This Week on Trans·formed (5/27)

Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week

Dung Beetles in Heaven (Marc Cortez): I’m sorry to say that the way most people describe Heaven sounds rather boring to me. Ask what they’re looking forward to about Heaven, and many people will say something about finding lost loved ones—sometimes even lost pets—the end of pain and sorrow, finally being able to dunk a basketball, run a marathon, or possibly even fly through the clouds. And these are all great things, I suppose. But I’m guessing that after a few thousand years, they’d all grow a bit stale. I love my friends and family, but after a millennium or two, I can pretty much guarantee that I’d be hiding in a closet every time I heard one of them coming around the corner. It’s possible that I just have an unusually short attention span and get bored easily. But 4,000 years of the same old thing sounds boring.

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Leadership Core: Education and Experience(Chad Hall): You were not born with everything you need to lead well, live well, or contribute well.  You were endowed with certain natural traits, talents, values, and strengths from birth and from your story.  But to give to the world what is truly needed from you, you must develop your strengths and add to your capacity. Beyond your personality, talents, and spiritual gifts, your capacity to contribute is bolstered by what you choose to add to your leadership core through the “double e’s” of experience and education.  Education and experience enhance who you are and strengthen your strengths.

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Do I Know Who I Am? (Bev Hislop): A woman who has derived her role primarily as a wife, will find the foundations of her life shaken if she faces divorce or widowhood. A person defined by a specific job or role, after losing that job may find she/he feels very lost. A pastor’s wife who plays the keyboard in worship at previous churches finds someone else has that role in this new place. Who am I in this new place?

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What Do We Do with the Bible? (part 2) We Meditate on It (Bill Mounce): So many of us are in such a rush. We live as if there are 25 hours in a day, and that extra hour is just what we need. But the relational devastation is immense. Marriages destroyed. Families split. Lack of true intimacy. We are too busy to pick up a phone, so we text while we drive. The very thing that will destroy a human relationship will also destroy our relationship with God — lack of time. So we spend time with God because we are committed to the relationship, meditating on his word, in silence listening.

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Other Posts of Interest from around the Web

• Embracing the Tension between Family and Church Ministry: These callings can seem to be in tension with one another, but it is a dynamic tension in which we can experience God’s goodness. God never separates the assignments he gives us from his sanctifying process in us. He is at work within your family ministry to sanctify you for your church ministry—and he is at work within your church ministry to sanctify your family.

• An Open Letter to Young, “Post-Partisan” Evangelicals: It’s that time again — the time when the younger evangelical generation surveys our damaged nation, observes the terrible reputation of leading evangelical “culture warriors” in the pop culture and with their peers, and says, “You guys blew it.  It’s time for a new approach, for a post-partisan approach.  We’re not in anyone’s political pocket.

• Hire Staff Proactively and Not Reactively: Reactive staffing responds to the urgent, the chaotic, and the squeaky. Reactive staffing certainly addresses the leader’s “felt needs,” but these are not necessarily the “real needs” of the church. Because reactive staffing responds to the most chaotic and squeaky departments, these under-performing areas may receive more resources and support than areas or departments more likely to advance the mission of the church. While relieving short-term stress, reactive staffing only treats the symptom of the problem—not the deeper issue. So within a few months, the chaos returns.

• The Unteachables: A Generation That Cannot Learn: And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism.

• Seven Ways to Get to Christ in the Old Testament: All the stories, and historical events of the Old Testament are pointing forward to something greater – to some one greater!

• If Christ Is Lord, Everything Matters: a common temptation is to view life as split into two areas: spiritual things that matter and that have eternal significance, and everything else, which does not. This perspective is not true to Scripture, and doesn’t honour the confession that most Christians—despite the glaring inconsistency—are eager to make: that Christ is Lord over all.

• 10 Things You Have to Do if You Want the Next Generation to Listen: I’ve noticed the biggest thing my generation wants is just someone who tells it how it is. They just want someone who lays it all out there and has firm convictions about what they believe. My generation just wants authenticity.