As the cliché goes, the best time to prepare for next quarter’s board meeting is the day after you leave this quarter’s board meeting. That’s when the board’s interests are clear and compelling, and you can harness all the seasoned wisdom and savvy anecdotes you just gleaned from a curated team of experts. Which elements […]
Category: church leaders
Seven ways to mentor one another in the local church.
Karl Vaters makes an important point in his book, Small Church Essentials. Many of us learned the basics of our faith in Sunday school or discipleship classes, but it takes mentoring to understand how to put it all into practice. The goal of mentoring is to help us move from knowing to becoming. Here are […]
Patrick O’Brian on the storms of life
The tempests of life don’t always surprise us. Some we’ve faced before, and we often see them coming. When that’s the case, it helps to remember the experience. There’s an episode in Patrick O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea that features four common stages of a storm. Though no two trials are identical, these stages rang true for me. […]
Discipleship: Five Guiding Themes
If you cut me off in traffic, it will irk me — unless I know you’re rushing to the hospital. And, if you live next door, we’ll keep quiet at night so we don’t wake you — unless your apartment is on fire. Then we’ll be shouting and pounding on your door. What we understand […]
Discipleship: Character Qualities
Business books are big business. They help you hone skills, build winning teams, and improve your game. Every title boasts great stories and lots of win-win. Biographies and histories are similar. Learning from others is entertaining, provides context, and yields wisdom. It’s hard to beat having examples to follow. Discipleship books are a hybrid of […]