Jun 27, 2019 | Perspectives
How would you characterize your own witness efforts? A characterization must be accurate enough to truly name reality, but short enough to be memorable and useable. Getting to a place where you can honestly characterize your own witness efforts should take some time...
Jun 27, 2019 | Church Matters, Inspiration
beep…Beep…BEEP! Your alarm clock goes off. Do you… __groan and go back to sleep? __press the snooze button? __get up ready for action? How does your answer mirror your reaction to what’s happening to the church today? Well, we just got a wake-up call: According to a...
Jun 27, 2019 | Personal Development
1. Be Interested Birds of the same feather flock together. We typically are interested in others who have something to offer us or have something in common with us. To be interested we need to notice the dirt path off the side of the four-lane highway of our lives. We...
Jun 26, 2019 | Church Matters
My mother chuckled as she penned her poem, a parody of “The Church in the Wildwood,” entitled, “The Wild Woods in the Church.” In our small congregation, three separate and unrelated Wood families occupied the pews. While the other two Wood families consisted of only...
Jun 24, 2019 | Perspectives
As a former church staff member, I’ve seen it happen over and over. A growing congregation, fully unified and working toward the same goal, starts to slowly splinter off into pockets of like-minded people. Those pockets live in harmony—for a while. But then, you start...
Jun 14, 2019 | Church Matters
You write that conflict is something to be expected as part of our human experience—that wherever there are human relationships, sooner or later, there is conflict. What makes conflict that happens in a church more complicated than conflict in other contexts? Most...
Jun 13, 2019 | Pastor's Life
June 20th is the first day of summer. I can barely contain my excitement. It may sound like I’m being facetious, but that’s not the case. After enduring a spring that was filled with dogwood, blackberry, and cotton britches winters, I’m ready for some warmer weather....
Jun 12, 2019 | Church Matters, Perspectives
In the story of Chicken Little, an acorn falls on the head of a young chicken, causing him to panic, feeling that the sky itself is falling. Armed with this myth, Chicken Little sets off to systematically convince his friends that the world is ending. Each friend...
Jun 11, 2019 | Pastor's Life, Personal Development
Many years ago when I was in seminary, I was given an assignment to write a research paper on any problem a shepherd (pastor)/staff may face on a regular bases. After several weeks of interviewing multiple shepherds and staff I began to see a pattern emerge that I...
