Leadership (Carol Stream, IL) articles from September 2010

Leadership (Carol Stream, IL) archives from September 2010

The ambition engine.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
September 22, 2010... When I entered seminary 12 years ago, I was humbled by many of my classmates. While we all suffered through "suicide Greek" (an intense six-week summer course that only a gifted linguist with a penchant for self-flagellation would enjoy), I...

Photshopped diversity?(WHERE FAITH MEETS CULTURE)
September 22, 2010... Communications expert Brad Abare says always mix up gender, generation, and ethnicity: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Regardless of whether or not the church has an ounce of diversity in it, it's important to make sure church promotional photos...

Bible readers: less debt, more giving.(NEWS YOU CAN USE)(Brief article)
September 22, 2010... There's a direct correlation between Bible reading, debt, and generosity. A survey by Leadership's sister publication Your Church shows that of people who read the Bible four to seven times per week, 85% donate 10% or more of their income to...

What do your small groups do?(NEWS YOU CAN USE)(Brief article)
September 22, 2010... Researcher Ed Stetzer advises this ministry and evangelism strategy for all small groups: 1. SERVE LOCALLY through ministries and outreach in your community. 2. PLANT NATIONALLY by supporting new church starts financially and with...

Greening the food desert.(NEWS YOU CAN USE)
September 22, 2010... Resurrection House Baptist Church is in a Southside Chicago neighborhood that has no grocery store, no farmer's market, and no fresh produce. In fact, some 600-thousand people in Chicago, as in many inner cities, find only junk food and soft...

Pizza still works.(NEWS YOU CAN USE)
September 22, 2010... When his youth pastor left to plant a new church, 17-year-old John Mader took responsibility for an annual outreach event that eventually resulted in a three-school dodgeball tournament drawing hundreds of teens and more than 60 commitments to...

The fading of youth ministry.(NEWS YOU CAN USE)
September 22, 2010... Only one in four teens now participates in church youth groups. The numbers are flat over the past decade according to research from the Barna Group, with declines in personal devotional activities among teens. "Talking to God may be losing out...

Matching-making ministry?(COUNTER CULTURE)(Interview)
September 22, 2010... His research on the sexuality, family dynamics, and religious behaviors of youth and young adults in America led Mark Regnerus to become an advocate for early marriage. Associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and...

The glory drive: godly ambitions lead to life, if we don't settle for the counterfeit, self-glory.(interview with Dave Harvey)(Interview)
September 22, 2010... Christians, even pastors, don't know how to talk about ambition. As Dave Harvey puts it, "Check your local bookstore. In contrast to sex, which drives more publishing than any topic in the galaxy, there's practically nothing on ambition....

A calling confirmed: how church planting networks assess and verify whether candidates are, indeed, "called.".
September 22, 2010... In 1999 the National Football League buzzed with the expected arrival of five superb college quarterbacks. All five were drafted in the first round. A few years later, after the hype subsided, three of those quarterbacks had become complete...

Pastoral narcissism: the dark side of ambition, and how community is part of the answer.
September 22, 2010... It was a silly thing to do, but I couldn't stop myself. During a "get to know you" conversation with a few acquaintances and a man from the church I serve, we were talking about interests, passions, and areas of ministry. I tried to keep the...

The distracted thrower: our goal is to point all our efforts in the same direction.
September 22, 2010... After watching Jeff practice the shot put, I observed: "Jeff, you have such great potential, but it is being neutralized by wasted movements. You're lowering your throwing elbow. You're allowing the shot to come out from under your chin. You are...

Game plans: how do we keep ourselves and our teams focused on the right things?(Interview)
September 22, 2010... What kind of ambition does success require? By any measure, Tony Dungy has known success. As a defensive back with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he won his first Super Bowl in 1978. He went on to coach in Tampa Bay, and later Indianapolis where in...

Church growth vs. church seasons: not every church is in the "my, how you've grown" stage, and that's okay.
September 22, 2010... When we first came to Midland Free Church in 1990, about 80-90 people were attending, but shortly thereafter, the church began to grow. Then we exploded with growth. Over the next 15 years, we watched attendance grow to 1,500 on two different...

Love the ones you're with: fantasizing about the congregation you wish you had isn't ambition, but sin.
September 22, 2010... My insomnia was sin. I spent hours a week awake in bed envisioning our church as another church. I even had a new name and logo, Emmaus Road Presbyterian, in the trendy all lower case letters with an ancient, but modern, open Bible and broken...

Interrupted by a gorilla: what happens when a teaching church becomes a calling church.
September 22, 2010... Last summer during our church staff meeting, we were interrupted by a gorilla. This gorilla ran past the glass windows of the conference room, growled at us and got just close enough for us to realize it was not a real gorilla but someone in a...

Take the lead.(books to read)(Brief article)(Recommended readings)
September 22, 2010... Mindfully. The Passionate Intellect Alister McGrath explains the integral role of Christian thinking in safeguarding the Christian vision of reality. By setting the gospel in the great tradition of Christian theological reflection, we have...

Facebook sermon prep.(PREACHING)
September 22, 2010... For years friends pestered me to sign up for Facebook, the social networking website that keeps you up to date with people you know well or not so well. Since I wasn't that interested in the movie preferences of my ninth grade lab partner or in...

What would make you leave?(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)
September 22, 2010... Oprah.com posted an online survey that asked readers, "What would make you leave your spouse or partner?" 6,069 people responded: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 33%..... infidelity 28%..... chronic fighting 24%..... "no longer in love" ...

Satisfied by the Imago Dei.(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)(quotation of M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)(Quotation)
September 22, 2010... Often people have the idea that the image of Christ is something alien to human beings, something strange that God wants to add on to our life, something imposed upon us from outside that doesn't really fit us. In reality, however, the image of...

Recreating the throne room.(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)(Brief article)
September 22, 2010... Just inside the door of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., in an alcove, was an arrangement called "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly." There are 180 pieces in the...

Following God in obscurity.(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)
September 22, 2010... "Mary, I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. I'm going to leave this little town far behind, and I'm going to see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. Then I'm coming...

Whose team are you on?(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)(Brief article)
September 22, 2010... Every year the NFL has the all-star selection. The best players from the league are appointed to their respective division's teams. The players on each team wear the same color jersey. So the NFC has on, say, blue, and the AFC has on white. But...

The danger of self-hatred.(PREACHINGTODAY.COM)(quotation of Rick Bragg)(Quotation)
September 22, 2010... "Once when I was little, I watched one of the birds attack its own reflection in the side mirror of a truck. It hurled its body again and again against that unyielding image, until it pecked a crack in the glass, until the whole mirror was...

Convergence.(DVD Curriculum)(Convergence: Where Faith and Life Meet)(Brief article)(Video recording review)
September 22, 2010... Where Faith and Life Meet (101 Distribution-EMI, 2009) THE FACTS: Basically, best-selling author Donald Miller hosts conversations with notable authors, pastors, and theologians on camera about issues related to putting faith in practice. And...

Ethnic Blends.(Book)(Ethnic Blends: Mixing Diversity into Your Local Church)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2010... Mixing Diversity into Your Local Church, by Mark DeYmaz and Harry Li (Zondervan, 2010) THE FACTS: This is Mark DeYmaz's second book on multi-ethnic ministry. The first, Building a Healthy Multi-ethnic Church (Jossey-Bass, 2007), was an...

Making green disciples.(Books)(Green Like God )(Zealous Love A Practical Guide to Social Justice)(Tending to Eden Environmental Stewardship for God's People)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2010... Amid the flood of resources aimed at making us more eco-friendly, here are a few of particular interest for the local church. Green Like God by Jonathan Merritt (Faith Words, 2010) The book is part memoir of conversion--from apathetic...

Talking honestly about alcohol.(PASTORAL CARE)
September 22, 2010... One of the earliest guides for pastors, the Book of Titus, tells a church leader to address drinking problems in the church, to instruct people "not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine" (Titus 2:3). The need hasn't changed much. The...

Should pastors know what people give?(CHURCH OFFICE)
September 22, 2010... Aquestion on XPastor.org's Google Group asked whether pastors should know who gives what to the church. Is it primarily an issue of privacy, potential partiality, or accountability and pastoral care? According to attorney Frank Sommerville,...

Giving debit its due.(CHURCH OFFICE)
September 22, 2010... Bryce Collman started a business to help churches save money on electronic payment processing. Rather than use the bundled rates many larger processors charge to process payments by credit and debit cards, he offered interchange rates, which can...

Sex offenders coming to a church near you: how churches, ready or not, are ministering to society's most despised.
September 22, 2010... Coastal Church was known to welcome broken people. With about 75 members, this small Boston-area congregation offered Divorce Care and Celebrate Recovery groups. One of the people who started attending was a convicted sex offender who had been...

Your regular checkup: if a "physical" is important, so is a "spiritual.".
September 22, 2010... My doctor's scheduler called several weeks ago and said it was time for my annual physical. "Are you talking a whole-nine-yards physical?" I asked. "Actually, ten yards," she responded. A day or so later my dentist's scheduler called to...

An unspoiled view: following Jesus means learning to see truth behind the appearances.
September 22, 2010... In September 1540, Spanish conquistador Garcia Lopez de Cardenas and a handful of comrades happened upon something no other European had ever seen before: the Grand Canyon. It's difficult to imagine what they must have felt. Lopez didn't keep a...

Big fish & small towns: the surprising benefits of ministry in out-of-the-way places.
September 22, 2010... Some 2, 129 people live in Hayward, Wisconsin. At least that's what the little green sign says coming into town, though it hasn't changed since the 2000 census. Our small Northwoods community isn't on the way to anywhere. It's a destination...

Ministry Crucified, Resurrected.
September 22, 2010... My first ordained ministry was about "transformation." As a new, second career pastor, I was called to revitalize a declining congregation. My means: innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to ministry. I embraced this rescue call and...

The particular call.(COMMENTARY)
September 22, 2010... As a college student, I participated in the American Studies Program in Washington, D.C. A professor said something that changed my life: "God has not just called you to himself through salvation in Christ. He has also called you to a specific...

Motorcycles and world cups.(COMMENTARY)
September 22, 2010... I turned 50 in June. To celebrate, to console myself, I bought a motorcycle, a low-slung cruiser that looks enough like a Harley that, at 100 yards, it's hard to tell the difference. I bought it before I was licensed to ride it, so straightaway...