“I just read the latest issue of Outreach magazine and the feature was an interview with Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic in LA. He said something that was so profound. Really made me think. ‘I think a lot of pastors have a dream that matches the life of the pastor who is the living the dream they want.’ Man, that stopped me in my tracks.
I think there is a such a temptation to copy when it comes to ministry. I wrestle with it as much as anyone else. I think we need models. I’ve got my fair share, including Erwin McManus. But I remember reading something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance: ‘There is a time in every man’s education that he arrives at the conviction that imitation is suicide. He must take himself for better or for worse.’
I think there are two simple principles that ought to guide us:
1) Keep Learning.
2) Be Yourself.
At some point, most of us stop learning and start copying. It’s so much easier. We stop living out of right-brain imagination and start living out of left-brain memory. And that is when we stop creating the future and start repeating the past.
Just a simple reminder. There never has been and never will be anyone like you. And that isn’t a testament to you. It’s a testament to the God who created you.”