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 […]
Compendium (part one) Read More »
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.
Go First! (part six) Read More »
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
Go First! (part five) Read More »
Leadership Courage Series # 32 In the home stretch of this Series, we’re considering the ninth characteristic of those who would lead well in a culture overrun with cowardice. Early in this series we examined why comfort-craving, security-seeking, spiritless stagnation is common to the Church. Sad, when you consider how we behaved in the Book
Go First! (part four) Read More »
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.
Go First! (part three) Read More »
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
Go First! (part two) Read More »
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
Go First! (part one) Read More »
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
The Unreasonableness of Being Reasonable (part four) Read More »
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
The Unreasonableness of Being Reasonable (part three) Read More »
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
The Unreasonableness of Being Reasonable (part two) Read More »