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Hired Staff Won’t Solve Church Problems

Yesterday I posted one of my short stories over on my Jevlir blog. For those who don’t read that blog (its readership is quite low), I wanted to write a couple of notes here. Many churches think they’ll find the solution to the problem of declining membership or financial problems by hiring just the right…

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Dashboards, Discernment, and Responsible Leadership

Yes, that’s a big collection of topics, but I think they’re connected. John Meunier links to an excellent post by Dan Dick, which you should read before you read this one. The topic here is the conference dashboards in United Methodist annual conferences, such as this one for the North Alabama Conference. I do have…

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Seeking Sinless Perfection

Image via Wikipedia Because I have some online watches for names of Energion Publications authors, I found the post In Search of Sinless Perfection, which quotes Alden Thompson. This comes from a Seventh-day Adventist background, but I must mention that I have been surprised by how much from my own SDA background simply translates into…

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Christian Perfection – Not So Plain to Me!

One of my early experiences teaching in a United Methodist Church involved giving a series on the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection. That may seem surprising for a new member of a United Methodist congregation, but my background in the Seventh-day Adventist Church involved a good deal of Wesleyan talk (though not the doctrine of…