Leadership Courage Series # 37 We’re making a brief, final lap through nine traits called for from pastors and influencers in the Church in North America. The second is: Take full responsibility for your own emotional being and destiny. Pastor, more than you know, you are the model of what maturity in Christ is. Regardless […]
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Leadership Courage Series # 35 This series on Leadership Courage began more than a year ago. Inspired by Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve, I set out to do two things. First, to establish the context: the Church in North America is, as they say in the South, “eat up” with anxiety. Chronically anxious, the Church
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Leadership Courage Series # 34 Last time, I used the phrase “do what’s right because it’s right, whether it works or not.” I learned this from a friend, who says he learned it from the Lord. His wife had lost both her parents to cancer. One after the other. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. The impact was devastating.
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Leadership Courage Series # 33 As with much of this Leadership Courage Series, I’m indebted to Edwin Friedman’s excellent book A Failure of Nerve for this ninth and final leadership trait: Go first! Friedman says “To be a leader, one must both have and embody a vision of where one wants to go. It is
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Leadership Courage Series # 31 We’re looking at a ninth characteristic of courageous Christian leadership. A leader moves. She takes action. Rather than taking a straw poll to see what the prevailing opinions are, a leader will go first. And sometimes this means going alone… for a while. It’s nothing special. It what leaders do.
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Leadership Courage Series # 30 To the Church at Ephesus, Paul wrote: So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up… Yet, since the Reformation, the Church in the West has been
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Leadership Courage Series # 29 Could you imagine the impact of a largely leaderless Church for, say, 400 years? Well, look around… We’re heading for the home stretch on this examination of courageous Christian leadership. The impetus for my challenges and observations is Edwin Friedman’s wonderful book: A Failure of Nerve. Thus far, we’ve made
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Leadership Courage Series # 28 Within a larger conversation concerning courageous leadership we’ve been examining the outworking of placing “an unreasonable faith in reasonableness” – a central tenet of much of post-Enlightenment Christendom in the West. I am indebted to Edwin Freidman’s A Failure on Nerve for illuminating this characteristic of the anxious, shallow, quick-fix
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Leadership Courage Series # 27 Pastor, who you are is more important than anything you say. Who you are is more important than everything you say! This Leadership Courage Series is a call to the courageous, risky life leaders lived in the Church of the New Testament. It stands in glaring contrast to the lifestyle
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Leadership Courage Series # 26 Edwin Friedman in his stellar work A Failure of Nerve challenges his readers to “disengage from an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.” It seems that the Church in North America is reasonable if it is anything, and that reasonableness has got us stuck. “Syncretism” is what scholars call it. I call
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