Leadership really IS influence. Spiritual leadership in the home is the ability to get your wife and children to follow you in your love for Jesus. My favorite Leadership proverb is, He who thinks he is leading when no one is following is only taking a walk. Successful spiritual leadership at home is creating a desire in your wife and in your children to WANT to follow you as you follow Christ.

Christian men know that God has appointed them to lead their homes. But what does that look like? We don’t want to fail in this role. But how can I succeed at what I know is one of my most important tasks when I can’t actually define what that task IS? In the next two episodes, our goal is for us to come away with a concrete picture of the three components of spiritual leadership in the home and how they work together to maximize our leadership impact in our families.
As I wrestled this week to consider WHERE our God-given calling as men slams against the strongest headwinds in our culture, I realized that it might be in being the spiritual leaders of our homes that Jesus wants us to be. The gale forces pushing against progress in leading are powerful: 1) the busyness of life, 2) a culture that undermines godly manhood, 3) our own sense of inadequacy (our wives are more spiritual—and don’t get taken down by images on the Internet). Perhaps the strongest headwind of all, though, is the question, Where do I start?  What do I actually DO so that one day I hear my Commander in Chief whisper, “Gary I entrusted Sandy, Kim, Karen, Brian, Tim, and Josh to you to lead to me. You have done that well! Yes, only I can make them spiritually alive—but you have led them well.”
The most valuable truth I’ve learned about leadership is that leadership is much bigger than authority. Authority is a vital subset of leadership. It needs to be used consistently, and fairly. Our followers, especially when they are young, cannot learn character apart from painful consequences when they violate God’s moral and creation laws. Scripture is clear, For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons (Heb 12:6-8). 
In an egalitarian culture where autonomy is the highest value, the biblical worldview counters, “authority is a good thing.” God punishes sin, the boss has the power to fire, God gives the state power to punish wrong behavior, and parents need to exercise firm discipline to train their children. Our race’s fall into evil has sent a desire for autonomy into the core of our being. Hearing that sin has consequences is not enough. For our character to be shaped by a hatred of evil, we need to experience pain when we disobey the moral law written on our conscience. If we deprive our children of painful punishment for disobedience, we never allow their character to be properly formed. They will never learn the pain of controlling their impulses—and they will continue to be as all children come into the world–self-centered. That is why Proverbs warns tender-hearted parents, Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him (Prov 13:24).
But leadership is BIGGER than authority. You might say, authority is the power to COERCE obedience. When kids are young, in our house, we use AUTHORITY (discipline) to get the behavior we want (which also trains them). But when our kids are older, away from the house, if the child still chooses to do what you would want him to do—that’s LEADERSHIP. Authority uses force to coerce obedience, a good, necessary thing not only for order but to train a child to control his impulses. But leadership goes further. It accepts the responsibility of wielding authority but goes beyond it to INFLUENCE. Influence causes your child to want to obey you. The greater your INFLUENCE the less you need to use authority.
In fact, leadership really IS influence. Spiritual leadership in the home is the ability to get your wife and children to follow you in your love for Jesus. My favorite Leadership proverb is, He who thinks he is leading when no one is following is only taking a walk. Successful spiritual leadership at home is creating a desire in your wife and in your children to WANT to follow you as you follow Christ.
Authority, again, is a God-ordained structure that we must teach children to respect. But effective leadership (especially with adults and teens) must go beyond authority. Harry Selfridge, the owner of a London department store chain, shows his managers the difference between seeing themselves as bosses or leaders.

The boss drives people, the leader coaches them.
The boss depends upon authority, the leader depends upon good will.
The boss says, “I”; the leader says, “We.”
The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.
The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how it is done.
The boss says, “Go!”; the leader says, “Let’s go!”

Let’s formulate a concrete picture of how leadership works. There are 3 COMPONENTS to leadership: the leader, the followers, the objective to be reached. Leaders are taking people somewhere.

A. The Leader. This can be the one assigned leadership by God in the family, or filling a leadership role at work, in the church, in the classroom or on the athletic field.  Being a leader is not synonymous with being an upfront person. A dad who is terrified of speaking upfront can be a great leader to his kids—building that influence through time together looking under a car hood or throwing a ball.
B. The Followers. For dads, it is our wife, kids, and grandkids. But followers can also be those I lead in my Bible study, those I serve in church leadership, a friend who has drifted from Christ that I am seeking to bring back, or a work associate I am trying to lead to Christ.
C. The Objective: Leaders are taking their followers somewhere. There is a goal to achieve, a mountain to climb, a destination to reach. When we talk about spiritual leadership, i.e. influencing those around us towards Christ, we could define the goal as spiritual maturity.
The above three arrows are the 3 fundamental PROCESSES to leading.
1. Orange arrow across the bottom: This is the arrow between the leader and the goal of spiritual growth. The leader must, himself, FOCUS upon and MODEL his own commitment to spiritual maturity. He must lead from his life (MODEL). However, here is a key point for men:  What you model is DIRECTION not PERFECTION. The gospel is that we all get knocked down by our own sin. Our kids know we fail. It does NOT help them to see us try to hide our failure; what they need is to see us fail and then get up, get back into the race, and follow after Christ even harder.
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Written by B. Nathaniel Sullivan |
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Learn enough about the new Netflix movie Pray Away to stay away from its overall message. Jesus really does change people from the inside out, and no amount of distortion or propaganda ever will change that.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. —The apostle Paul to the Christians at Corinth, and to us, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11—
Key point: Because certain truths are difficult for many to accept, they and the people advocating them are regularly maligned, distorted, and misrepresented. Yet these realities still are true, and they still have all the power and authority accorded everything true. People ignore and dismiss such truths, and the people presenting them, to their own peril.
If someone were to ask you to describe Jesus, what adjectives would you use? Many Christians would use adjectives like these: caring, compassionate, and loving. Certainly He was all of these, but I believe one of the Lord’s most important qualities — and one of the most forgotten — is that He was controversial. He was loved by many but hated by many more. Moreover, He warned His disciples that if they truly followed Him, they, too, would be misunderstood, misrepresented, and hated.
Jeffrey McCall: A True Disciple of Christ
Nearly two years ago I introduced you to Jeffrey McCall. He is a former homosexual who was radically transformed by Jesus Christ. Jesus changed this young man from the inside out, and he became the founder of the Freedom March, a movement that calls on men and women who have been delivered from a gay lifestyle and found freedom in Christ to come together and publicly declare how Christ transformed and delivered them. We have highlighted Freedom March events more than once at Word Foundations.1

Luis Ruiz and Angel Colon also have been involved in the Freedom March. Both of them came out of homosexuality and gave their lives afresh to God after the bloody shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016. Ruiz and Colon now have a ministry and website called Fearless Identity.
Can Homosexuals Change?
Ex-gays are the most misunderstood minority in America. Also, they are the most discriminated against group in the nation, bar none. The prevailing narrative regarding homosexuals is that they were “made” that way or “born” that way, and efforts efforts to change their sexual orientation are extremely harmful. Yet, if a person truly is objective, he or she cannot overlook men and women who have come out of homosexuality. These people are real, and their number is growing. Jeffrey McCall, Luis Ruiz, Angel Colon, Becket Cook, Stephen Black of First Stone Ministries, Daren Mehl of Voice of the Voiceless, and Anne Paulk of Restored Hope Network are only a few of many who would testify to authentic change in their lives.

Have all of these individuals overcome every element of same-sex attraction? No. But at a deep and authentic level, they no longer desire sexual encounters with members of the same sex; and with God’s help, they have walked away. In other words, they have shed their gay identity. Speaking about his conversion encounter with Christ, Becket Cook put it this way on the Eric Metaxas radio show that aired on August 8, 2019. You can learn more about Becket here.
Can homosexuals change? Resoundingly, formerly gay men and women who’ve been transformed by Christ say yes! Some, like Becket Cook, still may struggle with same-sex attraction (SSA) or homosexual temptation. Even so, these men and women have renounced a gay identity and welcomed an identity in Christ that aligns with the purposes for which God made them. This includes embracing biblical masculinity or femininity, as well as heterosexuality as part of God’s good design. Such a change in perspective and outlook has given these men and women a freedom they never could have attained without Christ.

What About So-Called “Conversion Therapy” ?
While some Christians with homosexuality in their pasts have experienced profound transformations in their sexual desires and moved toward heterosexuality without the help of professional counseling, others have found such counseling very beneficial. Go here to read about what legitimate counseling in this area looks like.

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Millions of blacks are walking around believing that whites hate and fear them so much that blacks are at daily risk of their lives from that hatred. This belief is the rankest fiction. Yet it is embraced and amplified by almost every mainstream American institution.

The shooting of a teen-ager in Kansas City, Missouri, has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America. Meantime, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored.
On April 13, 2023, at around 10 P.M., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm door handle. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door. Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.
Every news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. Yarl was inevitably identified as a “Black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative. The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence—life in prison—is higher than that for attempted murder.)
President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. “Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine (“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “Brown and Black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address) that he doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. Biden invited Yarl to visit the White House when he had recovered.
Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas made no effort to defuse the race angle that the press, the president, and his fellow Democrats had instantaneously imposed on the incident. Yarl was shot because he was black by someone who “clearly, clearly fears Black people,” Lucas said. The incident shows why “Black people and Black parents” are concerned that merely “existing while black” can get you shot by a white person, Lucas said. The ubiquitous fomenter of racial resentment, attorney Benjamin Crump, demanded that “gun violence against unarmed Black individuals must stop. Our children should feel safe, not as though they are being hunted.”
Race protests took the same line. “They killin [sic] us for no reason,” read a protest sign in Kansas City. The public was enjoined to “say his [i.e., Yarl’s] name.” This naming injunction is now a standard component of the claim that white America suppresses awareness of its anti-black violence and that it relegates such alleged civil rights heroes as Michael Brown and George Floyd to obscurity.
A professor of African American Studies and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies at Princeton University further ratcheted up the racial bathos. Imani Perry recounted in The Atlantic the “terror and grace of raising Black children in the United States.” Millions have protested the “premature deaths of Black innocents,” Perry wrote, without having any effect on the suffering of “Black folks.”
Two days after the Yarl shooting, on April 15, a 20-year-old girl was fatally shot when a car she was in entered the wrong driveway in upstate New York. Three days after that, on April 18, two cheerleaders were shot, one critically, in a Texas supermarket parking lot after one tried mistakenly to get into a stranger’s car. There were no protests around those shootings, invitations to the White House, or injunctions to say the victims’ names, because the decedent and the other victims were all white. But the fact that all three victims were white still did not dislodge the idea that “knocking on the door,” in Mayor Lucas’s words, was a particular threat to black people. Press accounts of the incidents continued to mention Yarl’s race, while staying mum about the female victims’ race.
A Chicago Tribune story on the Texas cheerleaders shooting was typical: “The attack [on the cheerleaders] comes days after two high-profile shootings that occurred after victims went to mistaken addresses. In one case, a Black teen was shot and wounded after going to the wrong Kansas City, Missouri, home to pick up his younger brothers. In the other, a woman looking for a friend’s house in upstate New York was shot and killed after the car she was riding in mistakenly went to the wrong address.”
A frontpage article in the New York Times on April 21 discussed other mistaken-house shootings that had come to light, also outside of the black-victim-white perpetrator paradigm. Only in the Yarl case did the Times continue to give the race of the victim and perpetrator. “Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old white homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., accused of wounding Ralph Yarl, who is Black, has been charged with assault and armed criminal action,” wrote the Times, while “Kevin Monahan, 65, the upstate New York homeowner accused of killing Kaylin Gillis [who had mistakenly entered Monahan’s driveway], has been charged with murder.”
There was a black victim in one of the other mistaken-house shootings discussed in the April 21 Times article: Omarian Banks, killed in March 2019 after ringing the wrong doorbell in an Atlanta apartment complex. Banks’s girlfriend heard one shot and then heard Banks yell: “I’m sorry, bro. I’m at the wrong house.” The tenant allegedly responded: “Nah, nigger, you’re not at the wrong house,” before firing two more times. The Times omitted the race of Banks and of his killer, Darryl Bynes, because Bynes was black. There was thus no possible “racial component” to the shooting, in the Times’s ideology. The initial contemporaneous reporting on the Banks shooting also omitted the race of the victim and perpetrator.
Despite the numerous trespass shootings that have been reported on since the Yarl shooting, the Times remains staunchly committed to its racism narrative. On April 24, the paper ran an article on how the Yarl shooting revealed the persistence of racism in Kansas City. Never mind that the city’s majority-white population had thrice elected a black mayor and had sent a black representative to Congress. That cross-racial voting just shows how “like this veil of [white] nicety and smiles . . . kind of overlays microaggressions and all kinds of crazy stuff,” the founder of a nonprofit that seeks to empower black women told the paper.
The narrative that blacks are at elevated risk for “existing while black” is true, but not because whites are killing them. Their assailants are other blacks, which means that these black victims are of no interest to the race activists and to their media and political allies.
Kansas City’s black-white homicide disparity is typical. In 2022, blacks made up 60 percent of homicide victims, though they are 26.5 percent of the population. Whites were 22 percent of homicide victims, though they make up 60 percent of the Kansas City population. A black Kansas Cityean was six times more likely to be killed in 2022 than a white Kansas Cityean. So far this year, blacks make up 75 percent of homicide victims.
The toll on black children has been particularly acute. In the first nine months of 2020, 13 black children were killed in shootings in Kansas City. Those child victims included one-year-old Tyron Patton, killed when someone riddled the car in which he was riding with bullets, and four-year-old LeGend Taliferro, fatally shot while sleeping in his father’s apartment. No Black Lives Matter activist showed up to “say their names.” Imani Perry did not weigh in on the “terror and grace of raising Black children in the United States.” Their deaths were again of no interest to the race advocates because their killers were black. In 2022, ten children aged 17 and younger were killed in Kansas City, also without racial protest, because those children were not killed by whites and thus did not matter from a racial PR perspective. The maudlin dirge that blacks are victims of lethal white supremacy is ludicrous, in Kansas City and every other American metropolis.
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