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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Leadership Courage Series # 25 For a number of months we’ve been looking at Christian leadership from what I hope are refreshing and resourceful perspectives. The genesis of this entire series is A Failure of Nerve by the late Edwin Friedman. I am again indebted to him for sparking today’s thoughts with his charge to
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Leadership Courage Series # 24 Here’s a final look at the 80/20 Rule and its connection to the culture of cowardice in the North American Church. And, it may be hard to hear. Could it be that a distorted substitute for biblical grace has taken the Church? Consider how little the Church asks of Christians…
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Leadership Courage Series # 23 We’re looking at another characteristic of the culture of cowardice that’s become normative in North American Christianity: the 80/20 Rule is flourishing! As senior pastor, elder, or lay leader, what can you do to Undermine the 80/20 Rule in your congregation? One: Think like a people-developer, not a gatherer of
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Leadership Courage Series # 22 Why is it that 20% of the people in our churches are doing all the giving, all the serving, all the ministry? What if we who lead have actually established the culture that reinforces 80/20? What are we communicating such that the vast majority of church dwellers feel great about
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Why is it that the Christian life is such an adventure? What has your experience been, following hard after God, as best you know? In my life, I repeatedly find myself in dilemmas that are completely beyond my ability. This was far less common before I surrendered my life to Christ. Now, it seems, the
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For the last eleven segments in a Leadership Courage Series that’s now twenty installments in length we’ve been investigating the challenge facing pastors today to stand with courage and clarity in a religious context that, for decades — maybe centuries — has become less and less courageous and clear. In this spiritual vacuum the greater
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Leadership in a Culture of Cowardice (part ten) Where and when did the role of Pastor become so closely associated with the characteristics of terrible leadership: anemic, people-pleasing, comfort-oriented, weakness-honoring, safety-bound, consensus-collecting, approval-seeking, distress-abating caretaking? How did we get from the decisive, principle-inspired boldness of Jesus with the money-changers [Mt 21], Paul and the riot
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Leadership in a Culture of Cowardice (part nine) Examining courageous leadership, a fifth principal is: Don’t “push on the rope”: the unmotivated are invulnerable to insight. Watching ministers lead for more than thirty years, it’s breathtaking how diligently and fruitlessly so many of us labor to lead those who are least-motivated to follow. No wonder
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