Michael Hyatt recently posted 20 Questions to ask other leaders giving us an amazing list based questions asked of him by Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church.

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At the end of his post, Michael suggested we ask these questions of ourselves and then blog about them, to enable us to all learn together.  So here’s my first…

1.  Can you name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader? Maybe some one who has been a mentor to you? Why and how did this person impact your life?

The person who has had the biggest impact on me as a leader is Andy Westrupp.

Andy is a Salvation Army Officer who is currently in a senior leadership role in New Zealand.  But he was the Corps Officer (Senior Pastor) of Johnsonville Salvation Army when Raewyn and I, along with our children, turned up when we moved city.

To watch Andy lead and grow a church and to have him speak into my life as he grew me as a leader has greatly impacted how I go about leading a church myself.  As it happens, my wife and I now lead the very same church that Andy and his wife Yvonne lead when we first met them.

Why did Andy have such a big impact and why has it stuck?  If I had to say just one thing that affected me it would be that he modelled what he expected.  Values to Andy were, and are, not things written on paper but what the culture of the church is all about.  And this culture only comes about by a modelling of the values by its most senior leaders.

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