Here are some ideas that have gotten planted inside me this past summer. Spring is coming...
Some of us feel curiously charged by the volatile conditions...rough patches force new sources of courage and character. The best thing you can bring to a crisis is a filled up you: refreshed, Spirit-filled, God-connected.
The kindest form of management is the truth.
All too often our churches are not magnetic, catalytic or embracing. They could be vibrant, resilient, and adaptive.
The world is changing exponentially fast, the world is becoming more turbulent faster than churches are becoming more resilient.
Entropy applies to everything. The future is not unknowable; it is unpalatable. Humility is not just a virtue, it is about survival. Be as unconventional as God needs us to be.
Leadership is a journey, take your own path, own way, own time. Not every reader is a leader, but every leader is a reader. Leadership can be lonely. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. Who the communicator is matters as much as what is said.
In the midst of change, focus on the bright spots! Look for what is working. Shrink the change. With big problems, look for small solutions. In tough times people are skittish and lazy.
A sermon is provocation, loaded language, warning. It is sub-version: there is another story. It is a reminder: the way things are is NOT how God had in mind. A sermon opens you up to new possibilities. It can be misinterpreted, yet revolutionary.
A sermon, then, is the continuing insistence that through the resurrection of Jesus a whole new world is bursting forth and everybody everywhere can be part of it.
A sermon, then, is about helping people see this creation with their own eyes of what God is doing.
A sermon, then, brings hope rooted not in escape but engagement, not in evacuation but in reclamation, not in leaving but in staying and overcoming.
A sermon, then, is never surprised when grace, beauty, meaning, order, compassion, truth and love show up in all sorts of unexpected people and places because it always has been God's world, it is God's world, and it will always be God's world.
A revolution seeks to change the whole structure; an insurrection lives that change now until the revolution is complete. We need substantial change, not just intellectual. Mother Teresa was violent - her compassion wrecked the Hindu caste system of India.
Images create a shared experience, but words unleash the imagination.
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