Parting Thoughts to the 2012 Emerging Leaders

Final EL Talk 2012

Here are the final 15 thoughts I related to the Emerging Leader graduates of 2012.  This list is an amalgam of wisdom that other men have given me, or that I have acquired by watching four generations of Emerging Leaders come and go.  I will confess that these items are not perfectly assimilated into my own life, but I am convinced that they hold true and are continually worthy of my pursuit.

1.    We are each a product of grace.  It would be a great perversion for your new knowledge of God and His word to produce arrogance.  Remember, knowledge does not necessarily equate to growth and maturity.

2.    Be content with anonymity.  God knows your name; that is enough.

3.    Resolve to live the truth, not simply to learn it.

4.    Read your Bible.  There is no Christian activity that can replace this.

5.    There will be moments that call for you to lead and not appease people’s preferences and feelings.  Never aspire to be intentionally offensive, but leadership requires you to make decisions that others won’t. 

6.    Exercise! You have been given one vehicle with which to take the gospel into the world.  Take care of it.  Disease and illness are out of your control, but a healthier diet and exercise are possible. 

7.    Adopt the disposition of patience.  Relationships are marathons, not sprints.

8.    Your sin can never cancel out your eternal security, but it can (and will) interrupt your intimacy with Christ.

9.    Your flesh seeks to destroy you.  John Owen states that if every lustful glance could be carried to completion then it would be.  Your sinful passions are not a harmless past time.  They are bent towards your complete, moral failure.  Be the type of person whose convictions outweigh their passions.

10. When assessing your life, always begin with your Justification.  Hold fast to the fact that you are already pronounced clean and accepted before God.  Most people assess their lives only through the lens of their sanctification, which generally leaves them continually discouraged.

11. Stay Poised! There is pain that lies ahead for all of you.  When your earthly circumstances most resemble what feels like Hell, remember that Paul states your life is in heaven.  Try your best to not overreact.  Remain faithful because there is deeper life on the other side of each trial. 

12. Learn the profound act of silence.  If you are someone who is always sharing your opinion, or you are always the one speaking out in small/large group settings then people will start to tune you out.  Often times, the less you speak the more you are heard.

13. Use yourself to attract people to Jesus; do not use Jesus to attract people to yourself.

14. No longer be people of potential, but of actuality.

15. God loves you enough to wound you.  This is never a spiteful or vindictive blow, but our wounds are often necessary.  A smaller summer of wounds now is meant to prevent a more desolate winter later.

What a wonderful year each of you have had.  My hope is that this past 9 months has been exceedingly meaningful, but that it is not the pinnacle of your lives.  You are each greatly loved.  Grace and Peace.   

You're Wrong Too

In Ecclesiastes the Preacher states, “with increased knowledge comes increased pain”.  Often, this is interpreted and applied in the arena of one individual life.  For example, the more I learn about the pervasiveness of man’s depravity, the more helpless I feel with respects to my role in effecting change.  In this illustration, my increased knowledge produced the increased pain of my despair.  There is, however, another application of “pain” with respects to this verse.  It is not the pain that our knowledge will cause ourselves; rather it is the pain that our knowledge can cause others.

The DownLine Institute will necessarily increase a student’s knowledge of the Scriptures.  This is one of its purposes, and this is a good and noble thing.  Unfortunately, the pursuit of knowledge quickly becomes perverted when that same knowledge terminates on ourselves and inflames our pride.  To be a learned believer is to be a privileged receiver, but often times we are tempted to wield our knowledge as a sword bent on cutting off the legs of anyone who knows less than we.  Allow me to offer two thoughts that have helped me navigate this particular sin struggle.  Firstly, we must understand that no matter what we learn, we are still wrong about something.  That is the inevitable result of a fallen mind pursuing an infinite and holy being.  God is knowable, but He cannot be fully known.  Resist the temptation of believing your mind has arrived.  Secondly, our motivation to learn should never be to exhaust a subject but rather to experience a personal God. Theology is meant to usher us towards deeper worship; it is not meant to produce useless quarrels or coffee house contests. 

As we move forward from here, it is my hope that the second semester of the DownLine Institute will find all of our minds stimulated, and hearts motivated, towards a further love of both God, and others.  

Off With Their Hoods

“…some Ku Klux Klan members, some still in their church attire, attacked the buses…”

May 14^th, 1961.  Anniston, AL.

I can imagine the initial screams that pierced the bus’ air as the back window was shattered; I can picture the glass flying through the air in search of a new home. The freedom riders’ vehicle had now become a prison, and their prison was set on fire by a glass-bottled bomb that ignited the Alabama heat.  Thankfully none died that day, but they were beaten, they were humiliated, and they had all this handed to them by some men who were “still in their church attire”.

If anything is true about me it is that I am not a qualified historian.  I have done little to no research.  At this moment all I am afforded is a theory, and this particular theory is linked to the bifurcating existence of Life and Faith in the great misnomer known as “The Bible Belt”.  How could men exit a church with the purpose of burning a bus?  How could white hoods hide the same mouths that had exclaimed hallelujahs only an hour earlier?  I theorize these attitudes are rooted in the soil of slavery and, like so many of our problems, are a byproduct of the black-and-white history of the South.

Over the next few posts, I will consider the implications of slavery on the South and its negative impacts on blacks, whites and Southern Theology.  None of what I will say is authoritative.  It will simply be a contemplative attempt to further understand the psyche of a land I will always know as home.

Teaching Misconceptions



"It is not so much great talents that God blesses, as great likeness to Christ."


-       Robert Murray M'Cheyne

An evangelical normality has emerged that, if unchecked, will exile most Christ-followers into a foreign land of perceived insignificance.  The gift of teaching has been elevated above all the rest, and the very truths of The Book that is taught is nullified by the enshrinement of the one teaching.  Show us an 80-year-old widow who cooks for the homeless and we may stop to blink.  Display a carpenter who does pro bono work for the poor and we will do him the courtesy of a quick compliment.  The middle-aged Dad who serves with his hands will get trumpeted as humble, but he will be left without a ticket when the train of “meaningful” leaders leaves the station. 

Paul goes to great lengths to communicate that teaching is A GIFT, but our lust for oratory has caused us to become its harlot.  In our longing for dynamic communicators, we have unwittingly removed Christ as the head of the body and placed teachers in His place.  We must assault this trend by granting that the gift of teaching is vital and important, but it cannot be celebrated as ultimate.

I say all this in full acknowledgment of my guilty participation in everything I have critiqued.  I further acknowledge that I am a grateful beneficiary of the wonderful teaching pastors at my home church.  We need them to fully function in their gifting, but we need everyone else fully functioning as well.  As Christ-followers we must pursue a culture that honors the gifts of compassion, mercy, giving, etc… just as much as the next conference speaker.  Furthermore, we must run after a culture that celebrates the godliness of the gifted above the singularity of any particular gift.

The Born Identity

Where sky and water meet,

Where the waves grow sweet,

Doubt not Reepicheep,

To find all you seek,

There is the utter East.

-       The Dawn Treader

A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

                                                                        -    CS Lewis

 It was a perfectly captured expression.  Reepicheep’s first glimpse of Aslan’s country showed an incomprehensible joy and wonder beyond anything he had known in Narnia.  He was finally home; he would now dwell in his new country, he would now forever live in the presence of the rightful King.

I was born at East Alabama Medical Center on March 21, 1983.  At that moment, my body was thrust into existence and an identity was conferred.  It was the identity of my earthly birth.  Name: William James Trussell IV.  Country: United States of America.  King: Myself.

I am an American by birth.  I am a Christian by re-birth.  The latter exercises dominion over the former since the former is a natural inheritance while the latter is supernaturally bestowed.  Why do I mention this?

We are quickly approaching the season of speeches and caucuses, and in this season many Christians will sadly trumpet an inversion of their true identity.  The slander, anger, zeal, and statements like “we have to save our nation by electing _______” will all work together to confirm what many American Christians value most, politics over their Priest.  It is inside this seasonal soil that I am burdened to plant 3 seeds of reminders that will hopefully grow into plants of resolve.

Reminder 1: America has never been “God’s nation”.  Therefore, it is inaccurate to think politics, or anything else, can return us to a position that never existed.

Reminder 2: ‘My Land Tis of Thee’ is temporary.  We should not tie our soul to its glory.

Reminder 3: Patriotism is worthy and noble.  Nationalism is false worship.

A disclaimer: nothing I have written arises from the trending popularity of America-bashing.  I love America, especially the Deep South, but it is not permanent.  The temporary will one day fade into the eternal, and it is for the eternal land that I must live, always looking forward to the day when I will go “further up and further in”.

The Gift of a Present

45 degrees and a slight breeze escorted me as I left my Kalispell, MT hotel room in late July.  4:45am comes even earlier on Mountain Standard Time, and the Montana-summer-morning was guilty of stealing the identity of a Memphis-winter-night. 

As we drove, evidence of the still hidden sun was soon introduced into the court of creation when the Swan Mountains’ silhouette claimed its existence amidst the never-ending expanse.  The Range’s peaks and spines were easily traceable, but it was in that moment that I realized there was a pervasive lack of detail.  The barren plots of lost trees, the dalmatian-spotted dirt pods, and the overgrown nature of rebellious vegetation were invisible.  Everything was covered in a dark-purple haze, everything glowed, and everything remained beautiful until the dawn became morning.  When the sun rose, the glow of dawn dissipated and the landscape’s imperfections were literally brought to light.  Lamenting the loss of what previously had been, I drew the passenger-side visor and fought off the sun.

There is a constant temptation to wish all of life was lived in the “dawn”.  We long to freeze every moment when all appears beautiful and remain suspended there forever.  Despite this longing, this is not a permissible operating mindset for the believer.  To wish away moments of pain and suffering is to wish away Christ-likeness.  Longing for perfect periods of the past diminishes both the importance of the present and the hope placed in the future.  If we use driving as an analogy of our interaction with time, then I cannot rightly look forwards, backwards, and side to side at the same time without negative results.  I have tried; I rear-ended a mini cooper.

A former mentor once told me that he awakes every morning with the thought that “I have the next 16 hours to be Holy”.  I find this approach helpful.  The majority of life will be lived amidst the grind of daily chores, but it is precisely in that grind that practical faith and holiness are seen and forged.  Sadly, we wish away the monotonous appearance of the present in hopes of returning to past days or awaiting better circumstances in the future.  

One beautiful aspect of the gospel is that it secures for us the DAILY indwelling presence of God.  God is often, and correctly, proclaimed as the God of history and the God of the future; but He is also the God of the here and now.  God both exists in, and is concerned with, the present.  We, as His image bearers, should be as well.  

No Words Needed