Whose standards do we seek to hold each other to?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that people are at different points in their journey towards Jesus. Even people I have similar values to will make different decisions to me at times. But I have noticed a tendency for us to be frustrated when people don’t meet the standards we have for ourselves.
I [...]

Taking people on the journey with you.

In a post Co-Ministry and Emerging Leaders, Sam Metcalf writes about taking people along on the journey with you.
It seems so simple. But Clinton’s principle of co-ministry for the development of emerging leadership is profound:
Co-ministry with higher-level leaders is a must. Such a ministry raises the status of an emerging leader toward the status of [...]

Creative Reflection

I had to write a creative reflection for uni about what I would do mission/ministry wise if I knew the world was ending in five years. It’s pretty long, but I thought I’d post it anyway.

What would I do if the world were ending in five years?
I believe that people’s lives are transformed as they [...]

Key character qualities of a post-modern missional leader essay

The last couple of days I’ve been writing an essay on the key character qualities of a post-modern missional leader. It’s not due for a bit over a week but I’ve done my first draft (which is usually also my final draft) so I thought I’d post it and see what people thought. You can [...]

A leader is …

A whole bunch of quotes from the first chapter of LeadershipNext called Redefining Leadership, not surprisingly these quotes are focussed around defining leaders and leadership. I should point out that they are not quotes directly from the author, they are mostly quotes in the book also.
A Christian leader is a person with a God-given capacity [...]

ACOM Missional Leadership Intensive with Stephen Said

The other week I had my first ACOM Intensive. Stephen Said was the facilitator and it was on the subject of Missional Leadership. I’m not a great note taker, in fact I really just wrote down things that interested me or that I was asked to. Anyway here are my notes …
One of the first [...]

Literature Review - Emerging Churches - Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger

I’ve done a literature review on the Gibbs and Bolger book I’ve been reading Emerging Churches for uni. I’ve posted it here if you’re interested. Although I do want to say that I feel like the word limit forced me to say a lot of nothing rather than a whole bunch of something that I [...]

Learnings from the garden 3

The lesson of the lettuce is the third lesson from the garden and it’s title should be ‘Don’t push it too fast or you’ll kill it’.
I raised some lettuce from seed this spring and I was very excited to see it rise up from the dirt and form beautiful little green leaves. These leaves grew [...]

In need of a new boldness

I’ve been feeling the need for a new level of boldness lately. My ‘ministry’ work up until this point has sometimes been challenging but never really risky. The worst thing that could have happened to me was losing face over a crappy sermon or a poor leadership decision. But with this church plant taking shape [...]

Empowering Leadership

The church I work at uses a tool called NCD (Natural Church Development) to help us measure the health of our church. Measuring health in churches is a hard thing to do and if you are a big church this tool seems quite useful. One of the eight quality characteristics that NCD measures is ‘Empowering [...]