There’s God in the Gaps and then there’s God in the Box. A great cartoon at Exploring Our Matrix.
The Internet Monk has a list of his most bone-headed ministry mistakes. It’s worth a read. Some of them aren’t really mistakes, in my view. For example, #4: 4. Two of my deacons made a big deal about me taking the a.m. service ten minutes too long two weeks in a row, and they humiliated…
This was so good I had to embed it!
I posted on my company’s blog today about writing to communicate, but I didn’t cover one important aspect: Transparency. Transparency isn’t a technique or a policy. It’s an attitude and a moral commitment. It says, “I’m not going to lie about how my life is going. I’m going to let people see what is real.”…
I’ve written several times before about looking for the essentials of the Christian faith, most recently in my discussion of what a successful United Methodist Church would look like. I maintain that it is important to identify what are essentials, and to have a well-selected set that will provide identity for an organization. Of course,…
Tithing Hits Record Low; Churches Spend More to Make Congregants Happy. While I don’t believe tithing is a command binding on Christians, my problem is not that it would demand too much, but rather that it demands too little, does so in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. But that’s another topic. And…
Over the years I’ve heard many discussions of what one should do about people asking for money at streetcorners, or at the exit from the interstate, or wherever they may be found. The vast majority of these discussions were about ethics. Do I have a duty to help such people if I can? If I…