From the monthly archives:

June 2009

Accepting Opacity

June 29, 2009 Group Leadership

If you create small group environments to support spiritual formation, one of your top values is transparency. This is the degree to which members allow each other to see who they really are. It’s related to social intimacy (“Into Me See”), but since those x-ray glasses hawked in comic books don’t work as advertised, a [...]

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Remember Me

June 22, 2009 Small Group Life

The guy who passed me the tray seemed nice enough, but I had never seen him before. Our eyes never met. We were concentrating on the hand-off, knowing that a fumble at this point would embarrass both of us and disrupt the 4,998 others who were executing the same play. Concentric rings of tiny plastic [...]

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Scalejacking

June 17, 2009 Ministry Leadership

Seth Godin is thinking small today. He defines Scalejacking as “the quest of marketers for size at all costs.” Right. Marketers… and church leaders. Godin says that the strategy involves reaching out and collecting as many followers as possible, then “filtering out the masses to get a few sales.” Or disciples. And here is where [...]

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First They Came

June 8, 2009 Miscellaneous

It was Good Friday, 1939 when an authoritative knock at the front door startled the pastor’s wife. Frau Jones was home, alone, and anxious. In Berlin, unexpected visitors were never a good sign. She slowly opened the door and recognized the uniform. Gestapo. What did they want from her? She wanted to slam and lock [...]

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The Kobayashi Maru

June 1, 2009 Ministry Leadership

There was nothing they could do. Their ship came under attack as they arrived to rescue the crew of a stricken freighter. They had the resources to fight back, but no matter what they tried, superior enemy forces thwarted their rescue and threatened their survival. In the end, having exhausted their supply of both weapons [...]

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