Simple thoughts on faith, church and discipleship
We are very quick to point out how we don’t want to be jerks for Jesus, but then we just default to being cowards vaguely associated with Christ. Those aren’t our only two options.
I used to find people with lots of money intimidating, but God has been teaching me over time what it looks like to serve them and lead them. These are simple observations, but ones that I have learned through pain and frustration at times. My hope is simply to be a faithful minister where God has me, and these are some of the principles that simple faithfulness requires of me in this context.
When profiteering replaces prophecy as the outcome for the creative mouthpieces of our churches, then we lose our voice in the world.
God meets with people right at the end of their ropes. He stands to meet us right at the end of the runway of our own capabilities and self-assuredness.
This week we reach a beatitude that at first seems to make no sense. It seems to make no sense because it again flies in the face of the common wisdom of that day and the common wisdom of today. But, it also seems self-defeating and borderline contradictory as a statement. In essence, Jesus is going to say that the dissatisfied will be the most satisfied.
“There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian…” – E Peterson.
The Baptism of Jesus shows us what total submission and surrender looks like. The Baptism of Jesus shows us what Jesus will do to secure our righteousness. The Baptism of Jesus shows us what the perfect, loving community of the Trinity is like.
What follows then are ten principles of team leadership that I have learned over the last decade, and as the title suggests, these were learned through the hard lessons of disappointing people and then just trying again. In other words, I failed in these areas, and so learned more through failure than through success, which is how a lot of learning seems to happen. I hope they are helpful.
What we have realized though is that to arrive somewhere is simultaneously to leave somewhere else, and that in order to be immigrants to somewhere you also have to be emigrants from somewhere else. Our desire therefore hasn’t just been to be good arrivers in a new place, but also to be good leavers of our previous place.
