Dreaming

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Not everyone is naturally a dreamer. Oh, we all have some dreamer in us, but some of us have more "organizer" in us and some of us have more "do-er" in us.

Not everyone knows how to dream or toward what end they might dream. But we can learn to dream more and better dreams. I owe most of these thoughts to Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery.

Dreaming is not day-dreaming. It's work. To dream as the leader of a local church means, in part, to do the work of dreaming the local church as something apart from you, the pastor. The work of asking all the right questions, about why this church, as opposed to that church? Why a church, as opposed to a Rotary Club? If you are a pastor, it's easy for you to decide to accept a position as leader/pastor of a church. But that's just the point. If you are a pastor and are determined to give dream-oriented, visionary leadership to a church, you would leave your "pastor-ing" experience behind you and engage in the internal dialogue with which every true visionary personality is wonderfully familiar.

You would begin to say to yourself, "It's time for me to create a new life. It's time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole opportunity-filled world is to lead a bold, alive local church. One that is full of on-fire disciples of Jesus Christ, one that doesn't require me -- personally -- to be there all the time, one that has the potential to be stunningly impactful, one that people will talk about long after having experienced it for the very first time, and as a result of a powerful experience, will come back again and again because it transformed them and continues to transform them. I wonder what that church would be?

That's the question of the Dreamer. The dreaming question. "I wonder. I wonder. I wonder."

Here's Gerber: "So the work of [a Dreamer] is to wonder. To imagine and to dream. To see with as much of herself as she can muster the possibilities that waft about in midair someplace above her head and within her heart. Not in the past but in the future. That's the work the entrepreneurial personality does at the outset of her [endeavor] and at each and every stage along the way. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. Just as every inventor must. Just as every composer must. Just as every artist, or every craftsperson, or every physicist must. Just as every baker of pies must. I call it Future Work. 'I wonder' is the ture work of the entrepreneurial personality."

How could you do your work differently and give life to the Dreamer inside of you? How could you totally change your experience of leading a local church?