August 22, 2016 0 “Community” is something to be constructed rather than inherited, and that applies to congregations as well.
August 22, 2016 0 Baptist pastor David Hull tells how a right question by the Sunday School Director in his first church helped the pastor appreciate how important it is to count and pay attention to the results of the counting. This church member asked this question:In Jesus’s parable about the lost sheep, how did the shepherd know that one sheep was missing out of 100 sheep?
August 18, 2016 0 The future is not a far-off point: It arrives in daily doses that must be noticed and understood.
August 18, 2016 0 Churches are reluctant to dampen enthusiasm that members have to take on a new ministry or project. However, often well-meaning people with the best of intentions move out to help without doing enough homework. The result can be insensitivity and ineffectiveness in helping those they intend to serve. A question that can help encourage more conversation and investigation, without discouraging those interested in helping, can be:What more will we need to learn to do this well?
August 15, 2016 0 It’s easy to dream too small or miss opportunities. Will Mancini tells about a meeting with church leaders in which a question sparked ideas leading to a new ministry in their community — one that had never come up for conversation before. He asked each person to respond to this question:What do you secretly believe your church would be great at but never told anyone?
August 15, 2016 0 I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages.
August 3, 2016 0 Mike Slaughter, in his book The Christian Wallet: Spending, Giving, and Living with a Conscience, proposes three right questions to ask each time we prepare to spend money:Why am I spending?Whose money is it that I am spending?What are God’s priorities in my spending?
August 3, 2016 0 Without question, the most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized, and most constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity.
August 2, 2016 0 Leadership is legitimated from within the community, and in this time of growing anti-institutionalism the demands for community legitimation, legitimation from below, are increasing.
August 2, 2016 0 Pastors often get compliments on their sermons. One pastor makes it a practice to use one of these right questions when people indicate that a sermon was particularly meaningful for them.What makes you say that? What made it meaningful for you? What about it meant the most to you? Can you tell me more?
