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vibrant community of Jesus followers, we would become active in helping our friends discover Jesus, and we would serve our neighbors in need through these three strategic anchors. Everything that happened, then, in our large and small-group gatherings and through our serving opportunities needed to direct people to growth in those three areas.
    So we knew that our weekend services needed to be transformational and point people both to our great God and to His community. They needed to be creative, relevant, and provocative in order to engage and move people. We began to highlight serving opportunities and the stories that emerged from them in our services.
    Our small-group leaders needed to be trained in an ongoing manner. That training needed to be authentic and done in community. Our leaders needed to be envisioned and trained to lead groups where people could be known and transformed. Jesus needed to be at the center of these times, and serving opportunities needed to become a part of the rhythm of each home group as well.
    Regular serving opportunities, both through home groups and Axis-wide events, needed to become a regular part of the fabric of Axis.
    Transformational large group events.
    Transformational small-group gatherings.
    Transformational serving opportunities.
    Three areas of focus, consistently given our best efforts, prayers, and ideas.
    Building into the people who would lead each of those areas.
    When you build an organization through a collaborative vision that honestly assesses current reality, you’ll find that the number of stone ships you encounter decreases. Somewhere along the way, someone will have the courage to tell you that while a ship is a great idea, you might want to reconsider the building material.
    But remember this: Avoiding stone ships is not the goal. The goal is creating an organization that flourishes and thrives, that creates and transforms, and that becomes a force to change things and help people.

Seabiscuit
    FOR A LOT OF REASONS, I was not the most obvious or anticipatedchoice when it came to leading Axis, a ministry that was geared to the “eighteen to twentysomething generation.” For starters, I was a middle-aged woman, and to my knowledge, that was not at the top of the list of qualifications the Axis team wanted in its next leader. Axis had been started, appropriately so, by a guy who was edgy and postmodern.
    Edgy and postmodern and young.
    They got me.
    I’m sure they weren’t thrilled when I came on board, and least thrilled of all was Steve. As the program director, Steve oversaw the teams that put the weekend service together. That service formed the bedrock of our ministry and was among the most important things we produced week after week. Steve had been doing this job almost since Axis began.
    He was distant and suspicious of me—polite, but barely. He avoided and questioned me, which is a lovely combination (the tone you’re sensing there is my spiritual gift of sarcasm, finely honed over time). My first week on the job, I asked him, “When does the programming team meet?”
    A simple, innocuous question. I was the leader of Axis, Axis held a weekend service, and the programming team designed, planned, and executed that service. I should probably know when the meeting was so that I wouldn’t be late.
    “We don’t need you at that meeting,” Steve replied. Since then, Steve and I have had many a good laugh over that, but I wasn’t laughing that day.
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but some of his reticence toward me was a reaction to leaders in the past who had come to that meeting, taken over, and changed everything. And I don’t think that was all that was going on.
    Steve wasn’t thrilled about me as the new leader of Axis, quite possibly because he was hoping he might get the job, but certainly because he never expected they would give it to someone his parents’ age.
    While my response to Steve was that I would be coming to each and every one