In Defense of Memorization
by Michael Knox Beran

Progressive educators call it “drill and kill,” but learning poetry by heart empowers kids.

If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.

Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?

That too-common view is sadly wrong. Kids need both the poetry and the memorization. As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low. In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children’s minds and hearts.

The memorization and recitation of the classic utterances of poets and statesmen form part of a tradition of learning that stretches back to classical antiquity, when the Greeks discovered that words and sounds—and the rhythmic patterns by which they were bound together in poetry—awakened the mind and shaped character. They made poetry the foundation of their pedagogy. Athenian schoolboys learned by heart the poetry of Homer, through which they gained mastery of their language and their culture. They memorized as well, in versified form, the civic pronouncements of Solon, the founder of the Athenian political tradition.

In every epoch of Western history we find educators insisting that their pupils serve an apprenticeship in the work of masters of poetry and rhetoric. Saint Augustine, as a schoolboy in North Africa in the fourth century, studied only a very few Latin classics in school, principally Virgil’s Aeneid, great chunks of which he learned by heart. But within its “narrow limits,” the historian Peter Brown wrote in his life of the saint, the education the young Augustine received was “perfectionist.” “Every word, every turn of phrase of these few classics,” Brown observed, “was significant and the student saw this.” The “aim was to measure up to the timeless perfection of the ancient classic.”

Some of the ancient methods, Brown conceded, strike a modern mind as “servile”: but the paradoxical result of this early servitude was mental liberation. Augustine, Brown wrote, came “to love what he was learning. He had developed, through this education, a phenomenal memory, a tenacious attention to detail, an art of opening the heart, that still moves us as we read his Confessions.” In Virgil’s epic picture of the multiple passions of human life—paternal, filial, pious, romantic, patriotic, heroic—Augustine found a key to understanding his own heart, and in the rhetorical perfection of the Aeneid’s speeches he found a key with which to unlock the hearts of others. Virgil depicts Aeneas using his oratorical skill to steady, in adversity, the nerves of his men and build up what would become the Roman Empire:

• Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.
• [Endure, and preserve yourselves for better things.]

Augustine would later use a similar set of rhetorical tools to build up the Roman Catholic Church.

More than a millennium later, in a grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, the mind of the young Shakespeare was formed by similar educational methods. In his book on Shakespeare, Michael Wood observed that the poet “was the product of a memorizing culture in which huge chunks of literature were learned by heart.” Such “learning by rote,” Wood wrote, “offers many rewards, not least a sense of poetry, rhythm and refinement—a heightened feel for language,” as well as an abundance of tales and myths, imaginative resources that are among the “most exciting gifts” a young person can receive.

These classic techniques of enveloping kids as young as seven or eight in the works of masters of poetry and rhetoric were transplanted to America, where they were incorporated into the readers and primers used throughout the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Well into the 1920s, rhyme-time occupied an important place in New York City public schools. Citing Edgar Allan Poe’s dictum that poetry is “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” the Board of Education, in its 1927 Course of Study in Literature for Elementary Schools, insisted on the importance of memorizing both poetry and prose orations. “The teacher,” the Board said, “should emphasize the rhythm, the beauty of diction, and the beauty of imagery [in a poem]. . . . Teachers should read a group of five poems somewhat similar in style and related in subject matter, so that the pupils may choose their favorite for memorization.” A “class may memorize only a part of a longer poem, or one or more selected stanzas, for the whole poem may not be suitable for memorization. Whenever possible, the lullabies and poems of the lower and middle years should be sung or presented by phonograph records. Much of our stirring patriotic verse has been set to music. Records of such songs are available.”

The standard of literacy in the 1927 Course of Study in Literature for Elementary Schools is astonishingly high. Poems “for reading and memorization” by first-graders include those of Robert Louis Stevenson (“Rain” and “The Land of Nod”), A. A. Milne (“Hoppity”), Christina Rossetti (“Four Pets”), and Charles Kingsley (“The Lost Doll”). Second-graders grappled with poems by Tennyson (“The Bee and the Flower”), Sara Coleridge (“The Garden Year”), and Lewis Carroll (“The Melancholy Pig”). In third grade came Blake’s “The Shepherd” and Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” while fourth grade brought Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Kipling. In the grades that followed, students read and recited poems by Arnold, Browning, Burns, Cowper, Emerson, Keats, Macaulay, Poe, Scott, Shakespeare, Southey, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Eighth-graders tackled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

Observers were impressed by how quickly the kids mastered the material. A visitor to a first-grade classroom in New York in 1912 remarked on how quickly pupils absorbed the verses their teacher had sung to them. “At the end of twenty-five or thirty minutes,” the visitor said, “a large majority of the class seemed to know most of the words—a remarkable fact, since there were more than fifty children present and this was only the second week of school.” This was at a time when more than 200,000 immigrants were settling in New York each year, and teachers were staggering under the burden of large enrollments.

But the culture of recitation and memorization that prospered for centuries—and that, in New York, survived successive waves of immigration that stretched schools to their limits—declined rapidly after 1940. Even the rationale for such practices was forgotten. “No one seems to remember the reasons for memorizing or orating great poetry or speeches,” says education historian Diane Ravitch, who served as an assistant secretary for educational research in the first Bush administration.

But the rationale is clear and compelling. Long before kids start school, parents begin to teach them language with the primitive poetry of the nursery rhyme. Before a two-year-old can understand the meaning of Little Jack Horner’s plum or Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet—before he knows what it means to hop on pop or why the pobble has no toes—he delights in the rhythm and rhyme of the verse; and by hearing the music of the verse often enough he comes gradually to understand first the sounds and eventually the words of which it is composed. I tried reciting to my three-year-old, over the course of a couple of weeks, Shakespeare’s sonnet “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” and Blake’s poem “Tyger, tyger, burning bright.” She could understand only a very few of the words; but when I recited one of the lines, she soon delighted in reciting the line that follows as nearly as she could. The music of the verse was as entrancing to her as to any grown-up. Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap of verse has been drawn into the civilizing interplay of music and language, rhythm and sound, melody and words—just as educational theory as far back as ancient Greece posits, according to Werner Jaeger in his classic account of Greek education, Paideia.

From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience. Kids need to become familiar with them not only through exercises in recitation and memorization, but also, as they proceed to the later grades, by construing, analyzing, and diagramming particular verses. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman called this close study of language “a discipline in accuracy of mind,” a “first step in intellectual training” that impresses on young minds notions of “method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony.” And of course memorization is a kind of exercise that strengthens the powers of the mind, just as physical exercise strengthens those of the body.

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity.

It is not only the form of poetry—its rhyme and meter—that endows it with unique educative properties. Just as crucial is its content. Poetry’s power makes it the ideal medium to introduce kids to their cultural inheritance as members of Western civilization and citizens of a particular nation. The content of the poetry fosters what education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr. calls “cultural literacy” in the kids who get it by heart, since great poetry is so often a pithy expression of the culture’s accumulated wisdom. Not to have certain works of art in your mental inventory—Macbeth, for example, or “Ozymandias” or Psalm 23—is to be shut out, to some degree, from the community of civilized conversation. Peter Brown observed that Saint Augustine’s education, with its emphasis on memorization, enabled him to “communicate his meaning to an educated Latin at the other end of the Roman world by quoting half a line of classic poetry.” And even today, in the conversation of the educated, a quotation from Shakespeare can speak volumes.

Much of what kids used to learn by heart was an explicit statement of the national creed. The schoolboys of classical Athens memorized the Homeric passages that taught the classical virtues. British pupils learned the great Shakespearean expressions of patriotism and national ideals: John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II describing his country as:

• This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
• This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars . . .
• This precious stone set in the silver sea . . .
• This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Or Henry V’s stirring speech to his troops at Agincourt:

• And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
• From this day to the ending of the world,
• But we in it shall be remembered—
• We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
• For he today that sheds his blood with me
• Shall be my brother. Be he ne’er so vile,
• This day shall gentle his condition.
• And gentlemen in England now abed
• Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
• And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
• That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

American kids learned the Gettysburg Address, as profound a statement of the national ideal as anyone ever uttered; and those who remember as adults Lincoln’s affirmation of the nation’s dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal—and to government of the people, by the people, for the people—never can lose sight of what makes America exceptional.

The tradition of memorization did not survive the progressive revolution in American schools. A century ago, progressive educators first voiced the arguments that would have such an unfortunate effect in U.S. classrooms. To impose classic poetry and rhetoric on young minds was, these theorists maintained, an oppressive act. Not just the memorization, but the literary culture at the heart of the exercise, was, they claimed, sterile and unfruitful, and promoted a culture of servility harmful to the free creative play of the mind. “We must overcome the fetichism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry,” progressive educator G. Stanley Hall said in 1901. “The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.”

The progressives’ efforts to discredit the older techniques are not yet finished. The most recent challenge to recitation and memorization exercises comes from a theory known as “constructivism,” the latest fad among progressive educators. Based on the work of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, constructivism rests on the belief that objective knowledge does not exist; students must therefore “construct knowledge for themselves.” Education professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford calls constructivism the “new paradigm” and argues that because “learners actively construct” their own knowledge, teachers “must construct experiences for” their students to enable them to learn. In the view of constructivist educators, the teacher who gives a kid Portia’s speech, “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” or Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” to memorize, fails to construct an atmosphere in which “dynamic” or “authentic” learning (to use two constructivist buzzwords) can occur. Memorization, one advocate of constructivism asserts, “is not a thinking activity.”

The constructivist literature is filled with unintentionally ludicrous jargon. “Constructivist teachers,” one educator declares, “must create an open, nonjudgmental environment that permits students to construct, disclose, and expose their constructions to scrutiny.” Another maintains that constructivism gives students “ownership of what they learn”—as if memorization doesn’t. But fundamentally, writes University of Alabama professor George E. Marsh II, the “impetus for constructivism as an educational movement stems from a reaction to the over-reliance in classrooms on rote memorization”—not just of poetry but of facts and dates, of tables and formulas. Marsh says that “memorizing the knowledge others have created is often not successful because knowledge is not a ready-made, transferable product but rather a product of the learner’s thinking.” Another educator, Asghar Iran-Nejad, argues that constructivist techniques can serve as “a substitute for memorization in learning.” Darling-Hammond echoes this sentiment when she advises teachers to “make sure the emphasis is on powerful learning, not rote memorization.”

Constructivism is a new name for the old progressive desire to turn kids into little anarchs who—if the progressives’ daydreams come true—will grow up to overthrow the oppressive civilization into which they had the misfortune to be born. An education Ph.D. enamored of the constructivist theory argues that because constructivism “de-emphasizes the rote-memorization” of material, it promotes “teaching practices that are rich in conversation. Through these conversations, the teacher comes to understand what the learner wants to learn.” Kids, in other words, should be free to do as they please; the teacher, in the role of “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage,” should cater to their whims; anything else is galley slavery. For progressive educators, to require students to recite “Daffodils” or memorize the Gettysburg Address is a relic of a “drill and kill” culture that inhibits the development of the self and is the educational equivalent of a chain gang.

But the progressives’ educational philosophy is only superficially a philosophy of liberty. The progressive exercises in “guided fantasy” and “sensitivity training” that have replaced memorization and recitation do little to free kids’ selves. The older techniques, by contrast, are genuinely liberating. They build up in the child a more powerful mental instrument, one that will allow him, in later life, to make good use of his freedom. They cultivate those critical powers that enable an educated adult to question authority intelligently. The older techniques also unlock doors in the interior world of the soul. Classic poetry and rhetoric give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings. They help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: “Become what you are.”

This kind of memorization does not impose upon young minds a single dogma, nor does it exalt, as the Islamic madrassa does, a single text above all others. If anything, it is the progressive liturgies—with their “diversity” drills and cult of self-esteem—that embody a narrow and intolerant ideology, one that imprisons kids in the banal clichés of the present and puts much of the past off limits, as though the moral and spiritual inheritance of Western civilization were somehow taboo. The literary culture at the heart of these exercises in memorization, by contrast, is a record of how men and women have, in various times and places, struggled to understand themselves and make sense of their natures. Such culture does not repress or enslave: it enlarges and strengthens and frees.

Steve Manskar

Mutual Accountability & Support for Discipleship

A Covenant Discipleship group is 5-7 persons who meet together for one hour each week to hold one another mutually accountable for their discipleship. Groups tend to form based on the day and time people are available for a weekly meeting.

There are no rules about the composition of groups. Many groups are composed of women and men together. Some are all men. Some are all women.

Groups are usually composed of people from the same congregation. But, particularly in the case of a multiple church charge or circuit, a group may comprise people from several congregations.

The purpose of the weekly meetings is mutual accountability and support for discipleship. The group is guided by a covenant they write, shaped by the General Rule of Discipleship:

To witness to Jesus Christ in the world
and to follow his teachings through
acts of compassion, justice, worship and devotion
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The covenant serves as the agenda for the weekly meeting. It keeps the focus of conversation on discipleship; what each member of the group has done, or not done, during the past week to follow the teachings of Jesus in their daily lives.

Weekly Compass Heading

Covenant Discipleship groups are where Christians “watch over one another in love” by giving each other a weekly compass heading. If you have ever used a compass you know that, when used with a map, a compass will point in the direction you need to travel in order to reach your destination. Occasionally, life and the world put obstacles and choices in our way that cause us to get off course. This is why it’s important to frequently check our map and compass so that we can get back on course and make progress towards our destination.

The goal of discipleship is to become fully the human beings God created us to be, in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Our map is the Scriptures which contain the teachings of Jesus Christ, summarized by him in Mark 12:30-31

… you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. … you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Our compass is the General Rule of Discipleship. The mutual accountability and support that happens in the weekly meeting of a Covenant Discipleship group provides the regular compass headings that help us to make the course corrections need to keep us on the way of Jesus that leads to our desired destination.

Task-Oriented Gatherings

Covenant Discipleship groups are task-oriented gatherings whose task is to help each other become better disciples. Members are responsible for one another. Covenant Discipleship groups are one way congregations help their members to keep the “new commandment” Jesus gave to his disciples in John 13:34-35

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

One of the ways Christians love one another is by helping one another to become the persons God created us to be; by helping one another to become more dependable witness to and workers with Jesus Christ in the world.

Forming Leaders in Discipleship

Covenant Discipleship groups are trustworthy and effective means of identifying and nurturing leaders in discipleship for mission and ministry. It’s important to understand that the mission of Covenant Discipleship groups is to develop leaders in discipleship who help the church to faithfully live out its mission with Christ in the world. While individuals certainly receive great blessing when they participate in CD groups, those blessings are secondary to the main purpose of building up the body of Christ for participation in God’s mission for the world.

Congregations that take seriously their mission to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” need dependable leaders in discipleship. They are women and men who are intentional about their vocation of following Jesus Christ in the world. As members of Covenant Discipleship groups they form holy habits that open their hearts and minds to grace. Their habitual encounters with grace forms them into persons whose natural response to the world is love. They are leaders in discipleship because others see in them and the way they live and serve in the world embodiments of Christ’s love.

Forming Dependable Disciples

The weekly Covenant Discipleship group meeting is not where your discipleship happens, but it’s where you make sure that it happens the rest of hours of the week. The mutual accountability and support you receive in your CD group keeps you mindful of what you need to do as a follower of the way of Jesus Christ. The weekly sharing that happens in the group helps you to be intentional about doing the things Jesus taught his disciples: prayer, worship, the Lord’s Supper, reading and studying the Bible, doing no harm, and doing good to everyone. Over time these basic practices of discipleship become habits that transform your character into a reflection of Jesus Christ.

Dependable disciples are the people who lead churches in their mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Covenant Discipleship Groups Are NOT...

• Bible Study Groups
• Prayer Groups
• Encounter Groups
• Cell Groups
• Sharing Groups
• Neighborhood Groups
• Service Groups
• Advocacy Groups
• Growth Groups
• Outreach Groups
• Caring Groups

The dynamic of Covenant Discipleship groups is mutual accountability and support for discipleship. Group members certainly read and study the Bible. But when the group meets the conversation is focused on discipleship, with the group’s covenant serving as the agenda. Many groups open their weekly meetings by reading a passage of Scripture and with prayer. But Bible reading and prayer are not the primary purpose of the meetings. Rather, they are more likely to happen in the lives of group members because of the weekly group meeting.

Congregations need a variety of small groups that meet people where they are and help them to grow and mature in faith, hope, and love. Covenant Discipleship groups provide mutual accountability and support for discipleship in a way that forms persons as leaders in discipleship. Some may serve as leaders for Bible study, prayer, cell, service and other types of small groups that serve as part of the congregation’s disciple-making system.

The Covenant Discipleship Group Meeting

The Leader Facilitates

The weekly meeting is a process of question and answer gives the leader a directive role. The leader offers a brief prayer and the group reads the covenant preamble in unison. The leader begins by giving his or her account of how she or he did with the first clause, or group of related clauses (acts of compassion, acts of justice, acts of worship, or acts of devotion). The leader then turns to another group member and asks, “How did you do with this (these) clause (clauses). After the person has finished hiving his or her account of that part of the covenant, the leader may go to the next person or he or she may ask a question to get the person to say more about their experience with that part of the covenant that week.

The leader determines gives each person an opportunity to give their account of how they did with each part of the covenant. He or she must also keep track of the time and make sure the group does not run over time too much. He or she also manages the time so that no one in the group monopolizes the time. It’s important to keep everyone focused on mutual accountability and support for discipleship in light of the covenant written by the group.

No Permanent Leader

Leadership of Covenant Discipleship groups is shared by the group. Members take turn each week. This way the task of leading week to week does not fall on the shoulders of one person. Shared leadership also helps members develop leadership skills.

If any group member does not feel ready to lead the group, that’s okay. Let them pass when it is their turn to lead. In time they will learn by observing their peers as they lead. In time they will take their turn with the others.

Finally, the last order of business of each meeting is determine who will lead the next meeting. Some groups set up a regular rotation of members. Others select weekly leaders from week to week. Either way is okay as long as everyone knows who is leading the next meeting.

Begin with prayer. Then go through the Covenant.

Leading a Covenant Discipleship group meeting is simple and straightforward. The leader opens the meeting with prayer. This may be a simple extemporaneous prayer or it may be a prayer from a book (The United Methodist Hymnal, The Book of Common Prayer, Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit: 52 Prayers for Today by Paul Chilcote are good resources for prayers.). The leader may include with the opening prayer reading a brief passage of Scripture. Some groups use Disciplines: A Book of Daily Devotions from the Upper Room.

Following the opening prayer, many groups read the Covenant preamble aloud in unison. Some groups read the entire covenant together. The unison reading centers the group in the business at hand and physically reminds them of the covenant, which is the meeting agenda.

The leader then walks the group through the covenant. This may be done several ways. The preferred way is to deal with each clause, one at a time. The leader always begins by giving his or her account of a clause and then inviting others to give their accounts in turn. This process is repeated until all the clauses have been covered.

The order in which the clauses are covered is up to the leader. Some like to start at the top of the page and work their way down to the bottom. Others may like to be more random and take the group through the covenant in no particular order. As long as the entire covenant is covered each week, the order is not really important.

One Hour Meetings

The group member leading any given meeting must always keep her or his eye on the clock. Meetings must begin and end on time. One hour. No more. No less. This means the leader is responsible for keeping the conversation focused on the covenant. It also means that the leader must help guide the conversation in such a way that each member has time to give an account of each part of the covenant within the allotted hour. More talkative group members need to be given gentle reminders to be brief in giving their account of each part of the covenant so that everyone will have time to participate within the hour.

Try to leave the last five minutes of the meeting free for members to briefly share prayer concerns. Then the leader concludes the time with a brief prayer, blessing and dismissal.

Be certain that everyone knows who will lead the next meeting before anyone leaves the room at the end of each meeting.

Covenant Is The Agenda

This means that the focus of conversation during the one-hour meeting is discipleship. In particular, the practices the group has agreed to incorporate in to their life together and individually contained in the clauses of the covenant. The leader in any given week needs to be mindful of this important dynamic. Occasionally the group will get distracted a comment or begin discussing recent events in the morning news or recent gossip in the church. When this happens the leader needs to gently intervene and bring the group back to the purpose of the meeting: mutual accountability for discipleship shaped by the covenant written by the group shaped by the General Rule of Discipleship. The covenant is the agenda. Limiting conversation to the agenda will help to maintain focus and keep the meeting to its agreed upon one hour time limit.

Develop an Atmosphere Of Trust & Sharing

Over time, as the group meets faithfully week after week, an atmosphere of trust and sharing will develop. This trust and willingness to share develops and grows when meeting leaders faithfully keep the weekly conversation focused on the discipleship contained in the covenant (the meeting agenda) and regularly begin and end each meeting on time. Trust is built when the discipline of accountability and support for discipleship is routinely maintained.

Confidentiality is also essential to build trust and sharing within the group. The group needs to agree from the beginning to keep confidence with one another. This means that all that is said in the group stays in the group. Nothing that is said in the group meeting may be mentioned to anyone else, ever. No group member should ever hear something he or she said during a meeting outside the context of the group. Confidentiality within the Covenant Discipleship group helps to build trust and deepens the level of accountability and sharing.

Catechesis: Question and Answer

“The most important reason for the sharing of leadership is that the format of the group meeting is what the early church called catechesis, a process of questions and answers. In other words, the distinctive dynamic of covenant discipleship is a dialogue between the leader and each member of the group. This is how the primitive Christian community taught its new members and its children: the catechist was the questioner, and the learners were called catechumens. To this day in a number of denominations, learning one’s catechism is still the first step toward being accepted into full church membership.

“Of course, cont content of the catechesis in covenant discipleship groups is practical rather than doctrinal. But the method is the same, and it is a good one. It means that important aspects of Christian discipleship are first of all agreed and written into the covenant. Then the leader appointed for the week voices them and asks each member to do likewise. In this way the axioms of living a Christian life are written, heard, and spoken.

“A good illustration of this dynamic is what happens in an airplane cockpit before takeoff. There is a basic checklist—so basic that most pilots prior know it backwards. Yet the routine is established. However well they know these basics, the pilots go through them, one by one. They read them out to each other, they physically check that each control is properly set, and they say out loud that they have made the check. The procedure is rudimentary yet very necessary, for human error is always a real possibility.

“How much more, then, should Christians do the same for their discipleship. After all, serving Jesus Christ in the world is the most responsible duty assigned to human beings in this world. It surely merits meticulous checking, for human error is an ever-present possibility” – from Covenant Discipleship by David Lowes Watson (pages 145-6).

Recommended Resources

Covenant Discipleship: Christian Formation through Mutual Accountability by David Lowes Watson is an essential resource for congregational leaders and Covenant Discipleship group members. The first half of the book is a brief review of the theological, biblical, and historic foundations for CD groups. Part Two is a practical guide for organizing a Covenant Discipleship group, writing a covenant of discipleship, leading a weekly meeting, and answering common questions and objections. Ideally, everyone in a CD group should have a copy of this book. They will find it to be a practical and useful resource.

Forming Christian Disciples: The Role of Covenant Discipleship and Class Leaders in the Congregation by David Lowes Watson is written for pastors and other congregational leaders. Watson describes the nature of the congregation and how Covenant Discipleship fits into a disciple-making system. This book is an essential resource because it provides the step-by-step process for introducing Covenant Discipleship to a congregation and the process for supporting and sustaining the ministry over time. This is a good book for Church Councils and pastors to read and study together.

Both books are available from Cokesbury and at Amazon.com.

The local church is the hope of the world.

For it to reach its redemptive potential it must be well-lead.

It has incredible impact-potential.

It has to be lead by godly, servant-oriented, humble, growing leaders.

If it is lead by those kinds of leaders the gates of Hell will not prevent the full work of God in the world.

Those of us with leadership gifts have to step up and have to step it up.

We have to take responsibility for our own leadership development.

Read as a discipline.

Get around those who are better than you, who have been where you haven’t been.

Ask the right questions.

Get better.

Go where leadership is taught.

Keep leading strong wherever you are leading.

Our church needs strong leaders.

This church would fold tomorrow if it weren’t for the fantastic marketplace people who considered themselves bi-vocational, serving in leadership roles at Willow Creek.

They have a huge group of unpaid staff that make Willow happen.

Clergy and marketplace people need to forge bonds of unity to carry out the calling of the Church.

The greater percentage of people you have at shared experiences enable you to move with critical mass from here to there.

If we have an expanded experience together, we can expand the Kingdom of God together.

Day 2 of Leadership Summit: Talk #7

Named by TIME magazine as one of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,” Bishop Thomas Dexter (T.D.) Jakes is an entrepreneur, global advocate, philanthropist, and pastor of The Potter’s House. Located in Dallas, Texas, this multiracial, non-denominational congregation has more than 30,000 members. Known for his service to both the church and the global community, he’s led initiatives to combat domestic violence, homelessness, poverty, and AIDS. A prolific writer, Bishop Jakes has authored more than 30 books, including two New York Timesbest-sellers. A past and popular Summit speaker, he will close our 2010 gathering with a powerful and moving reminder of the greatness of God.

• How can we impassion and motivate the people who serve with us so they can be all that they can be.
• Not only in staff development but developing the place they work from.
• When people are passionate about what they do they are far more effective at what they do.
• It’s not all about money.
• People do what they do for passion, not out of a desire for money.
• How can we get the passion that fills us to infiltrate them?
• Church leadership is unique.
• People don’t come to follow us, people come to follow Jesus.
• They come to follow Jesus but they get stuck with us.
• Our responsibility is to make sure that people don’t hear a different sound than from what drew them to call them what they are called to do.
• You can’t get passionate people unless you are passionate yourself.
• Passion has to come from an inner place, not from other places.
• It’s not about mimicking other people.
• Mimicking is not original.
• People get tired of following a cheap copy of a great original.
• We have to lead from a place of power not a place of imitation.
• It has to come from an inner place.
• We have to be drawing from an inner, sacred space.
• God used Hannah’s barren womb to bring Samuel.
• Leadership is always transition.
• It’s not copying or repeating.
• It’s going from here to there.
• Leadership is not maintaining.
• Leadership is navigating transition.
• People follow people who move.
• People follow people who take risk.
• People want to go on a mission that is bigger than they are.
• God can’t use people who don’t have a real connection with Him.
• Our lamp cannot go out.
• We can be so busy with what we are doing that we can’t see the light has gone out in our people.
• From the head, to the beard, to the skirts.
• What we envision happening as it passes down from the bear to the skirt cannot be polluted or contaminated by people’s own thoughts, ideas, etc.
• The same passion on the head has to be on the skirt.
• Passion needs to be cycled down.
• If we give people something different they will be defeated and fail to become all they were meant to be.
• You have to constantly evaluate what people can do.
• Challenge people without the demands overwhelming them.
• People are passionate when you ask them to do something within their reach.
• When you overwhelm them they will feel defeated.
• Passion and defeat cannot coexist.
• Have a strong sense of evaluating people’s gifts.
• People need to be able to asses themselves.
• Allocate people appropriately.
• You have to be able to assess what people can do and allocate them appropriately.
• Be a good steward of the resources God has given you.
• Make sure the staff/team/group working with you can deliver on the promise you projected.
• Know you aren’t in this by yourself.
• Not seeing results now doesn’t mean you won’t see results later.
• If you do something you are passionate about and it comes up short, God will make up the difference.
• When people sense the contagious passion you have every day it will impassion them.
• People are ignited by passion not by principles.
• Passion is more than emotions.
• Passion is the fuel the makes the engine go.
• Leaders are called to deliver the people across the land.
• We can do it!
• There are two types of leaders: bankers and builders.

Builders

• Builders can start with little and make a match into an inferno.
• Joseph was a builder… wherever he went he flourished.
• They can turn around a hopeless situation.
• Builders are better at building than maintaining.
• If you are a builder you need a banker.

Bankers

• Bankers can keep a fire burning without it burning out.
• Bankers can make it last!
• Builders can maximize resources.
• They make ideas happen and build systems to sustain them.

Challenge

• The problem is that we bring people around us that are just like us.
• If you only surround yourself with people who do what you do they compete with you they don’t complete you.
• You need people who are good at what you are not good at.
• Surround yourself with people who are good at what you aren’t.
• Good teams complete you, they don’t compete with you.
• They add to you, they accessorize your life.

Confidants

• As you lead and develop you need people who are assets and not liabilities.
• You don’t want to make confidants out of people who are serving with you.
• Confidants are people who are “for” you.

Constituents

• Constituents are people who are for what you are for.
• They believe in the mission and the message.

Comrades

• They are for what you are for but might jump off at any time.
• Don’t try to hold things too tightly.
• Some people aren’t for you or what you are for… they are against what you are against.
• They are motivated by the fight.
• How do you manage people who are not like you?
• People who are willing to fight can be an asset if you learn how to leverage them.
• Don’t kill the fighter…direct the fighter in the right direction!
• If you don’t teach them how to fight for you they will fight against you.
• Direct them at the target instead of putting the bullseye on your backside.

Good leaders take their passion and divide it among their people proportionately.

• Do people have your spirit, vision, and passion?
• When people can read your looks you know they have your passion.
• You work best with people you read well.
• You cannot serve people you cannot read.
• Most leaders find it difficult to be transparent enough for people to know what they think.
• If you are going to lead people like Jesus you have to be willing to show them your wounds and see who you are.
• When Jesus rises from the dead he doesn’t show himself alive to sinners, he shows His disciples His wounds.
• He showed them who He was so they could learn as much from His struggle as they did from His strength.

The Fight Against Normalcy

• In the moments of nothingness, between battles, is when we have our hardest work.
• You don’t have to impassion people in a battle or when you are under attack.
• The long walk between them requires you to keep people motivated.
• That assignment falls on us.
• We can get tired of encouraging people.
• We can send people out encouraged and we can leave depleted.
• Encouraging, motivating, and leading can leave us operating in the red.
• “If I owe you anything I will repay you when I return.” – The Good Samaritan
• Leading won’t be easy.
• When you find yourself running low you have God you can turn to and ask for help.
• We have to ask God to help us so we can help them.
• Give me passion so I can give them passion.
• Give me fire so I can give them fire.
• When I am overwhelmed I go to the Rock that is higher than me.
• You can’t motive people if you aren’t motivated yourself.
• You can’t get people passionate if you are not passionate yourself.
• Rededicate yourself to the mission set before us.
• Recommit yourself to the task before us.
• Do it with passion and with gusto.
• We could have been destroyed, but we are blessed to be here.
• We aren’t going out to get the victory we have the victory right now.

Day 2 of Leadership Summit: Talk #6

Said to be the most studied CEO of the 20th century, Jack Welch began his 41-year career with the General Electric Company in 1960, and in 1981 became the company’s eighth chairman and CEO. Fortune named him “manager of the century,” and the Financial Times named him one of the three most admired business leaders in the world. He teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and recently launched the Jack Welch Management Institute at Chancellor University, offering advanced management degrees online. A prolific business writer, he authored the internationally best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut and also wrote The Welch Way, a widely read BusinessWeek column.

Authenticity

• You have to be yourself.
• You have to be comfortable in your own shoes.
• Don’t portray yourself as being something other than you are.
• People can see right through phoniness.
• People want to be able to count on you.
• In business, people take on a persona that is not really themselves.
• You have to be real and not hide behind a title.
• You have to be able to engage people in conversation.

Energy

• You have to energize people around you.
• You have to excite people and bring them on board.
• If you are always jumping around it doesn’t help people.
• You have to give people a clear mission and vision you articulate that will energize them.
• You have to take time to tell people the story of where you want to go and helping them decide if they want to be on board.
• It’s getting people to feel where you are going.
• If you can’t feel it yourself, why would you do it.
• Unless the leader feels the fire it’s hard to pass it on.
• You can make routine jobs seem exciting.
• Tell a story, show them how their lives and options can change if they are successful.
• Get them excited about the journey.
• Get people to tell their stories to one another.
• So much time is wasted with meetings and PowerPoint slides.
• You need to create engagement.
• The job of the leader is to raise the intellectual level of the room.
• Insecure people hire dopes!
• Let people role model and say what works, what doesn’t work, etc.
• People can all share experiences.

Candor

• Fight desperately to get how people really feel about things on the table.
• Say what you believe, not what people expect to hear.
• Candor creates less meetings.
• Establish a culture of differentiating people.
• The teams that win are the ones where the players know their individual roles.
• Candor has to be the foundation of an organization.
• Use candor to develop an appraisal system.
• No leader can go to work without people who work for them knowing where they stand.
• People need to know who’s in charge and where they stand.
• People spend more time trying to fix the bottom when the bottom can’t get better.

What’s the attitude of the top A-Level leaders?

• Filled with energy.
• Likable.
• Good values.
• They have a gene that says, “I love to see people grow.”
• They love to reward and promote people.
• They aren’t mean-spirited.
• Generosity defines them.
• They aren’t afraid to have great people around them.
• They don’t envy, the celebrate.
• When you set your values

B-Level Leaders

• Just as important.
• Hard-working.

Bottom 10

• Low energy.
• Not a team player.
• Pain in the arm.
• Nothing is worse than negative energy in an organization.
• They are disrupters and boss-haters.
• The boss-hater needs to be listened to every once in awhile.
• You can’t shut down the noise from someone who’s willing to be noisy.
• It’s the person who whispers, the cynics, you have to watch out for.
• The hallway cynic’s whisper is deadly to an organization
• You have to do everything to stop the meeting after the meeting.

Compensation

• You can’t give people in the top 20 enough.
• There’s not a better way to build a team than letting people know where they stand.
• You have to acknowledge performance.
• No winning teams ignore performance.
• Sometimes non-profit means non-performance.
• You’ve got to put out a profit.

What’s your biggest failure?

• I moved too slowly.
• You can never move too fast.
• Don’t ponder.
• No one ever says, “I wish I would have waited.”
• You might make some mistakes, but GO!
• Quicker decisions mean you get quicker feedback.
• One of the jobs of a leader is give people self-confidence to make decisions.

On Transition

• They had 8 possible candidates for his successor.
• The long-shots were the ones who made it to the final 3.
• It’s a growing process.
• Time changes things.
• You can’t make a decision in a snapshot of time.
• You’ll never know how someone will behave at the next level.
• Hiring is hard.
• Succession is brutal.
• Include as many people as possible as you can in the process.

Celebrations

• If a leader isn’t doing regular celebrations they are missing a significant opportunity.
• People have real trouble celebrating small victories.
• Build a little into your budget to celebrate!

Day 2 of Leadership Summit: Talk #5

Acknowledged as one of today’s most dynamic serial entrepreneurs, Blake Mycoskie launched five successful companies before the age of 30. He is best known as the founder and “chief shoe giver” of TOMS shoes, a for-profit company with a unique social enterprise model that has drawn tremendous media attention. Providing a new pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair sold, they have distributed more than 400,000 pairs of shoes to children around the world to date. Darren Whitehead, teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, interviewed Mycoskie on leading organizations with a cause and navigating the start-up phase of an organization.

TOMS Facebook page
Friends of TOMS
Follow Blake on Twitter
TOMS on Twitter

Why did you get into the shoe business?

• I wasn’t trying to get into the shoe business.
• He encountered people doing a shoe drive in Argentina.
• He was touched by it but didn’t see it as being a sustainable model.
• He wanted to do something to help people but didn’t want to start a charity.
• Instead of looking to charity for help, he wanted to go to business.
• That’s where the idea of one-to-one began.

How important is the word “give” to TOMS?

• TOMS was started as a spontaneous response to want to give.
• Giving feels amazing.
• Giving not only feels good, but it’s also a good business strategy.
• Giving is a good life strategy.
• All we have to do at TOMS is focus on giving.
• If we focus on giving in a sustainable and authentic way, our customers take care of the marketing.

What are your company’s distinctives?

• We encourage our employees to be a part of giving.
• Employees are actively engaged in the process of giving.
• Giving has a transformative effect.
• When people start serving they forget about their own problems.
• When you include giving and service into your organization, there is a strong transforming effect.

You seem to have a non-profit culture being a for-profit company. Why not be a non-profit?

• 8 months into TOMS Blake sold an online educational company he owned and took the profit and invested it in TOMS.
• With that money he could have purchased 40K pairs of shoes.
• They’ve had no other investments since then.
• They’ve helped 680K children get shoes as a result.
• Being for-profit they’ve been able to help more children and it’s continued to be more sustainable.

Earlier this year TOMS did a “One Day Without Shoes” campaign… how did you do it?

250,000 people participated in One Day Without Shoes.

It started amazing conversations and didn’t cost anything.

They got passionate people involved who respond in a huge way.

Microsoft and other large organizations got involved.

What was it like when you first came up with the idea for TOMS?

• It was just an idea. He was running another business at the time.
• When it became more than an idea was when he went on his first shoe drop.
• It changed his life.

TOMS has captured younger generations. What has grabbed their attention and created their loyalty?

• Young people want to have a voice and want to do something that matters.
• They have the passion but it isn’t always easy.
• TOMS makes it easy for them to act and do something that matters.
• They give them an opportunity to show people what matters to them.
• It’s a beginning for much greater things they are going to do in their lives to come.

As you look at the past four years,  you’ve had some strategic partnerships. Why are those important?

• TOMS gives people an authentic story to tell.

How important is asking people to do audacious things?

• You have to do it.
• If you really want to do something or create change you have to ask people to join you.
• People enjoy giving because it allows them to be a part of the journey.
• You can’t be bashful if you want to make change.

How has your faith impacted TOMS?

• TOMS illustrates many biblical principles.
• We didn’t start a shoe company to make money then give.
• We started a business to start giving.
• They gave their “first-fruits.”

What would you say to other young leaders?

• Come join us
• We need fantastic people to get us from HERE to THERE!
• It’s never too early to start giving and start serving.
• It’s better to start now than waiting til later.

How can church leaders get involved?

• April 5, 2011 is the next One Day Without Shoes
• GO BAREFOOT!
• It doesn’t cost anything but the difference you can make is HUGE.
• That will not only raise awareness but it will start transformative conversations.
• Learn more by going to TOMS Shoes website.

Day 2 of Leadership Summit: Talk #4