Vision Clarity is my Habitat
I was recently asked by a group of pastors a great question, “how do we know when to develop our strengths and when to address our weaknesses?” One school of thought says we are only as strong as our weakest link and proposes we systematically identify our weaknesses and develop them. The other school argues we grow […]
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In a previous post (here), I asked, “have we (Evangelical Christians) read the Great Commission through the lens of an extroverted ideal? If the Easter celebrations at your church were anything like mine, it was wonder-filled. There wasn’t an empty seat when the service started, and the room buzzed with anticipation. Buzz is the social energy […]
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Mike Breen and Steve Cockram, in Building a Discipling Culture, state, “if you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause. If you set out to build the church, there is no guarantee you […]
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I’ve spend the last couple of days with a high capacity colleague working to help a church understand how how guests experience their Sunday morning worship services. Are you aware of how others see you? Anthropologists talk about emic and etic knowledge. Emic knowledge is how we see ourselves and understand our world.; etic knowledge is how others see us and understand us through […]
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For the first time in 600 years, a Pope resigned. On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI issued a letter of resignation stating, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine […]
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Collaboration is increasingly the name of the game in leadership circles and decision making. Today’s ministry challenges are both dynamic and complex and need to be approached from multiple perspectives and viewed through the different lenses. Quality creative problem solving, and collaboration, however, can have a directly inverse relationship. Group problem solving is great for three […]
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Thanksgiving reminds us all that we need more gratitude in our lives. The question for this post is, how can we instill gratitude in our children? Like most parents, I like to remind my children that they could have it worse off. In my better moments, we pray together for those who are in need or we […]
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In a previous post, The Hazards of Success, I suggested that the best safeguard against the hazards of success was accountability. But how can a pastor create and sustains effective personal and vocational accountability structures? First, take stock of what accountability structures exist. A pastor in a mainline church once told me the problem with non-denominational […]
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I was hiking with my wife recently and ran across a cautionary tale of the dangers of diversified growth. The trail cut horizontally across a moderately sloped hillside. On the left, about ten feet up the hill, a tree had fallen downward toward the trail, but had gotten lodged between two trees on the opposite […]
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Steven Berglas writes about the four hazards of success for a leader: 1. Aloneness (loss of accountability). 2. Arrogance (loss of humility). 3. Addiction (pursuit of novelty, new challenges, etc., to maintain high levels of arousal). 4. Adultery (pursuit of the ultimate pleasure). Loneliness asks the heart, “who near me understands the weight of what […]
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