Category: Church Leadership

Encouragement for leaders

Categories
Church Leadership Journal

Leadership sub-category created

I’ve some key adjustments to my blog that I hope are helpful to my readers.  

1.  Now that I’m a little more familiar with this environment and on the advice of folks at our annual board retreat, I’m opening up new posts and pages for comments.  I have received some feedback by email and I am looking forward to more interaction. 

2. I am adding a new nested category, called church leadership under church notes for posts that are especially relevant to that topic.  

Leadership is an area that I have studied and read after extensively in the last decade.  As a young pastor I did not understand its importance.   Bible college and seminary education was then and is still woefully inadequate in this area. 

But now as a seasoned pastor,  I realize that leadership is central to how a pastor encourages others in ministry (Eph. 4:11,12) and accomplishes more than he or she can accomplish alone.    Through this new category on my blog I hope to help younger pastors and lay leadership avoid my earlier error and find helpful insights.   I will also seek to review some of the best books I have read in my book review pages as well.

Categories
Church Leadership

“Use the health you have” and churches

At High PEAKS this past Thursday, we interacted with a Leadership Summit DVD.  One point the speaker, former football star Mike Singletary, was making was that one of the dangers to maintaining and protecting high impact teams was comparing ourselves with others.   Most often when we do that, he warned us, it leads to complaining and grumbling about what we don’t have.   That is not a productive stance.  As our group discussed this issue, we remembered that the Bible warns us against this pitfall (2 Cor. 10:12; Lu. 18:11). 

Our LBA vice-chairman also invited us to integrate this warning with the inspirational story I had blogged about recently containing that key phrase, “Use the health you have.”    He suggested to us that this piece of advice from a young Mom struggling with health issues would also serve as a tremendous key thought to help us as a church counteract the tendency to compare and complain.    When our internal conversation is something like, “Don’t be thinking about what you don’t have; rather, use well what God has already given you,” we will be far better off.   We will have a more positive focus and we will find work that we can do within our reach.   It will help us use our own gifts rather than envying the gifts of others.  It was an inspired connection.

Sometimes too, we get so focused on trying to fix the problems –there are always problems–that they distract us from using our strengths.  But if our mind maintains emphasis on taking the best advantage of what is working, we will often make more progress.  

What great church leadership advice!   “Use the health you have!”