Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week
The Three Rs of Transformation (Marc Cortez): Overemphasize reformation and we’ll approach the church and the Christian life as a task that must be accomplished, a goal we can achieve if we just work hard enough. Down that road lie pride, frustration, and eventually exhaustion. Overemphasize revival and we’ll approach the Christian life as something that can only be truly lived during times of heightened excitement, passion, and felt empowerment, something that must be continually stirred up and sought after. And down that road lie pride, frustration, and eventually exhaustion. Two different roads. Same tragic end.
How to Lead a Meeting (Chad Hall): How can we improve our meetings? A few years ago I had my eyes opened to the simple truth that how we approach meetings makes a tremendous difference. Specifically, my ability to lead meetings improved when I recognized that every meeting has three key elements: purpose, process and content. When I let these three elements work together, they work for me and everyone else in the meeting.
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At the End of the Day, It Is Their Choice (Bev Hislop): This can sometimes be difficult to remember when shepherding someone you care much about. No matter how good your perspective, your wisdom or intuition, or the Bible verses you offer, it is her/hischoice to accept or reject it at the end of the day. Shepherds must respect the God-given power of choice of others.
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Exercise Is Not Training (John Johnson): Exercise is not training. Doing ministry the same way, leading the church to the same goals, staffing ministry to do the same ministries is simply exercising. Dreaming, envisioning, imagining, and planning for a future that is constantly shifting is training. We talked a lot about this today in our staff. We have no desire to be caretakers of the status quo. We have to keep asking—what are the ten things we should be doing next? And just maybe, God might give us a new strategy that maximizes something people are writing off, or creating something people have not thought about yet.
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Other Articles on Trans·formed This Week
Other Posts of Interest from around the Web
- I Could Be a Great Leader if It Weren’t for the People: Every leader knows frustration. Every leader has been discouraged. All leaders have moments where they wish they could change the circumstances in which they find themselves. And many of those desired changes involve people.
- Back to (a Theology) of Work We Go…: Why the church must talk about “vocation” and not just “mission” if it hopes to engage young adults.
- Here are a couple of good preaching resources: How do you preach a one time sermon? and How To Prepare an Annual Preaching Plan.
- How the Elephant Room Is Redefining the Pastoral Office: By lifting up men with minimal theological commitments as examples to pastors, the Elephant Room is proclaiming, perhaps unwittingly, that a rigorous concern for sound doctrine is not essential to the pastoral office.
- What the Bible Teaches about Capitalism: More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.
- Jesus and the Goodness of Everything Human: The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, fittingly called the “church father” of the 20th century, put it this way: “As the man Jesus is himself the revealing Word of God, he is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”
- How Do You Discern the Conversion of a Child?: There are commonly 2 extremes as we all wrestle with this question. The first is the careless lack of discernment of many churches who have an alter call for 4-5 year olds, ask them to raise their hand if they love Jesus, then baptize them as converted followers of Jesus. The other extreme often results from the carelessness of the first.
About Marc Cortez
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