I have been at the Orange Conference 2013 this week in Atlanta. If you’ve never been you’re missing out.

This is not an unbiased account, just so you know. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Reggie over a number of years. We have written together, traveled together and spoken together.

But more than that, he’s become one of my best friends and he’s been an incredibly positive influence on my leadership.  He also officiated at my son’s wedding last year. I so appreciate his friendship and leadership.

While Reggie Joiner is passionate about families, he’s also one of the very best leaders I’ve ever met – anywhere. He’s creatively brilliant and strategically laser focused. And he’s an incredible friend to many.  I think anyone who knows Reggie would agree.

But I thought you might like to learn from Reggie the way I’ve learned from him. So I thought I’d highlight 21 leadership lessons I’ve learned from Reggie over the years.

Let’s start with some lessons on life, family and relationships:

1. Your legacy is going to be most important to the people you’re with right now. Invest in the people closest to you. I have seen this modeled in Reggie’s life. His investment in time and care in the people who know him is second to none. Although he leads thousands of people, he leads the few around him with completely commitment and humility.

2. The environment you want to create is one where no matter how far people might stray they want to come back. When people ask me what Reggie’s like, I tell them “He’s a creative genius…one of the smartest people I’ve ever met…he’s deeply relational.”  All of that is true. But he also just loves people and knows how to value them in their worst moments. If I was ever ended up in the moral ditch, I would ask for Reggie to come help me get out. He creates the kind of environment where no matter how far people stray, they would want to come back.

3. Nobody has more influence in the life of a child than a parent. Fact. Which is why no parent can ignore the 3000 hours of influence God gives us each year.

4. A parent is not the only influence a child needs. God never designed parents to handle their kids all alone.

5. Two combined influences have a greater impact than just two influences. When you combine the influences of church and family, you get something more powerful, like when red and yellow combine to produce Orange.

6. 100 years from now, the only thing that will matter in the life of a child is their relationship with God. Bam. If that isn’t perspective, what is? I have a coaster in my home I use every day for my morning tea. That’s what it says on the coaster.

7. God doesn’t use perfect pictures. He uses broken people. The ideal family doesn’t exist. Just read your bibles and breathe a sigh of relief. Most biblical families were just as dysfunctional as yours.

8. God wants to tell the story of redemption and restoration in every family. God meets us where we are, not where we think we should have been.

9. God’s story of redemption in a parent’s life gives a child a front row seat to the grace of God. When God begins to work in a parent’s life, the kids get a front row seat to grace. So beautiful. And true.

10. Every child needs another voice saying the same thing a loving parent would say. This may have saved my sanity as my kids move through their teenager years. Even though they might not want to tell me anything, they had other adults in their life they could talk to. Powerful.

11. You need to pursue strategic relationship for your kids before you need them so that they’re there when they need them. When you prioritize small group friendships and adult leaders who serve as mentors early, you set kids up for success.

12. People will not believe they are significant until you give them something significant to do. That’s why in Orange ministry, we give teens and even pre-teens significant opportunities to serve.

13. The Church convinced me for years that I was supposed to love people who are different, but they never gave me permission to like people who are different. Bam. Reggie has one of the most progressive minds I know when it come to thinking about who the church needs to be, how we need to act and what we need to do to love and like the people who are different than us. (The future of the church probably lies in our response to that issue by the way).

14.  The most important fight you can have is the fight for the heart. Reggie taught me what it was like to fight for people, not with people. My life will never be the same as a result.

And let’s finish up with some leadership principles

15. Push others into the spotlight. I don’t think anyone I know does this better than Reggie. He loves raising up leaders, handing over the mic, standing to the side and helping other leaders succed.

16. Change isn’t an option. How you respond to it is. I love talking/writing about change. Reggie nails it in this quote.

17. Strategic steps beat random programs. Reggie taught me to think steps, not programs. Our church is so much healthier as a result.

18. The problem with needs based ministry is there’s no end to need. Every time someone says “I see a need we should respond to”, I think about this quote from Reggie. You could go there as a church, but just know you are never going to solve every need you see. So we just pick one or two and go deep.

19.  Your strategy ultimately determines the success of your ministry. Effective ministry is not just about great content, mission or vision it’s about having a great strategy. A poor strategy will frustrate the execution of a great mission.

20. Teach Less For More. To cut through the communication noise our culture suffers from, teach fewer things for greater impact. All information is not equally helpful, relevant or engaging.

21. Focus on who you want to reach, not who you want to keep. I always wanted to be about unchurched people, but this principle changed my focus more anything else.

Those are 21 leadership and life lessons I learned from Reggie Joiner.

What have you learned from Reggie?

I talk to so many people outside the church who say they get along better than people in the church. If church people behaved like they tell other people to behave, they might come.

I’ve met so many Christian couples who just couldn’t work it out. Famously, the Christian divorce rate is almost identical to couples that wouldn’t call themselves Christian.

And as Christians, most of us realize fighting is destructive and likely unChristian, but we don’t know what to do about it.

The truth is that all of us fight.

Couples fight.

Church leaders fight.

Boards fight.

Denominations fight.

Siblings fight.

Friends fight.

Staff fight.

Parents fight their kids.

Kids fight their parents.

Sometimes I fight with myself.

Okay, you get the picture. People fight.

And the stakes are high. Families, churches and friendships break up as a result. And unchurched people stay away.

But since this week we’re talking about lessons I’ve learned from Orange, I want to share one with you that changed me forever.

Shortly after Reggie Joiner and I met, we started working on some ideas that would eventually find its way into our book, Parenting Beyond Your Capacity. During that process, I learned about a very different kind of fighting.

I learned how to fight for the heart. Let me explain.

You can fight with someone. Or you can fight for them.

These two small words– for and with–represent a world of difference in how you fight.

Most of us have only ever had someone fight with us. If someone fights with you:

It’s a zero sum game.

They need to win and you need to lose and you need to win in order for them to lose.

The people who fight care more about themselves than anyone.

Both walk away feeling diminished–usually even the ‘victor’ does over time.

Contrast that with fighting for someone. When you fight for someone:

You’re fighting for them so you want to see them better off.

The fight is happening because you want to see them win, not because you want to win.

You care more about their interests than you do about yours.

Both walk away replenished– with the relationship stronger in the short and long term.

Even if the other person doesn’t respond well, you have done everything in your power to help them, not hurt them.

Fighting for someone means you want their best interests to prevail, not yours.

It means that when there’s conflict, the conflict is about moving through an issue so the person you’re fighting with is better off, not that so that you are right or feel vindicated.

And finally it means that everyone leaves better than before the fight rather than depleted. Relationships are stronger and the issues got dealt with in a way that actually helped advance the mission.

You know who taught us this?

Jesus.

No one modeled fighting for someone (rather than with someone) better than Jesus. As his enemies nailed him to the cross, he said “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

What they didn’t realize of course, is that this Jesus they were killing was dying for them. He was fighting for them while they were fighting with him, and it changed the world.

So what do you think would happen if parents, church leaders and families started fighting for each other rather than with each other.

Question….when was the last time you fought for someone rather than with them?

How could that change your family? Your church? Your life? The world?

I’m a senior pastor, and I’m passionate about “leadership” issues. But I almost missed one of the biggest of them all, all because it had to do with kids and teenagers.

While I have kids of my own, I thought kids in ministry were an issue that we programmed for.

It’s perspective many senior leaders fall into: hire or recruit some capable people to look after kids and teens so you can free up your time not to think about family.

I realize now that my old perspective was dead wrong. What’s more, it was incredibly unstrategic. And let’s add unspiritual into the mix too (I believe God has a heart for families).

My flawed perspective came into sharp focus several years ago. I had invited Reggie Joiner (who founded Orange) to speak at a conference I hosted. I wanted him to talk about leadership and give leadership talks. He agreed, on one condition: that he give one talk on the family.

I didn’t really want him to talk about family, not because I don’t like families (I love mine and many others), but because this was supposed to be about, well, leadership. I only agreed to let him do the talk because it was part of the deal.

So what happened?

I loved his leadership talks.

Almost everyone else couldn’t stop talking about his family talk.

It actually kind of frustrated me at the time. But I couldn’t deny it.

Talking about family lit up our families.

Talking about family lit up our families about their friends and neighbours and how to reach them.

I couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Over the last few years I realized that Reggie is on to something big. He’s onto something that every senior leader ignores to his or her peril.

Family is an issue that demands the focus and attention of every senior leader (and their team) for at least these 5 reasons:

1. Unchurched people never lie awake at night thinking about your next sermon; but they do lie awake at night wondering if their kids are going to be okay. When you start the conversation with unchurched people around the cause of family, you have a conversation they’re already engaged in.  And you want to reach families, right? What if the conversation about family is the greatest evangelism opportunity you’ve got?

2. Family is a universal issue. Sure, not everybody has a family. There are singles, and engaged couples, widows and many who are single again. And not every family is two adults with two kids (not that that was ever the Biblical definition of family anyway.) But everybody comes from family. And many of us spend great chunks of time being impacted by our families, even as adults. While families come in all kinds of different forms, when you speak family, you speak a language everybody understands.

3. Family is one of three arenas for applying any sermon. Most of the people any senior leader speaks to on Sundays tries to apply the message in one of three areas of life: family, work and friendships. By far, family is the biggest application area because most people spend so much time with family. To ignore family when preaching a message is to essentially tell people “this has no application in one of the most essential areas of your life”.

4. Your leaders think family before they think leadership. Guess why many of the leaders who serve in your children’s ministry and student ministry serve? Because they want to be better parents and have a better family. Speak to their hearts as parents even before you speak to their hearts as leaders. They’ll thank you for it.

5. This generation of parents is producing the next generation of leaders. If you want to see healthy leaders emerge in the next generation – both in the marketplace and in the church – then nurture healthy families. It’s simple as that. As goes the family, so goes the next generation. Your investment in family is an investment in next generation leadership.

Ministering to families isn’t something that should happen down the hall on a Sunday – it’s something that should be happening in the heart and mind of every leader every day.

Because family is pretty much everyone. If you miss family, you miss almost everything.

My posts this week will be about family.  This week, over 5000 leaders from the US and around the world will gather in Atlanta for the 2013 Orange Conference. I’ll be speaking there and also hanging out with a team of 17 from our church (Connexus) as well.  Stay tuned for posts (and notes from my talks) on the blog this week.

What are you learning about moving the cause of family higher on your agenda?

What do you think you’re missing if you miss family?