Article by Colton Dyck
In watching the church leaders videos thus far, the main theme that has stood out to me is the theme of building for the desired outcome through healthy church leadership and day to day life structures. This idea that the outcome that I want can be more easily achieved if I understand how to create helpful structures around me that will work to facilitate that particular outcome. Like lines on a road, these structures create a path for people around and under me to follow, eventually with the hope that those desired outcomes become their new normal.
Even in looking at our personal foundations, I want to have more opportunities to grow in prophecy, in christian leadership or praying for the sick, then I can mold my life to become the very structure which facilitates increased opportunities for doing those things. I have set my mind to be observant in every situation, always scanning and paying attention to see if I can spot someone limping or stretching, which gives me opportunity to ask if they need healing. This has been honed to the level where now I can spot even a very minor limp on someone simply because I have developed that particular structure out of my desire to pray for more people for healing. I will have as much opportunity as I want, so long as I am looking for it!
Then, in looking beyond my personal life, I can start to create more opportunities for the re-creation of my personal culture in the lives of others in terms of how I determine to interact with others through ministry coaching and day to day life. I do this in my personal life surrounding a core value I hold with the prophetic, that it is better to hear God’s voice for yourself than to hear it through me as an intermediary. Because I hold this as a core value, and because I have seen its efficacy in my own life, I also want to find ways in which to encourage others to do likewise. I can do that in one of two ways, either teach or model it. I like to always do both if I can haha. When someone comes up to me on the ministry team for prayer or a prophetic word, I rarely give someone a regular prophetic word. Instead, I will walk them through asking God a series of questions and follow-ups so that they can just hear directly from the Lord on the matter. As I facilitate them in this encounter, I also am explaining the nature of hearing God’s voice and how it is as simple as hearing a friend’s voice. In so doing, the structure that I create of eliminating their need to hear God through me, hopefully, is shifting their core value and their way of thinking about the prophetic so that they will be less dependent on people for their guidance and more confident in their own ability to hear the Lord for themselves and receive counsel from Him on a moment to moment basis which will, in turn, transform their mind ever more into the likeness of Christ.
It is interesting though in thinking through how I might apply this principle of culture shaping through church small group
structures into areas which I have not had experience, such as church leadership. I have seen how this comes into play in the professional environment in how I created a set of standards and best practices and then taught others how to meet those standards until our level of quality as a company far surpassed our clients’ previous expectations.
I am thinking now about how I might dream of my desired outcome, and then be able to affect my team’s core values so that we could even create the structures to facilitate those outcomes together instead of my having to be the one person concerned with those things, which is how it has been in the past. Plus, especially since I am a teacher/trainer at heart, I am constantly looking at how to not only put these things into practice, but how also to be able to replicate and reproduce these concepts in others so that they also can begin to put them into practice with the smallest amount of input and training time. I got to do this on a recent trip to DC where my friend Teresa and I held trainings for people about how to move in the supernatural, and I experimented in how I presented these concepts to see if I couldn’t get people feeling confident to practice these things faster than even they expected themselves to. The result was that people were feeling confident by the end of one or two trainings to now do it themselves! One lady was interpreting dreams after only one session of training. I wanted to reproduce my personal conviction of simplicity by using the structure of my presentation to create the outcome of their confidence in practicing these supernatural lifestyles, and I was pleased to see the results of it. More so, I look forward to taking this concept of structure even further!
