This Week on Trans·formed (6/16)

Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week

The One Minute Gospel: Helpful Tool or Tragic Mistake? (part 2) (Marc Cortez): The way we share the gospel impacts the way we try to live out the gospel. Think about it. If the gospel is the central truth of the Christian life, and if our gospel summaries emphasize the things that we think are most important about the gospel, then our gospel summaries communicate a lot about what we think the Christian life is most fundamentally about. Evangelism and Christian living are inseparably linked.

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Leadership Direction: Organization Assessment (Chad Hall): Whether you lead a church, a ministry, a non-profit organization, a school, a business, or a family, there are five key questions you must ask and answer in order to have an accurate assessment of the organization.  Here are five (take a stab at answering these for the organization you lead).

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Rethinking Success in Ministry (Again) (John Johnson): All of this gets me asking (again) the question–so what defines success in ministry?  Get a Larry Osborne, a Eugene Peterson, a Bill Hybels, a John Piper, and a Shane Claiborne at a table, and you might get very different answers.My take is a lot of pastors are about pursuing some form of success. Who, after all, wants to be a failure? But if we are not careful, we can sell a bit of our souls to get there.

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Other Articles on Trans·formed This Week

• The Need to “Go Deep” in Youth Ministry (video)

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Other Posts of Interest from around the Web

• Mystery and Knowledge, Stranger and Lover: Knowing a person, human or divine, is a gift. And it’s a gift to be cherished precisely because it leaves hidden far more than it uncovers. The mystery of a person is what makes the journey worth making. And the infiniteness of the mystery is what makes eternity so exciting.

• Confessions of a Failed Church Planter: Of course, I had heard the stats about church planting failures. Regardless, I went for it knowing the Lord was leading me to start a new church for His glory. I read all the books, attended the conferences, took church planting classes in college and seminary, planned, prayed, pleaded with and persuaded others to join the team, raised money, developed a killer logo; even my wife was onboard! How could I fail?

• I’m a Mormon, Not a Christian: This is the so-called Mormon Moment: a strange convergence of developments offering Mormons hope that the Christian nation that persecuted, banished or killed them in the 19th century will finally love them as fellow Christians. I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.

• 5 Ways to Reduce Conflict in Your Church: You will get more done in your ministry by enlisting the help of others. God never intended for you to handle all the ministry at your church by yourself.

• Hopeless without the Spirit: The early church was alive and active because of the Holy Spirit. There is no verse—not even one—that relegates the importance and vitality of the Spirit only to the New Testament church. That’s the key: We have to believe the Holy Spirit is present for us today.

• St. Paul, Theologian of the Trinity: Should we think of doctrine as a grimy residue that has to be scrubbed away before we can really see the vibrancy and vividness of Paul’s letters? It’s a hard question to answer in the abstract, once and for all, but at least with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, a growing chorus of scholars is responding with a resounding, “No.”

• The Five Myths about Small Groups: Discipleship manifests itself in the local church most often through small groups. But building effective small groups takes a lot of work, and can be difficult to implement. They often struggle to be successful and transformational because of wrong expectations, beliefs, or myths about how they work best.

• People Will Actually Sing If You Let Them: One of my non-negotiables going in to starting a church was that congregational singing be the primary musical expression of the gathered people of God. Not a band. Not an organ. Not a singer-songer writer strumming guitar chords. But the congregation itself.