I work in a secular job and I was recently having a conversation with a young guy at lunch. He was raised Catholic and ventured even away from that. We began to speak about God and I listened to his ideas of what the church is. “All you do is give the church money, money, money and I can worship God myself and keep my money.” I tried to get him straightened out on this point but to no avail and so we ate lunch and kept jokingly bouncing the bad points of church and bad points of not going to church amongst each other.
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| Are you speaking or listening with your communication? |
On the way back to work I began to give an example of why people go to church. I will admit that I am not sure this was the Holy Spirit but the example really worked when I spoke about marijuana.
I said, “JJ if you were a pot smoker and loved it so much you couldn’t help but think about it all the time and you had this one guy with a nice house to hangout with on Friday nights and smoke pot, see your friends there that also loved weed, then tell me where you would be every Friday night?”
I think it instantly dawned on him why I said, “no you don’t have to go to church to go to Heaven, but if you are a Christian then you will want to go to church!” Now I didn’t lead JJ to the Lord that day but I did make a huge impression with him on why Christians fellowship on Sunday morning’s. I will not stop though until he knows Jesus.
Leadership is not about forcing someone to follow you or follow your beliefs. Leadership is about having people want to follow you and your beliefs. You can be as dogmatic as you want, as knowledgeable as you can possibly be, but if you do not know how to communicate your message then they will never follow you. As a college instructor I learned that every person has different styles of learning and we must adapt to each to spread God’s message!
Never be afraid to communicate your message on the level of the person receiving the message. All people have different styles of learning. Stay in God’s power and you will not go wrong. Need help with learning to communicate with people? Let me know!
