. 

Have a sober assessment of yourself. We can get very drunk about ourselves and how special we are or we can be blind to our gift and value. We need to talk about it. We need to ask people honestly. 

Team when it works is wonderful. To get to that place is vital but it doesn't come over night. 

Excel at giving honour to one another. If the lion doesn't do that, no one will. 

8. Correction

Show grace and humility when corrected and others will trust you.

Some of the issue is that we don't receive correction, some of the issue is that we receive too much - we listen to too many people, we listen to everyone's opinion. We need wisdom to know who to listen to.

Story of Dave Holden. At the Down's Bible week as a young man in his 20s three separate people told him on the morning he was to speak that he had 'pride in his life.' It robbed him of confidence and courage. Terry Virgo, noticing something was wrong asked him. Dave told him and Terry replied 'if there was pride in your life I would not have asked you to speak. I've asked you to speak, now speak!' Choose who you listen to.

9. Opposition

Jesus said: woe to you when all men speak well of you.

and yet...

The worst things people can say about you are still not as bad as the truth. David Pawson went to God complaining to God about some things that people had said about him and felt God reply 'it's not as bad as the truth.' Martin Luther similarly. When the devil would tell him how bad he was or what sin there was in his life, he'd reply 'you've missed out some of the worst.'

10. Relationship disappointment

Learn how to be loyal. Joel told the story of a time he found a letter in his dad's office who had said some really horrible things to him. Joel & Terry were praying together and Terry started praying blessings on the man who'd written the letter. Praying that he (Terry) would have the grace to be a rock upon which the man could vent all of his sadness and heartache without needing to respond.

Things learnt by the government from Google

Check this out for a good list of 17 things learnt from a week with google:

https://gcn.civilservice.gov.uk/blog/2014/11/24/a-week-at-google-steve-vaughan/