Simple thoughts on faith, church and discipleship
It has been a terribly confusing week on the internet, well for me personally anyway, and I suspect for a few others judging by the plethora of “what have we learned articles” that I am unnecessarily adding to, and I am once again really wrestling with how and when to engage issues and how and when to leave them well alone.
Every now and then I like to collate some of the stuff that I have found interesting on the web in any given week. These are not endorsements, but rather just a starting point for anyone who perhaps would be seeking some broad weekend reading. Enjoy.
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.
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.
As my wife and I walked back to the parking lot after the movie, we saw people wearing colourful African print dresses, colourful headcovers, colourful African shirts with matching trousers. These were people from every race, age group, and continent. They were buzzing with joy, just hanging around the foyer, their bond stronger because they had been to Wakanda and back.
Turning 39, getting a traffic ticket, listening to Radiohead, reading Esther, and how it all reminds me that I forget the gospel.
In the context of #metoo and #churchtoo, and the horrific things we are learning through that, I am seriously before the Lord asking how we might create churches that are safe spaces for broken and abused women. Churches where we go out of our way - like our Lord - to dignify women's stories, to offer the living and restorative water of the gospel, and to give meaningful purpose in mission to women who previously felt like they had no place.
