The “Perfect Approach” Myth Will Keep You Stuck
I am an analytical person. I like to tear things apart and put them back together and see what’s going on. This means I analyze things to death and can sometimes get stuck in the analysis. We will never come up with anything even approximating the perfect approach without actually implementing something. Most of what […]
Seeing What You Can’t Yet See to Do What You Can’t Yet Do
I love disc golf. I used to play it every week. Life has gotten busy and now I am down to a few times a year but the sport is one of my favorite things to do. Years back when I was younger and more nimble, I could throw the disc a pretty good distance […]
How Healthy Are Ministers? I Ran the Numbers.
As a minister it is important to me to understand the potential ramifications of how ministry affects my health and the health of my family. I ran the numbers on this in 2017 and want to share a few significant findings with you here. I assessed health in multiple areas and then ran correlations and […]
Hope Network and the Power of the Interim Season
You may or may not know that my blog is a part of Wineskins and our network of Christian authors. Each month we run ads in order to help us keep things up and running and improve the quality of our content and production. This month we are running an ad from Hope Network. We […]
Anxiety is Far Too Common in Ministry. Here is Why and What Can be Done About it
Over half of ministers report suffering from significant anxiety as a result of their ministry. Churches are anxious places. They are anxious places because we are supposed to get everything right and to do something not how it is always done or said creates uncomfortable questions and anxiety that is then, often, transferred to leadership […]
We are Approaching a Critical Moment in Churches of Christ
There is a confluence of factors steamrolling toward us that I think we are largely asleep to in Churches of Christ. What happens next is anyone’s guess but I think we can plan and adjust in a way that makes sense. What are those factors and what kind of change is it leading toward? Upcoming […]
What Keeps You Going?
My answer to this question has been developing and changing my whole life. When I was a kid, the excitement of learning kept me going. I was and still am to a large degree inquisitive. There was always more to learn and that drove me to seek out answers to all kinds of questions. In […]
The ISTJ Minister – Assessing How Our Personality Affects Our Ministry
I love the Myers-Briggs type inventory. It seems like the Enneagram is all the rage these days but I still haven’t moved on from the good ole trusty MBTI. This is partly because of the insights it brings out and it is also due to the fact that it was developed at one of my […]
“Those Were the Days” – What Does the Future Hold for Churches of Christ?
Nostalgia is the first step in church life toward congregational death. “Nostalgia is an exile mentality. Fulfillment is contingent on the ‘once upon a time’ remembrances of yesterday. ‘I remember when’ stories become commonplace in organizations during nostalgic days. The golden days are remembered fondly. From an organizational perspective, nostalgia signals the beginning of a […]
Do What You Can…Some is Better Than None
So many things go undone because we don’t do what we can. When we think we can’t or just don’t want to take the whole thing on by ourselves we freeze up and don’t do the little bit we actually can do. A bunch of little “tries” add up to a much greater sum than […]