Free Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands by Nancy Ortberg Page B

defining moments, one that resulted in widespread lifestyle change, and one that didn’t. Therefore one was truly a defining moment and the other wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time.
    During the first few months in my leadership role at Axis, I joined regular attendees and people new to the ministry at a weekend retreat in Wisconsin. We started with a great teaching and worship session on Friday night, and then another similar session followed small-group experiences on Saturday morning. The afternoon was full of great outdoor free-time activities, and after dinner on Saturday evening, we had an evening worship service.
    To say that the worship service was an event is an understatement. The band was amazing, and the energy in that room was just short of “rock concert.” People wouldn’t let the band finish, they kept clamoring for more, and as it got closer to midnight, I told my staff that I was going to bed and to be sure and wake me if they ended up having to call the police. Mostly that was a joke (although as myson constantly reminds me, in order to be a joke it needs to be funny), but that’s how high the energy was.
    Defining moments are only as significant
    as the lifestyles they produce.
    The next morning I thinkmost of the people were suffering from a “worship hangover,” and breakfast attendance was sparse. By the time the final morning teaching session was ready to start, many people had told me how amazing the worship had been the night before.
    I was sure the concert itself had been amazing, but I wondered if people were trying to make it into something it wasn’t. When I spoke that morning I said this: “When the day comes that this Axis community—myself included—is giving at unbelievable levels, serving the poor with the same kind of energy I saw last night, and living deeply in authentic, Christ-centered, transformational relationship with one another, then I will believe that what we experienced last night was true worship.”
    But without all those things, our concert was nothing more than intentional frenzy that may have felt good in the moment but had no real, deep connection to the inner core of God. On the outside, the event had all the markings of a defining moment. But a closer look revealed that it was more like cotton candy: one bite and it dissolved. Nothing significant or lasting came from it.
    (Now, as a side note, here is what I think is one of the most difficult things about leadership: I could have been wrong. It wouldn’t have been the first time. My internal hunch could have been completely off. So saying what I said was a risk. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was off. Let me be even more honest. I wish it had been a defining moment. It would have been great for my reputation as a leader to have one so soon after starting.)
    Fast-forward a little over a year later to a summer series we did in Axis called “21 C: How to Live an Authentic Faith in the 21st Century.” We wanted to highlight people in their twenties and early thirties who were living out their faith in unique and authentic ways, and one of the people we invited to speak was Shane Claiborne.
    Shane’s talk was a defining moment that shifted Axis into a lifestyle change. One hot August night, and the following morning, Shane talked to our community about what it meant to follow a Jesus who talked more about serving the poor than about prayer and what it means to be born again, put together.
    In a winsome way that had more teeth than we even knew at the time, Shane spoke words that were prophetic. Through the teachings of Jesus and numerous Old Testament passages, he clarified for us the call for our discipleship to be infused with service to the underresourced. You can read a longer version of this story in Looking for God , but the end result of Shane’s sermon was an altar of sorts, made up of more than seventeen hundred pairs of shoes, which were given to be distributed immediately