kellisorg's posterous

Paying Attention

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:09:42 -0700

This is Monday's blog which is now being written on Thursday because I don't seem to have any words. The one hundred and forty characters of a tweet are beyond my ability at this point. So, let me be intentional about sinking down deeply into God's presence in the quiet of the early morning hours. Let me hold in my heart those I know are hurting, who are standing at the thin places of life's edges, for those who have come before and will come after me.

Even in that prayer, I am self-referenced. As if the me in the middle of that generational prayer was somehow the most important thing. The paradigm shift is to be God-referenced, not self-referenced. Not 'what do I want more of' but 'what does God want more of' and how can I be in alignment with that?

On Monday, I watched about 10 minutes of the new Master Chef series on Fox. I only turned it on because a tweet rolled through my feed from Joe Bastianich, son of Lidia Bastianich. Lidia is a restaurateur, business woman and cook whose cry of 'tutti a tavola a mangiare!' (sorry about the spelling, I don't speak Italian) resounds through public television. Everyone come to the table and eat! I love to cook, I love to eat and someday want to sit down at Lidia's table and eat after watching her for years.

So anyway, it turns out that her son, Joe, a powerful New York restaurateur and vineyard owner is a judge on this reality cooking show. I should have known better when I found out Gordon Ramsey was one of the other judges. The show is all very slick and like so many other reality shows that have proliferated in every media venue I can think of. The very first "contestant" has prepared some kind of curry dish and seemed to know what she was talking about in describing its creation. One by one the judges went to her station to taste. By now, the world knows what to expect from Gordon Ramsey. Scratch him and he exudes the profanity for which he is famous (or infamous). But Joe just takes one bite, never speaks to the woman, mutters something under his breath and then strides (struts?) back up to his place at the elevated judges table. And then he is loud in his condemnation of her posturing as a chef. Then I turned it off.

Here's why.

Sometimes when I am really tired and fed up, I put in the DVD of the original Fawlty Towers with John Cleese. Now in that show, John Cleese is hilariously funny because he says and does all the things we wish we could say and do when we, in our self-righteous, self-referenced-ness, feel like we are no more than a glorified Golden Retriever, doggedly fetching and carrying whatever the rest of the world throws at us. In laughing at the ineffective buffoon of Basil Fawlty, I am really laughing at myself and being reminded not to take myself quite so seriously.

What do we gain from Master Chef, Top Chef, American Idol and the host of other 'entertainment' where one group of people make themselves vulnerable so another smaller and supposedly knowledgeable people can rip most of them to shreds, tread on their dreams with hob-nailed boots and kick them off the island? Is our culture so defined by violence and domination that watching people get hurt is now entertainment? And that's not a rhetorical question.

It's time to say no, to turn it off, to unplug ourselves and our children and our friends from the violence. And it's time and past time to begin working toward a culture that is not based in fear. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear for fear has to do with punishment. Even our institutions that were set up to protect, to guide, to create havens of safety have become based on fear and scarcity and the overwhelming certainty that we have all been abandoned and left to our own devices. Not just the government, it's also true of the church.

We are not alone, we have not been left to our own devices, the progress of man is not all there is. I came that you may have life and have that in abundance. The God who created the universe isn't sitting with God the Son and God the Holy Spirit behind a judges table waiting for you to give it all, sing it all, be all you can be so they can decide whether or not you are going on to Vegas or LA or the heavenly equivalent. God Himself leapt over the table to join us on the stage of our lives, to sing and dance and work and play alongside us and through the miracle of Pentecost and the real-time presence of God the Holy Spirit to live within us and through us so that we too are part of new creation. That means that we don’t have to wait for other people to judge whether or not we are good enough, pretty enough or meet some other criteria.

The moment we turn our steps toward home like the Prodigal Son, God the running Father comes sprinting down the road to meet us, to welcome us home and give us real work to do, work that will last beyond the time and space that seems to limit us today.

It's not about us.

It's about God.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Remembering on Memorial Day

Mon, 30 May 2011 04:01:47 -0700

A few days ago, Sarah asked me about why there was such arguing over Rob Bell's new book Love Wins (about heaven and hell and who's going where). It occurred to me that the stakes are so high on this topic for a few socio-historical reasons that may shed some light.

The generations from the 1860's on have lived in worlds that were necessarily impacted on a daily basis by the horrors of war and injustice, poverty and economic depression. The world wasn't sanitized from violence the way it is now. If we don’t want to see it or think about it, we can turn off the television, only visit the websites that support our point of view and squint our eyes to keep from looking closely when we have to drive through 'that part of town'. But for our great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, there was not the luxury of cocooning themselves from pain and fear and worry. It DID and does matter who is going to heaven because they can't wait to get there to escape this world and its wars and tears and darkness.

We supposedly modern Christians roll our eyes and refuse to sing I'll Fly Away or When We all get to Heaven decrying their escapism and denial of life here on earth right now. And yet, it seems to me that if my farm had been decimated by Civil War soldiers of either army marching through like locusts, if my husband or son was serving mysteriously 'somewhere' in the European or Pacific theaters or deep in the jungles of Vietnam, I too would long for the place where there would be "no more night" and I would care deeply about who I was going to spend that eternity with. (bad grammar, I know but you get my point). This isn't about the worldview that says "What I do on this earth doesn't matter because God's going to burn it up anyway, so I'll strip mine Kentucky down to its socks." It's a worldview that because of "man's inhumanity to man" has no where else to turn, except to God, no direction to look other that up to heaven, no option to consider other that God is, in some inexplicable way, in control. Perhaps we sophisticated, civilized folk could use a little more of that perspective to leaven our smug self-sufficiency and acculturated blindness.

This is an incredibly complex issue about heaven and hell and what happens when we die. It is a hot topic inside the church and outside it. It affects how we live out being the community of Christians and how we appear to and relate to those looking in from another perspective.

The point of this reflection perhaps is about labels. We disparage what we don’t understand and don't have an answer for. Can we, on this Memorial Day when we remember the sacrifices of so many (and their families and friends), set down the labels, try to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and allow our perspectives to be changed, our paradigms to shift? Perhaps in that paradigm shift we may begin to see the world the way God sees it, with eyes of mercy and grace and peace and hope.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Making Clergy by Will Willimon

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:40:57 -0700

This post pretty much sums up my life right now. :) This is from Bishop Willimon of the North Alabama Conference of the UMC.

This month our Board of Ordained Ministry (Rick Owen, chair) moves into high gear in evaluating persons for ministry in our church. I am thrilled with the various improvements that our BOOM has made in the process of prayerfully evaluating, selecting, and authorizing new clergy. Our whole process of calling people to the ordained ministry has been overhauled with careful attention to the task of producing the leaders that our church needs to grow and to give United Methodism a bright future.

She walked off a good job that she dearly loved and, in her early forties, went back to school in an academic field in which she had no previous experience. When she told her husband that she was heading to seminary, he called her crazy and threatened, “This wasn’t part of my contract.” Her teenagers said they would never forgive her for announcing, “I think God wants me to be a United Methodist minister.”

She borrowed fifty thousand dollars to help pay for the education that the church requires, leapt a dozen hurdles including psychological testing and a financial investigation, and endured grueling interviews and papers on United Methodist doctrine, history, and polity for the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry. Not content with her M.Div. degree and her past preparation, the Discipline requires two more years of probation while the Board evaluated her fitness for ministry.

And all of that has brought her tonight, to where she kneels before me in the Service of Ordination. I hold my crosier in one hand and give her a Bible with the other, ominously telling her, “take authority to preach the word.” I ask her to promise loyalty to the United Methodist Church, to defend our doctrine and, more specifically, submissively to go wherever a bishop like me sends a pastor like her. And then I lay hands on her head praying for the gift of the Holy Spirit to enable her to do what she has so brashly promised.

Of all Episcopal duties, the making of new clergy is the most sacred -- and the most daunting. Ordination is counter to just about everything that Americans believe. A vow to subordinate personal ambition, marriage, family, a comfortable income, and even the choice of where to sleep at night to the mission of the Bride of Christ is mind boggling recklessness. The odds are something like one in four that she will make it no more than ten years as a pastor before she burns out, blacks out, or backs out.

And I stand before her, lay hands upon her head, order her to tell people the truth that most of them are assiduously avoiding, pray for the Holy Spirit to zap her, and proclaim that her ministry is God’s idea before it was hers. I am unworthy to be here, as I have been unworthy to nearly everywhere Jesus has put me.
Pray, church, that the Lord will continue to send us laborers for a bountiful harvest!
Will Willimon

Permalink | Leave a comment »

THE TRANSFORMING WORK OF THE SPIRIT

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 06:51:39 -0700

Jesus never brainwashed anyone. To the contrary, He depicted the cost of following Him in the most realistic terms imaginable, "Take up your cross and follow Me." He never imposed Himself on another person but always left room for choice and even rejection. In that same style, any changes God works in a person will come about not as a result of coercion from the outside but by a Spirit working from within, summoning up new life, transforming from the inside, out. The words used to describe God's Spirit -- Comforter, Helper, Counselor -- imply that change may involve a slow, internal process, with many fits and starts.

After considering the various words used of the Holy Spirit, both in Greek and in English, James Houston summarizes them in the simple word "friend." A true friend always has my best interest at heart. Sometimes the Spirit must, like a good friend, use tough love to remind me of what needs to change -- knowing me from the inside out. God can bring to mind shortcomings I would prefer to overlook. Yet when I feel empty, misunderstood, and lonely, the Spirit offers comfort, calming my anxiety and fear. Most of all, the Spirit reminds me of God's love, His very presence a token of the fact that I have been graciously adopted as God's child.

-- Philip Yancey in Reaching for the Invisible God

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Tending the Vineyard

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:20:38 -0800

by Paul E. Hopkins

Jesus’s farewell words to his disciples recorded in the Gospel of John may contain both the most comprehensive and the simplest description of the call to fruitfulness in pastoral leadership. “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16). Out of the agrarian culture in which he lived, Jesus talked quite a lot about bearing good fruit, and the image of fruitfulness is a rich one throughout the New Testament. Fruitfulness emerges from a wonderfully complicated environment. Even a garden that began with orderly planting in straight furrows soon spreads into lush complexity. The roots and vines, leaves and blossoms, offer nourishment and protection that yield—when blessed by tender care and the fortunes of sun and rain and tiny bees—a bountiful harvest. It is a long and venturesome process, this planting and cultivating and waiting, its lineage extending back to creation and its practice sustained by relentless endeavor, patient hope, and complex relationships.

Graceful and growing faith requires careful planting, strong connections, loving care, and nourishment from diverse resources. Likewise, pastoral leadership requires planting and connections and care and resources to “bear fruit that lasts.” This milieu is the vineyard out of which fruitfulness emerges, and the whole church must protect and enrich that precious vineyard, as must individual pastors themselves. Caring for it is a shared responsibility as old as the first garden.

Four key elements are becoming recognized as imperative for the cultivation of enduring pastoral fruitfulness:

Systemic commitment to lifelong learning: Pastors must take the initiative to ensure that they are always refining their understanding of their fundamental purpose. This might mean writing or rewriting a personal mission statement or journaling about their unfolding discernment of God’s call for their lives. They must also examine their own authenticity to make sure they are living out of their true self in ministry and sharing that self with the community of faith. This process could include seeking therapy to identify and integrate the various and sometimes conflicting voices within. Pastors must develop skills through seminars, coaching, and mentoring relationships that can help them respond creatively to the challenges they are facing in ministry. Primary responsibility for a commitment to constant learning rests with the pastor. It is part of the cost of call. The responsibility for lifelong learning does not, however, rest on the pastor’s shoulders alone. This must always be a shared burden with the larger church, and the church in all its manifestations must continue to provide abundant resources for the continuing formation of pastors. Sharing responsibility for cultivating a community of lifelong learning is just one way that the church and its leaders must cooperate to ensure the proclamation and day-to-day enactment of the gospel. This is how ministry is practiced best—with mutual effort and expectant openness to God’s continuing creation.

Intentional connection to communities of shared practice: Families are one kind of “community of shared practice.” Children grow up in families learning core values and beliefs and rituals, and they internalize an understanding that “this is how the Smiths or McCraes or Jaramillos do things.” The influence of those traditions and evolving ideas and practices lasts for life. The church is a similar kind of community, one in which people are called to bear one another’s burdens, to recognize how the varieties of gifts God has bestowed belong to the same body, and to encourage one another in witness and service. At its best, the church might be described as a diverse and growing community of shared practice, whether conceived internationally, denominationally, ecumenically, or congregationally. Fruitful pastoral leaders understand the importance of being part of such communities, and they make sure they have regular continuing access to such groups. The most basic community of shared practice for Christians is, of course, the congregation. When the central relationship between pastor and congregation is working well, there will be reciprocal teaching and learning and encouraging and confronting as all seek to live out God’s call in their lives. But the demands of ministry and the peculiar relationship of pastors with parishes (employee/employer; leader/follower; servant/master?) require that pastors belong to other kinds of communities within which they might openly share ideas, hopes, and fears about the practice of ministry. This emphasis on mutual support for ministry is not an entirely new idea, of course. Religious leaders have sought to encourage and learn from one another ever since the eleven disciples huddled together in those agonizingly uncertain hours after the death of Jesus on the cross. What is new, however, is the increasing data from research attesting to the value of such groups for pastoral leaders and suggesting what works best.

Careful stewardship of the leader’s own self: Pastors rarely misunderstand the mandate to love God and love neighbor, but they too often fail to grasp the full meaning of the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus did not say “instead of yourself.” I suspect this misunderstanding is most often rooted in some misguided attempt to live sacrificially, although I fear it is frequently a works-driven quest for worth or reward that bears witness to a lack of trust in God’s grace. In my counseling practice I’ve seen hundreds of pastors over the years whose depression, physical maladies, spiritual burnout, and troubled family lives reflect their failure to love themselves as they love others. While Jesus’s warning in the Gospel of Matthew about bad trees’ bearing bad fruit was aimed at the dangers of false prophets (Matt. 7:15–20), the logic of his metaphor could surely be extended to the importance of pastors’ caring for themselves so that they might bear good fruit.

Strong roots and active exercise in a growing faith: The word ecologywas coined by zoologist Ernest Haeckel in the nineteenth century, bringing together the Greek word for the “study of” something withoikos, which means “house” or “dwelling place^.” The ecology of Christian ministry is always surrounded by Christ. This is both a theological affirmation and a mandate for practice. Life in ministry must constantly be grounded in the lively practice of faith and confident hope in God’s providence, even through the dark days of discouragement and loneliness that inevitably come for most pastors. Staying connected to the vine of Christ is the most essential task of pastoral leadership and sometimes the most challenging.

Both theologically and pragmatically, though, the formation of pastoral leaders is beyond precise human definition. How pastoral leaders bear fruit that lasts is ultimately a mysterious gift of God. Fruitfulness springs from tender and tangled branches watered and fed and pruned by the vine grower, the Creator who gracefully planted the vine from which the branches derive their capacity to bear fruit—bountiful and enduring.

Adapted from Pursuing Pastoral Excellence: Pathways to Fruitful Leadership by Paul E. Hopkins, copyright © 2011 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

THREE WEAKNESSES

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:16:58 -0800

Modern Christianity is crucially weak at three vital points. The first is its compromised, deficient understanding of revelation. Without Biblical historicity and veracity behind the Word of God, theology can only grow closer to Hinduism. Second, the modern Christian is drastically weak in an unmediated, personal, experiential knowledge of God. Often, what passes for religious experience is a communal emotion felt in church services, in meetings, in singing or contrived fellowship. Few Christians would know God on their own. Third, the modern church is often pathetically feeble in the expression of its focal principle of community. It has become an adult social club, preaching shop, or minister-dominated group. With these weaknesses, modern Christianity cannot hope to understand why people have turned to the East, let alone stand against the trend and offer an alternative.

-- Os Guinness in The Dust of Death

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Great thoughts about leadership and spirituality

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:37:00 -0800

LEADERSHIP DISPOSITIONS AND QUALITIES

To lead a church to blessedness a leader must become grounded spiritually in God's purpose, presence, and power by forming deep dispositions of faith, hope, love, discernment, prayerfulness, humility, and servanthood. Spiritually shallow leaders cannot lead others to spiritual depth, though many try. Still, while it is essential that spiritual leaders form deep dispositions, that is not enough. Many deeply spiritual people, people of prayer and faith, are not very good leaders. They genuinely want to serve God, but they have weak leadership qualities.

Being adept at the deepest forms of prayer and reflection does not necessarily qualify a person to lead others onto God's agenda. Even the most deeply spiritual people can be overcontrolling or too permissive. Becoming a blessed leader requires developing key leadership qualities.

Leadership dispositions
root us in God's purpose, presence, and power -- in a deeply loving relationship with God. Leadership qualities enable us to motivate and move others. Most good leaders have a variety of qualities that make them effective, but the best -- especially the best spiritual leaders -- appear to have seven specific qualities. Such a leader has become trusting, encouraging, compassionate, visionary, able to articulate that vision, sacrificially selfless, and committed to outreach.

Leaders who nurture and develop these qualities usually accomplish a great deal. They enable people to feel safe amid turmoil, crisis, transformation, and change. They give people the confidence to believe they can have an impact. They let people know that they are valued and supported, despite mistakes and failure. They help people to glimpse possibilities beyond what they had been able to grasp on their own. They give people a sense of purpose and meaning. They lead people to become selfless and sacrificing. Finally, they lead people to make reaching out to others the main goal of their lives.

-- N. Graham Standish in Becoming a Blessed Church: Forming a Church of Spiritual Purpose, Presence, and Power, published by the Alban Institute

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

David Bornstein: There is no such thing as sustainability -- only continuous renewal

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 07:55:00 -0800

October 13, 2010 | To paraphrase Bob Dylan, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born, said David Bornstein, a frequent writer on social innovation. There is no such thing as sustainability -- only continuous renewal.

Given the inevitability of change, leaders need to behave like social entrepreneurs, or intrapreneurs, turning everyone in their organizations into creative thinkers bold enough to remake their institutions every day, he said.

Bornstein, whose books have been translated into 20 languages, is the author, with Susan Davis, of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He also wrote “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.” His first book, “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” chronicled the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank and the global emergence of microfinance as an anti-poverty strategy. He received the 2008 Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Bornstein spoke with Faith & Leadership about social entrepreneurship and lessons for institutional leaders. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: In your most recent book, “Social Entrepreneurship,” you talk about building institutions. What is the value of institutions?

There’s this expression: “There’s nothing more powerful in the world than an idea whose time has come.” But that’s not true. There are lots of ideas whose time has come -- and some whose time has come and gone -- because of a lack of institutions to embed them in reality, or the wrong institutions.

Look at the institutions in the Islamic world that promote Wahhabism; look at what happens when you have institutions promoting that brand of Islam that are very powerful and very well-financed. What would the world look like today if the institutions promoting religious pluralism had the same amount of power and reach to challenge those ideas? Institutions make ideas real, whether they’re religious ideas or whether they’re practical, social change ideas.

Q: How do established institutions encourage, support and integrate entrepreneurship?

There are two questions. One is, how do you create institutions that don’t already exist and breathe life into them? The next one is, how do you revitalize institutions that have been around for decades or hundreds of years? Really, the question of how to renew institutions gets to the question of entrepreneurship every bit as much as how to build them at the outset.

There is no such thing as sustainability. There is really only continuous renewal. Bob Dylan said, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” To some degree, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born.

The question that every institution today faces is how do you unleash the change-making power of every single person in the institution? How do you turn everyone into a creative thinker who feels confident to try to advance an idea, someone who believes that it is his job or her job to improve upon things that they see and not just accept the status quo? How does the leadership of the institution communicate, reward people, excite people to see that their job is not merely to fulfill some function but to be a creative actor in the remaking of that institution every single day?

That’s an enormously difficult leadership challenge, one that requires extraordinary communication abilities. You now have essentially said, “Everybody in this institution is a creative actor. Now we have to work together, and what are we going to create together?” We have to be able to build teams.

We need empathy so that we can talk to each other even if we have different opinions about important questions. This is the challenge today in the field of social entrepreneurship, as people are building institutions across society. They’re all facing the same challenge, which is, how do I unleash the creative capacity of every single person in our institution and not just rely on 5 or 10 percent of the people to be the leaders?

Q: Do you have any examples of established institutions that have been successful in this kind of continuous renewal?

If you look at Ashoka, for example, an organization that supports social entrepreneurship around the world, they expect every one of their employees to be an “intrapreneur,” which is an entrepreneur who works inside an institution.

If you look at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, they expect their bank workers to be not just people who administer loans; their job is to help villagers solve their problems.

At companies like Google, a certain percentage of everyone’s time can be devoted to projects of their own choosing. Most of their innovations come from that 20 percent of their time when people can work on whatever they feel like, as long as it is something good for the company. If you look at organizations like City Year or Teach For America or the Acumen Fund, you’ll find the same pattern. They have to be unleashing the creative capacity of everyone in their organization, or they wouldn’t have come so far.

Q: In your new book you describe the process of entrepreneurship as one of leadership more than of creating the best ideas. How is that kind of leadership unleashed and developed?

You have to break these things up into small boxes. From the point of recruitment, right from the outset when they come into an organization, you want to send them signals. You want to choose people who want to be creative actors.

We’re living in a world where people may be coming to a job with conditioning that makes them think, “I don’t want to be a creative actor. I want to know what’s expected of me, and I want to be able to deliver that and go home. It is too much pressure to have to be thinking all the time and to come up with new ideas and be expected to be bold and use my voice.” There’s a lot of old conditioning, which told people they should fit into a certain slot in society and deliver what’s expected of them.

Our test-taking culture -- which tells children that you should memorize this information or understand this and then give it back to the teacher on the test -- reflects that kind of conditioning. You want to make sure that you’re recruiting people, or at least enough people, who want to behave entrepreneurially and would like to be able to express their full range of talents in their work.

The second thing is the way you communicate. It’s very important to let people know through the storytelling culture -- through the speeches, through the newsletters, through whatever the organization rewards or highlights -- that we want people to be trying new things and we don’t penalize people for their experiments that didn’t work. We celebrate them for their effort. The one thing that we do penalize or we don’t pay much attention to is business as usual or people who respond to problems by hoping that things will just get better without some new action taken.

Then thirdly, it’s very important to bring in people in the organization who are very, very well versed and skillful at managing teams. The team is very different from the assembly line.

Q: In your previous book, “How to Change the World,” you discussed the importance of investing in young people. Which of these social entrepreneur organizations does a good job of bringing up another generation of young leaders?

One of the goals is to encourage people to grow up so that they have a sense of agency, which means if they see something is wrong they think, “I can fix it.” They don’t feel that something terrible is going to happen if they take the initiative. They can imagine the world better than it has been. How do you bring up children to have moral imagination and a sense of agency? We’ve been seeing organizations that come into children’s lives at a young age and teach them the skill of empathy.

There’s an organization in Canada called “Roots of Empathy.” They bring an infant into a classroom environment with the mother to show what empathy looks like. They ask young children to imagine the experiences of the baby at many different stages in the baby’s development. This process has been demonstrated through independent research to dramatically improve the children’s empathetic ethics. It’s a powerful change. It makes people more loving and kinder and more understanding.

How do you encourage that throughout childhood? One of the best ways to encourage that kind of behavior is by helping children to play in a more beneficial way. Many school districts in the United States have cut down or eliminated recess from the elementary school day because of disciplinary problems, and also because of pressures to cram in as much math and English practice as possible for the state assessment tests.

Recess games are very complex and meaningful. A game is an agreement. A bunch of kids come together and agree to abide by the same rules. In order to have the experience of playing, they have to subvert their own needs for the needs of the group, which is essentially what citizenship is all about. It’s a voluntary agreement to participate in this collective, even when it’s not in your own personal interest.

Organizations like Playworks go into public schools and help bring back this culture of play, not by telling children to play but by helping them become leaders in organizing successful games. This also allows them to demonstrate their teamwork and their leadership and their empathy -- all of the skills that any institution needs to be great.

1 of 2

1

2

Next page »

via faithandleadership.com

Yes, yes, yes!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

WAITING FOR THE WORD

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 06:35:46 -0800

Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, Are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.

-- Henri Nouwen in Weavings, January 1987, published by The Upper Room, Nashville, TN.   Used with permission.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

PARTNERS WITH GOD

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 07:35:05 -0800

Eventually, you come to understand something really fundamental and important about God: God will always get done what God wants to get done. And so, the key question for us is simply: will we choose to work with God, or against God?…

Lord knows, in our lives, we often want things to work out our way. Lord knows, we sometimes get angry if our team doesn't win, or if our plans are not the one everyone else adopts. And, sometimes, we may even get angry with God, because we have a vision for how we think things are supposed to be.

But, what if we could learn to simply trust instead? What if we could believe that God can use us for some real good in the world? What if we could learn to follow what God wants from us, instead of fighting against God's plans? I think, if we could do all these things, then God could use us to accomplish far more than if we fight against God's plans and always suggest our own. We could be partners with God in the great things God will still do.

But, whether we decide to do things God's way or not, there is good news: sometimes despite us, God will always get done what God wants to get done; and the only real choice is whether we will choose to work for or against God.

-- Copyright Eric Folkerth 2000. All Rights Reserved. (Used with Permission)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

How Smaller Churches Grow

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:06:23 -0800

Hmmm, I am too far away from a Wal-mart??

http://raleighdistrictumc.org/how-smaller-churches-grow/

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:23:31 -0800

"For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." (Romans 14:17 NRSV)

It is sometimes said that even if no rules were laid down for the conduct of its affairs, the Church, being created by Jesus to "further the work of the Kingdom of God," can be judged by the extent to which it is successful in continuing His work. This supposition rests upon a misunderstanding of what is meant by "the Kingdom of God"... The Kingdom itself is not something to be "furthered" or "built" by men's efforts.

It is something which we are invited to recognize as already present, after a manner, in the life and work of Jesus. It is something to be inherited or entered into by those who believe. The task of the Church, in other words, is not to set the stage for a better world than this one but to draw the curtain from it, to reveal something that is already there.

-- Nick Earle in What's Wrong with the Church?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

RESURRECTION FAITH

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:39:27 -0700

God does not cheapen Himself or us by offering us easy answers to the anguished, "Why?" that we who are human cannot help but ask. The mystery of life and death and suffering remains a mystery in all human generations, and it is no less a mystery for us. We don't get a quick fix from our faith.

But we do encounter a God who sits patiently beside us in grief, usually silently, like an orthodox Jew sitting shivah
with his bereaved friend, offering no words to explain away a mystery that is beyond words. God sits with us in our sorrow. In the days and weeks after a loss, as we sit together in the silence, something new begins to creep into our consciousness. The faith that has sustained our whole lives will begin to knot our sorrow over this death together with what we believe about the life to come. Faith and experience will knit together like a broken bone knits together as time passes. We begin to be able to see for ourselves what is already a reality for those who have gone on ahead of us, something the tears of early bereavement make it hard for us to see at first. They begin to appear in our vision of heaven, taking their place in the communion of the saints. We begin to feel their presence, not just their absence. Once again, the resurrection faith to which we cling gently bathes our hearts, and our hearts are healed.

-- Bishop Edmund Lee Browning from "A Year of Days with the Book of Common Prayer"

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Love never ends

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:06:51 -0700

From today's Upper Room (11/2/201
LAST Monday the 31-year-old son of a church colleague died at the end of a six-month battle with cancer. He and his wife have a two-month-old son. What can I say as a pastor at times like this? What could any of us say? Theologian and father Karl Barth offers some help. Standing at the grave of his 20-year-old son, Barth seized on the apostle Paul's words now and then in First Corinthians 13.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

These two words define the boundary between this life and the life to come.
We stood at that painful border Monday morning. The doctors had done their best; cancer had done its worst. There are so many questions we want to ask, don't know how to ask, or are afraid to ask. Paul acknowledges that in this life we don't have all the answers.

Our hope is in the promise of then. On the other side of resurrection, we will see God face to face. Then we will understand fully, even as we have been fully understood by God. Now we see dimly; then we will see face to face. Now we know in part; then we will know fully. In times of grief, three essential qualities link our now with God's then: Faith. Hope. Love. And the greatest - the gift that crosses the boundary between this life and the life to come - is love. May God's love be made real in us for those around us now, as a taste of then.

James A. Harnish (Florida, USA

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

How Smaller Churches Grow

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:31:06 -0700

This post by Jon Strother, Raleigh District Superintendent seems to suggest I need to move closer to Wal-mart.....
How Smaller Churches Grow.
The secret includes goals and Wal-Mart.
Many smaller churches reflect a rural mindset, marked by crisis and hardship. A few show growth and vitality. What makes the difference? A recent survey of 109 growing smaller churches in the middle United States shows 15 common characteristics. The growing churches exhibited a majority of these traits:

The pastor and members were involved in community activities.
They were located in towns of 2,500 people or more.
They were fewer than ten miles from a Wal-Mart.
The population was in transition.
They were pastored by younger pastors.
The church was “very friendly,” not just friendly.
The church was open to new methods.
Evangelism was a number one priority.
The atmosphere of the church was open and safe for newcomers.
The church had multiple children’s ministries.
Mentoring activities were available for newcomers.
A high percentage of members were involved in ministry.
Evangelism was the strongest skill of the pastor.
Guests were welcomed and treated as though they were members.
The church had written plans and goals.
—The McIntosh Church Growth Network newsletter.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

"As any had need" creative stewardship is about spiritual formation

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:06:04 -0700

FROM THE CCBLOGS NETWORK

Oct 14, 2010
by Carol Howard Merritt

A friend of mine realized that she only had one friend who went to church. As someone who cares deeply about the church, she wondered why it was. And so she began to ask them, “Why don’t you go to church?”

The answers startled her. It wasn’t what she was expecting at all. The number one answer that she received was, “I can’t afford it.”

Another young women echoed another sentiment to me recently. She said, “I was like most people in their twenties. Even though I loved church, the budget always seemed to be going to their dilapidated building or mission work that I didn’t care about.”

Another person confided his personal budget to me. “I have my salary. Thirty percent of it goes to taxes. Sixty percent of it goes to paying rent. Ten percent of it goes to paying student loans. I don’t even know how I’m living, much less how I’m going to give to the church.”

Long before the economic crisis hit the stock market and the real estate market, it was creeping into the realities of young adults. Men and women in their twenties and thirties were feeling the crushing load of student loans, high rents, temporary employment, stagnant salaries, quick lay-offs, and uncovered medical expenses. Men and women who did everything “right” in their careers and budgets still found themselves with jobs that were not able to pay off the loans. They ended up juggling bills, figuring out which ones to pay each month, and praying that they never had any medical issues.

Congregations often want to reach younger members because (let’s be honest) churches need them for the bottom line. When men and women are in the midst of a personal financial crisis, and they walk into a church with a bigger financial crisis, it can be difficult for them to keep attending. When we want some shelter from the storm, some hope in the midst of our despair, it is hard to walk into a church and have the stress hit an even higher level, along with the expectation that you will be able to save the situation. Since there is not much cultural expectation for young adults to attend church (in fact, there’s more of an expectation that they will not attend), then it’s easy for them to go grocery shopping instead of walking into another financially stressful environment.

New congregations have responded to this in various ways (I don’t advocate all of these practices. I’m pointing them out, in the hopes of stimulating more ideas.):

•Rethinking the gathering space. Rent is often cheaper than maintenance. A few innovative churches have cut down their expenses dramatically by shedding the need for a building. They can often be found nesting in the basement of a church, a livingroom, a gallery space, a coffeehouse, or a pub.

•Changing the giving traditions. A few gatherings quit passing the plate during the service, and they have “joy boxes” near the door. People can place the money in the box on their way out. Some gatherings have extensive podcast or videocast ministries, so much of their income comes from around the world, as men and women give through the paypal button on the website.

•Encouraging tentmaking pastors and gatherings. Pastors are often encouraged to be bi-vocational. Or, the church itself is bi-vocational. For instance, the gathering might also serve as a coffeehouse, a winery, or an art gallery. If a person cannot give money to the church, they might be able to give their time serving coffee, or their talents in the form of an art donation, or expertise in website design.

•Creating a culture of giving and receiving. New congregations are often small, and they tend to respond to each other’s personal needs. When someone loses his or her job, the community often knows and they give to one another. So they are able to practice something an aspect of stewardship that has been missing in many of our established congregations: the act of receiving.

Of course, these innovative communities haven’t solved our economic concerns. But they are responding with creativity, imagination, and love. In many ways, there is a new economy arising in some churches. Where “stewardship” moves beyond the tiny pre-printed envelopes dropped into a shallow plate at 11:45 on Sunday morning. Instead, we are beginning too see how each can give to each other, in our needs and our abundance.

There are less radical ideas that would help in these situations as well. Having younger members as part of the process to carefully choose the mission projects and articulate them clearly. Making sure that people know that we don’t have a church tax. And, of course, always understanding that our ministry to and with all people, is not so that it can make our income line higher, but so that we can do God’s work.

What else have you seen? What other faithful responses to our economic crisis have you noticed?

Originally posted at Tribal Church, part of the CCblogs network.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Ask the Right Questions

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:47:01 -0700

by Reggie McNeal

Good decision makers make sure they are working on answering the right question. They know that answering the wrong question, even precisely, doesn't accomplish anything; in fact, it keeps leaders and organizations tied up in counterproductive pursuits, with potentially disastrous results.

Pastor Ned finally realized that changing the worship style and moving the worship times at his church were the wrong problems for him to be working on. This realization came only after he had paid a terrible price personally in terms of the conflict generated by his new initiatives. He had endured months of criticism from church members who resisted the changes before they happened as he nurtured the hope that the new worship would draw many new faces into the church, making all the pain worthwhile. Trouble is, it didn't happen. Now, four months into the new schedule and services, he was looking at the same faces - actually, fewer of those faces.

Ned finally came to grips with the real issue: the congregation's lack of mission. The right question involved helping the church gain God's heart for people, especially those who have yet to hear the gospel of God's redemptive love. Absent this conviction, the church members just viewed the worship and schedule changes as a loss for them.

This beleaguered pastor is not alone. All over North America churches and church leaders are busy addressing the wrong questions. Answering them not only won't address the critical issues facing them, it will, in fact, compound the wider church's dilemma and hasten its slide into spiritual obsolescence in the emerging culture.

Given the significant collapse of the influence of the church in American culture, and given the fact that church attendance is holding up only because people are living longer, and given the signs of heightened spiritual awareness accompanied by a loss of affection for religious institutions, and given how God is working in other parts of the world where Pentecost is happening every hour, you might think that North American church leaders would be scrambling to deal with the real issues underlying these realities. Instead, many continue to deal only with presenting problems, fed by short-sighted hopes of making their church successful, and are thus working themselves into mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion in pursuit of answers to the wrong questions.

A list of these wrong questions, juxtaposed with the tough questions that church leaders should be addressing, points out how very different the leader's agenda will be shaped, depending on the question he is addressing.

Wrong question: How do we "do church" better?
Tough question: How do we "be church" better? Or how do we deconvert from "churchianity" (institutional religion) to Christianity (the movement)?

Wrong question: How do we grow this church?
Tough question: How do we serve this community?

Wrong question: How do we develop ministers for the church?
Tough question: How do we develop missionaries to the culture?

Wrong question: How do we develop church members?
Tough question: How do we develop followers of Jesus?

Wrong question: How do we plan for the future we see?
Tough question: How do we prepare for the future God sees?

Wrong question: How do we develop leaders for church work?
Tough question: How do we develop leaders for the Christian movement?

The ability to ask the right question requires that spiritual leaders spend more time thinking beyond the presenting problems, peering under the hood, so to speak, to see the real issues. They must be willing to challenge the status quo and to be ruthless in their analysis of both the situation and the results. Great spiritual leaders are aided in this search by their constant discipline of learning. This is one area where breadth of knowledge becomes indispensable. For instance, a pastor savvy in transition issues understands why people are resistant to change, so he knows to provide emotional support to people, not just arguments to convince them of the necessity for change. A smart leader begins with people's sense of loss, not their recalcitrance.

The requirement that spiritual leaders grasp the right question also pushes them toward God. The prayer life of great spiritual leaders is oftentimes centered on asking God to help them understand what is happening around them. Contrast this to a typical approach to prayer that informs God about what is going on and then asks for his help or intervention. Great spiritual leaders have God's view of a situation. This enables them to partner with him in bringing about the future God desires. This powerful prayer life is not accidental. It requires a commitment and discipline on the part of the leader to listen in prayer, not just talk.

Excerpted from, Practicing Greatness: 7 Disciplines of Extraordinary Spiritual Leaders by Reggie McNeal (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2006). Posted with permission from Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

How to Identify Transformational Leadership

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:22:04 -0700

by ROGER GANZEL

In the years that closed the 20th Century Dr. Allan Sager at Trinity Seminary in Columbus, Ohio was helping that institution become an early leader in identifying transformational leadership that best enables the Holy Spirit to work His transformation in the Church. Seeking to fine-tune what they were discovering, they sought the perspective of some of the key transformational leaders in congregations by inviting them to assess what the seminary had been doing.

Over sixty leaders gathered in Columbus to review a list of one hundred transformational characteristics the seminary had gleaned. There was consensus at that time that each statement in the list contributed something to the leadership definition they were seeking, though not all of them equally so.

Since that event the changing world has moved more than another half-decade. Trends have advanced, fads have begun to fade and technology has moved us in multiple directions at the same time.

While transformational defines what has been happening in perhaps 15-20 percent of the congregations in any denomination, most of the Church persists in determining what happens by a majority or consensus of the members. Most of it ends up being personal interest and desire. Those congregations grow nominally by adding a few members or continue to decline in number. Without proponents even realizing it, Constitutions and Robert's Rules Of Order frustrate and compromise the work of the Spirit.

Where transformation is able to occur, the addition of a few members is replaced by the multiplication of disciples for Christ. What happens is determined by focusing on the mission Christ has given the congregation and the vision the Holy Spirit gives to it.

Compromised focus means is that there is still something every elusive for most about being able to pin down or nail down what transformational leadership is. What is at the heart of a transformational leader? What would be considered necessary or expected of a leader who is identified as transformational?

In the spirit of the work that was done a number of years ago by Trinity Seminary under Dr. Sager’s leadership, what is being offered here are 14 primary current characteristics of transformational leaders, followed by 11 secondary ones. There has been no attempt to list either the 14 or the 11 in any particular order.

PRIMARY CHARACTERISTICS
1. Transformational leaders have a passion for the unchurched.
2. Transformational leadership is more an attitude than it is a leadership style.
3. The mission of transformational leaders is to turn church members into disciples of Jesus, who make other disciples of Jesus … to move from being a caretaker parish to being a mission outpost.
4. Transformational leaders desire more than they can accomplish, insisting that some things have to be believed to be seen. They maintain that vision is the art of seeing things invisible and that vision is ongoing, not something that can be completed in a lifetime.
5. Knowing that DNA defines an organism and is in every cell, transformational leaders are not content until the church’s DNA becomes unambiguously missional.
6. Transformational leaders are about building trust and giving permission.
7. Transformational leaders are self-differentiated. They are not afraid to say, "I am your servant for Jesus’ sake, but you are not my master."
8. Transformational leaders manifest a genuine and persistent compassion for those who don’t know the peace and joy of life with God. Outreach with that embracive goal reflects great diversity.
9. Transformational leaders decentralize decision-making so that those closest to a particular ministry are the ones empowered to make decisions that fit intrinsically into the congregation’s mission and vision.
10. Transformational leaders, like Jesus, spend a lot of time with a core group who are ready and willing to go and make disciples who make disciples.
11. Transformational leaders repeatedly cast vision for work to build a healthy church that almost inevitably becomes a growing church. Approximately 80% of a pastor's time should be spent casting vision as they go about their ministry..
12. A large majority of transformational leaders act as player coaches. They do not pretend to be a coach that sits on the sidelines and sends in the plays and players.
13. Effective transformational leaders align everything and everyone with the vision and the leverage point.
14. Leaders who anticipate the Holy Spirit’s transformation realize that all such growth starts with them. They either become a catalyst for change or grow to be content with the status quo. Upwards to 85% of ELCA parish clergy unfortunately seem to settle for the latter.

SECONDARY CHARACTERISTICS
1. Transformational leaders do not settle for survival goals. Instead they recognize that the key to survival issues in the parish is an ability to foster and build positive, affirming interpersonal relationships.
2. Transformational leaders are committed to proactive ministry that focuses on opportunities rather than responding to problems.
3. Transformational leaders are opportunists who recognize when the “kairos” time has come for select actions.
4. Transformational leaders know that another of the worst obstacles to growth is present satisfaction with the way things are. A complacent church is generally farther from being an agent for transformation than one with a sense of desperation or in an acknowledged crisis.
5. Transformational leaders believe that the fewer people we can have making guidance decisions the better. Congregations governed by consensus don’t grow. In any effective team, but surely in the best leadership teams, a leader among leaders emerges. That person becomes the primary visionary for that team. The pastor becomes the keeper of the vision for the congregation.
6. In every effective, growing missional congregation, the transformational pastor, as chief spiritual leader, has to be the keeper of the vision. She/he bears the deepest responsibility to discern the direction of the Holy Spirit.
7. Transformational leaders sense that starting another worship service targeted to the unchurched may be the most important decision a church can make to grow. Such a service will feature music that is indigenous and easy to sing, visuals, drama, and other engaging communications. Music is clearly the global language in today’s American mission field. To be appreciated today is that the fad of contemporary praise services is starting to fade out. Next to finding the right transformational pastor, finding the right chief musician is the most important staffing decision.
8. Transformational leaders love the Church! Such love may or may not include the denomination.
9. Neither Ordination nor Installation create a transformational leader. The making, calling, and empowering of transformational leadership is the work of the Holy Spirit. One's calling is anchored in their baptism.
10. Transformational leaders know that transformed adults of any age, not youth, are the future of their congregation. Adults who are changed, gifted, called, and equipped will take care of everything else. Trained youth do, of course, help lead the church.
11. Transformational leaders know that congregational insiders are often least likely to discern vision. People on the fringe of church life are typically better able to identify what is needed. Transformational leaders consult with them regularly.

Transformational leaders expect to learn much from other vibrantly healthy, growing congregations, but realize that cloning them is neither an option nor desirable. Often defined as "out-of-the-box," transformational leaders summon the church to move from the existing "establishment church" paradigm back to the original first century "missional church" paradigm. They understand that biblical images of the church in mission are crucial to understanding what Jesus has called the Church to be.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Heaven Breaking Through

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:44:03 -0700

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of the seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world.

-- William Law in Rules for Living a Holy Life,

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

JESUS MUST DISTURB US

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:40:53 -0700

A couple was traveling in Alaska by dogsled. It was 40
º below. He walked with the dog team, while she sat comfortably on the sled. He kept an eye on her and noticed her beginning to doze. Suddenly he took hold of the sled, jarred it violently, shook her off, and drove the dogs on. She woke up and called out. He did not stop. She picked herself up, started running, calling all the while. Half a mile later he stopped the sled. She climbed aboard, visibly annoyed, but she didn't say a word. They arrived home. She could not contain herself any longer: "Why did you do that to me?" "Because," he said, "if you had fallen asleep, you would have frozen to death."

You begin to see why Jesus must disturb us. We have grown content with ourselves, satisfied in our thinking, traditional in our practices. He must shake us loose. And if He is the Lord, the Word made flesh, the Light in the midst of our darkness, He must show us reality behind the appearance of things. Our values are so irrelevant. He must establish totally different standards for us.

--
H.S. Vigeveno in Jesus the Revolutionary

Permalink | Leave a comment  »