The Power of Courageous Conversations
How shifting our language reshaped our discipleship and confronted our fear of man.
A note from Robin: I’ve written about how Laura and I are a team. That applies beyond leadership and organization in our home, but also to the development and communication of thinking around discipleship. Consequently, she’s been a huge part of helping to hone the writing on this platform behind the scenes. This week, Laura is bringing the article herself. Keep reading!
Eight years ago, when we were articulating the culture of discipleship we felt called to and the vision of how that would function within our church family, we came up with five “Discipleship Emphases.” These, we determined, are five areas that every disciple of Jesus needs to grow in as they walk with others toward Christ. They were:
1. Gospel Fluency: understanding the primary foundations of repentance, salvation, and eternity
2. Secure Identity: rooting ourselves in our identities as God’s children, ambassadors and servants
3. Radical Generosity: living a life that serves others, both with time and resources
4. Missional Living: living with a kingdom-first posture, not a possessions and status-first posture
5. Crucial Conversations: communicating openly and honestly with non-believers and believers alike to point them towards Christ
Our emphases have remained the same over the last eight years and have proved to be a helpful framework for identifying growth areas in ourselves and in our disciples. However, there is one adjustment we have made to Crucial Conversations, as a result of a subtle shadow side to our choice of language.
Crucial Conversations
The term crucial conversations came out of a season of hard learnings where we, as leaders, were not having the constructive conversations we needed to have with the team leaders we were leading. The fallout of leaving expectations unsaid was painful, so we realized that honest and clear conversations were crucial to the health of our teams, relationships, and leadership.
Because the term came out of a refining fire, and by the very nature of the word crucial, the idea of crucial conversations over time gained a connotation that crucial conversations were intense or challenging only. This produced an unintentional attitude that these conversations are always serious, and therefore intimidating, and too much urgency around how and when they must happen.
Crucial To Courageous
As a mild-mannered, don’t-comment-on-anybody’s-business Canadian, I’ve had to put a lot of effort into intentionally growing in my ability to have difficult and/or direct conversations. And a lot of that growth has happened the hard way. It is never fun, especially when you come from a “polite” and “nice” culture, to get up in another person’s business.
A couple of years ago, we read through the book of Jeremiah in our Daily Devos. Immediately, words jumped off the page at me. Jeremiah is dialoguing with the Lord after He commissions Jeremiah to go prophesy to the nation of Israel:
6 But I protested, “Oh no, Lord God! Look, I don’t know how to speak since I am only a youth.”
7 Then the Lord said to me: Do not say, “I am only a youth,”
for you will go to everyone I send you to
and speak whatever I tell you.8 Do not be afraid of anyone,
for I will be with you to rescue you.
This is the Lord’s declaration.9 Then the Lord reached out his hand, touched my mouth, and told me: I have now filled your mouth with my words.
…
17 “Now, get ready. Stand up and tell them everything that I command you. Do not be intimidated by them, or I will cause you to cower before them.
The Lord was commanding Jeremiah not to be afraid - to be courageous in front of the people he was delivering the Lord’s message to. He promised that if he had courage, the Lord would rescue him (v 8) and warned that if he didn’t, the fear would overpower his anointing.
In the past, and often still in the present, I found crucial conversations very intimidating. But what I saw in this scripture was that it was actually my fear of man that caused me to feel intimidated and, therefore, paralyzed in the face of potential conflict, not the conversation itself.
The reality is, “crucial” conversations come in all shapes and sizes. They are not just crucial, difficult or corrective. They are conversations where people “go there” - when we ask how someone is really doing, when we share a prophetic word, when we step out and share the gospel with a stranger, when we love our brother or sister enough to gently, graciously point out their sin. Courageous conversations are more than crucial; they take courage.
So, this fall, we have officially changed the language of our Discipleship Emphases from crucial to courageous. We want people to be empowered by the idea of speaking truth into the world, not intimidated. We want to equip them to rely on the Lord to access courage that in our human strength we don’t always have. And we want to transcend a cultural norm that often results in uneasy silence. As someone who has deep roots in this “polite” and “nice” culture, I have had, and still need, to remind myself to be courageous and share what is on my heart - even if it feels like I’m violating my cultural norm.
The Power of Courageous Conversations
Courageous conversations help us grow deeper roots in relationships because when approached correctly, they communicate care and build trust. They force us to reject the fear of man and instead rely on the power of the Holy Spirit.
Thinking of these conversations through the lens of courage allows us to:
Rely on the Lord’s strength and not our own
Helps appropriately categorize the conversation in the urgent/important, not urgent/not important, not urgent/important matrix and therefore, releases the anxiety it can hold over our minds
Releases us from the performance mentality that tells us that we must perform the conversation correctly and receive the correct response, rather than simply have the courage to say what we need to say and let God do the rest
Luke 12: 32: Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights to give you the kingdom.
May you have the courage to speak truth and life to the world around you!