by Kelly Carr

You are leading and influencing people every day in some way. You may lead your small group at church, you may lead in the business world, you may lead your children, you may lead by example. Catalyst is a conference for leaders (catalystleader.com). As its president, Tyler Reagin, said, “It’s not just for church leaders but for leaders who love the church.” The Lookout editor Kelly Carr was invited to attend and interview some of the speakers when Catalyst came to Cincinnati. We hope these excerpts will encourage your leadership:

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Hopefully my faith has matured and I’ve emotionally matured, I hope. When we had two people working on our team I had to be a different kind of a leader. I was a young leader and didn’t know what I was doing. Now I’ve got 600. And so how do you lead? There’s a different kind of leadership for one thing, but I have to be a better leader to do that. The same thing if I’m managing $10 for God as a steward, it’s not as strenuous as managing $10 million for God as a steward. You have to be more attentive and more careful and more detail-oriented and more concerned about excellence. In that sense my walk with God has intensified because the responsibilities have intensified.”

—Dave Ramsey, money management expert, author, host of “The Dave Ramsey Show”

“I like to remind us that when we look at our heroes in the Bible, most of them had jobs. Whether it’s David or Joseph or Luke or Lydia—they were business leaders, they were doctors, they were working in the government—they had jobs. Much of our life is spent in the workplace. They actually model for us kingdom opportunity—the opportunity for the gospel and for ministry in the context of their everyday life. We actually get to influence the world for good. Why wouldn’t we want to be there? The whole idea of us being salt and light bids us to be in places where salt and light are not. If there’s a way for us to be amongst people and build relationships with people and do our work well and use our gifts well for the common good, why wouldn’t we want to be there? I feel like we should be commissioning people as they go into the week. Like Sunday is commissioning day.”

—Jo Saxton, author, speaker, church planter, and leadership coach

“The person who got on a ship many, many years ago in the late 1800s who went to the peninsula called Korea and preached the gospel to my great grandfather, who as a result was so captivated by the gospel that he went home and our whole household came to faith—he is never going to see the fruit of that labor. I don’t know who that person is, but I’m here because of the faithfulness of that person. All that we can do at the end of the day is to be faithful. And in our faithfulness may we experience that joy. There may be times we get to see the fruit of that labor and times that we don’t. But I trust in the faithfulness of God, who is working in ways that are seen and unseen, orchestrating all things for his good and glory.”

—Eugene Cho, minister of Quest Church in Seattle and founder of One Day’s Wages