VillagePastor

Lessons From Steve Jobs

Reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs has been a pretty amazing experience. I JUST FINISHED LAST NIGHT, AND LIKE Gordon MacDonald, who recently wrote a piece on Jobs, I regretted getting to the last page. He has to be one of the most unique men who has ever lived. Maybe history will place him in the pantheon next to Edison and Ford, for he truly built the world’s most creative company, Apple. He launched a series of products that transformed whole industries—

• the Apple II
• the Macintosh
• Toy Story
• Apple Stores
• The iPod
• The iTunes Store
• the iPhone
• the App Store
• the iPad
• iCloud

 So here are some takeaways from his life—

1-Be as meticulous with the unseen as you are with the seen. Jobs grew up as an adopted child, and lived in a working class home. His father loved to work with his hands, and work in his garage. He was meticulous with detail. He taught his son to craft the backs of things like cabinets and fences, even though they are hidden. The important lesson he learned was to do things right, to care about the parts you cannot see. It led him to despise carelessness in a product. He applied this to everything he created at Apple.

 2-Never underestimate the formative influence you can have with a middle schooler. This part of the story scared me, as I think about the words I say as a pastor. Jobs attended a Lutheran church as child, but it came to an end when he was thirteen. He confronted his pastor with a question regarding human suffering and the sovereignty of God, and the pastor’s answer led him to reject Christianity. He went on to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism, mixed with meditation and spirituality, acid and rock. He followed the basic precepts of Eastern religions. Until his final days, he never had any real assurance about the things of God. He concluded that different religions have different doors to the same house, and maybe the house exists and maybe it doesn’t.

3-A fly in the ointment can spoil the perfume. Jobs had an amazing, creative mind. He was a genius. He could absorb information and sniff the future winds. He inspired and challenged the very best from people, and attracted the very best minds in the world. He won people to a cause, and it moved CEO’s from major corporations (like Sculley of  Pepsico-“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”). He attracted the brightest and bests artists and engineers. He could be charming, charismatic, and even mesmerizing. But he could also be manipulative, brutally cold, and rude. There was no regulator between his mind and his mouth. He created unnecessary fears because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his proclivity to tell people exactly what he thought. Ultimately, his profane and nasty edge hindered more than helped him.

 4-There is great power in intensity and focus. Isaacson, after all of his research and interviews came to the conclusion that Jobs’ most salient trait was his intensity. He set priorities and aimed his laser attention on them. He could filter out all distractions. Jobs believed that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.  Because Jobs brought intensity into everything he did, it created its own tension. He was tightly coiled and impatient. His silences could be as searing as his rants. He either praised you or cursed you. It was either a great product or it was crap. Whatever he was interested in, he almost always took to an irrational extreme. But this is a huge part of what made his accomplishments great. One is left wondering if one can truly achieve at a level of greatness without this.

to read the rest of the article go to Trans-formed

Untimely Prophets

Preaching on the prophetic discourse in Matthew 24 this past weekend, I was reminded that prophetic preaching is not so in vogue these days.  We have survived the “prophetic voices” of the Lindseys, Kirbans, LaHayes, and more recently the Campings, and are not so inclined to listen to those who have seemingly cracked the code or created impressive time charts.  And that is good.  How they have done these things in the face of Matthew 24:36 is rather mystifying. But prophets are still needed, and prophetic preaching is more necessary than we realize.  Ours may very well be the “days of Noah” Jesus warned about. We may be so consumed with present activities we are oblivious to how God is actually moving.

What is needed are different kinds of prophetic voices—prophets less obsessed with calculation; more consumed with preaching a message of vigilance. Prophets less concerned with the times; more concerned with untimeliness.  Nearly ten years ago, Os Guinness, in his Prophetic Untimeliness,  challenged us to become “untimely prophets”, prophets who speak the word of the Lord, interpret events from the perspective of faith, and fearlessly declare how we must then live. 

Untimely is an interesting description, but his illustrations help flesh it out. Untimely prophets are ill-timed and inconvenient because they declare what the world is not so inclined to want to hear. They discern the times and have the courage to repudiate powerful interests and fashion. They look something like Winston Churchill. Because he was an historian, he was enabled to at the same time be a visionary (what’s called the Janus Effect-the more one can see in the past, the more one can see into the future).  But very few were willing to listen to his premonitions, his prophetic voice, and so the 1930’s were his “wilderness years”.  Though he warned of the mounting menace of Hitler (something he could see because of his reading of European history), and though he declared that Hitler must be checked, hardly anyone listened.  The nations were “lulled into oblivion” before the rapidly growing power of Nazi Germany.  His words were timely, yet untimely for the culture he lived in.  It was that way with Noah.  It may be for emerging prophets today. 

But in an age where the church is becoming increasingly captive to culture, untimely prophets are needed more than ever.  Guinness warns in his book that they, however, must prepare to pay a price.  The first is maladjustment.  Prophets who choose to be faithful will increasingly find their message is out of sync, irrelevant (though he also warns that those focused on being relevant to the times ultimately become irrelevant). The second price is impatience.  Prophets who face an increasingly godless and corrupt culture will feel the frustration of God’s delay, God’s bringing to fulfillment His kingdom. The third cost is a sense of failure.  They will not necessarily amass a crowd nor sell a lot of books.

The good news is that our failure may very well be His success, and our setbacks will be His turning point.  Timely words.  Future prophets who redeem the time will do so by being untimely.

Exercise Is Not Training

It’s been there, posted on a wall here and there.  I just never stopped to think about it until this morning, while working out at the gym.  There in front of me was this poster: “Exercise is not Training”. Maybe it’s intended for people like me, who go to the club four to five times a week, swim laps, play tennis, lift weights, and spin.  I’m not really destinational.  This is especially true in spinning class.  We ride lots of miles, but go nowhere.  I’m not really training for anything—just maintaining, keeping muscles from going limp and a tennis game from regressing any further, and lungs from devolving.  And maybe that is okay.  At this point in my life, I am quite content if my body just keeps its shape.

But this is not okay in other areas of my life, especially ministry.  It wouldn’t be such a bad idea to put this sign on a number of doors, both at the church and at the seminary.  For we enter these places not merely to exercise, but to train (I hope).  This certainly was Paul’s language.  He did not call us to mere exercise.  I Tim 4:7 exhorts us to “train yourself in godliness”.  Everything about his faith was destinational, as it must be ours.  There is a prize to go after, a race to be run, a line we are called to aim for (2 Tim 4:7).

While I am not so impressed with Steve Jobs personal life, I am impressed with a man who seemed to live by these words, “Exercise is not Training”. I am much of the way  through Isaacson’s impressive biography, Steve Jobs.  I did not like it at first.  I found myself wondering why I should devote much time to a man who was clearly a narcissist and at times a real jerk.  But now that I am in chapter 30, I am finding myself reading portions of it to my staff.  And here’s why.  More than keeping on keeping on, he always kept pressing forward into the future.

In the chapter “The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod”, Issacson recounts how Jobs would once a year take his most valuable employees on a retreat.  Standing in front of a white board, he would ask this question: “What are the ten things we should be doing next?” He would get their suggestions, cross off the ones he considered dumb, and then announce they could only do three. It was out of these settings Apple came up with some of their great ideas—ones that moved into reality. 

In one of these moments, Jobs and team launched a grand new strategy.  Just when experts were predicting the personal computer, the center of the digital revolution, was losing its central role, maturing into something “boring”, edging toward the sidelines, Apple decided that the PC should become the digital hub that coordinated everything from music players to video recorders to cameras.  Everything changed for the Macintosh, as well as for Apple.

So what’s the takeaway?  Exercise is not training.  Doing ministry the same way, leading the church to the same goals, staffing ministry to do the same ministries is simply exercising.  Dreaming, envisioning, imagining, and planning for a future that is constantly shifting is training.  We talked a lot about this today in our staff.  We have no desire to be caretakers of the status quo.  We have to keep asking—what are the ten things we should be doing next?  And just maybe, God might give us a new strategy that maximizes something people are writing off, or creating something people have not thought about yet.