Yesterday was one of those bizarre experiences when the micro and macro aspects of my life converged for a moment. I’m sitting at the DMV (department of motor vehicles) with my tag, “B003,” waiting for my turn, which might never come (despite the fact that I got there 20 minutes before it opened) because the computers were [...]
Continue reading about The “I have NO IDEA” Moment: Context 3
Two blogs ago I began a series looking at context, claiming that the CHURCH universal has always had local expressions, in which the eternal truths of the gospel have been interpreted and made known in culturally relevant forms within many different particular contexts.
I’d like to expand on this thought theologically. Just as God was incarnated [...]
This week finds me in Washington DC, first sweltering in 95 degree heat, and now freezing in driving rain and wind. You may be asking what a weather-challenged Californian is doing on the other side of the country enduring weather whiplash?
I’m working with a creative, caffeine-hyped group of Presbyterian leaders fascinated with the idea of [...]
Leadership takes the pithy and memorable purpose/mission statement and keeps it before the people such that it can propel impactful efforts over a sustained period of time (and therefore doesn’t become the statement filed away in a drawer and forgotten). Good implementation of a purpose statement over time depends on good generation of the purpose [...]
Continue reading about Vision Part III: Living the Shared Main Melody
One of the reasons churches experience futility around creating a vision statement is the challenge of leadership. One of the five leadership practices that emerged from the research of Kouzes and Posner is that leaders inspire a shared vision. Leaders’ “clear image of the future pulls them forward. Yet visions seen only by leaders are [...]
Many churches find the exercise of creating a vision statement to be an exasperating endeavor. Failed experiments abound, choking creativity. “What if this becomes a statement that gets filed away and forgotten?” “What if we just produce a run-on sentence with participial phrases up the ying-yang that becomes a mish-mosh representing nothing helpful or real?”
As I [...]
As many of you know, I traveled two weeks ago to Louisville, KY for a “Transformational Summit” in my “tribe” of PC (USA). Below is an interview I did that week with Philip Lotspeich, who convened this summit. Philip is the Director of Church Growth for our denomination. You can see the website he started at [...]
That one of the questions I’ve been wrestling with this week, along with a group of others-who are described as a “think tank” assembled in the snowy heartland of my tribe, Presbyterian Church USA in Louisville, KY. With the esteemed George Bullard to moderate, we sought to come up with answers to two questions:
What is [...]
Continue reading about What is Congregational Transformation?