This Week on Trans·formed (7/7)

Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week

No, I’m from Canada. We live in a broken world. Everywhere you turn, you see the impact of sin. But why? Why did sin spread from Adam and Eve to all people? In the last post, we explored the possibility that sin spreads everywhere because we spread it. We don’t want to admit it, but we’re our own worst enemies. In this post, I’d like to look in a different direction. Maybe sin spread to everyone because we’re all in this together.

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Escaping to Confront Reality. I became utterly captivated with [Brueggemann’s Like Fire in the Bones–Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah], reading it every chance I got. Which might not have been so good. If you want to escape from reality, Jeremiah is one of the last books you want to encounter. His principal mission was to confront  his contemporaries with God’s reality, and the hazardous consequences of coming to grips with it.

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We Are BECAUSE They Were. The huge risk taken by our founding fathers (each represented by a full-sized bronze statue in the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia) in drafting and signing this new document is easily forgotten in 2012. I admit there were times when I wondered if our current government leaders remember the life-giving values that drove these early founding fathers and the original documents. It is easy to forget the sacrifices of those gone before us.

Other Articles on Trans·formed This Week

• 10 Keys to Avoiding the Tragedy of Infidelity

• Aging Biblically

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Other Posts of Interest from around the Web

• 3 Ways to Lead an Exhausted Team. As a leader, you’ll undoubtedly have times when your team is exhausted, discouraged, and ready to break. It’s important to lead not just with the what to do, but to encourage and influence your team to see the bigger picture. So how do you do this?
• 7 Ways to Reduce Your Stress Level in Ministry. Rick Warren has shared seven ways that he has found to reduce stress in ministry. How do YOU reduce the stress level in your ministry job?  What’s YOUR secret?

• 10 Reasons to Underprogram Your Church. I’m a devotee the “simple church” concept, but I have experienced just how daunting a task it can be to lead the under-programming of my church. We are inundated constantly with opportunities for activity from other churches (which we don’t want to turn down lest we appear uncooperative and standoffish), advertised “movements” local and national (which are good at getting people excited and distracted), and “good ideas” from our own community (which we are reluctant to deny lest we break someone’s heart). But what all this so often amounts to is a church that is merely busy, and busy does not always equal diligent or faithful.