I've begun leading a group of our ministry leads at church in a collaborative effort to improve how we do ministry. Rather than jump into the details of doing ministry, I decided to start with vision alignment. The idea is to help us explore and improve how well our individual ministries fit within the overall mission of our church. Momentum and growth are generated by having each ministry aligned as closely as possible with the main vision and mission of the church. To that end, I've started working with the ministry leads to define what a "win" looks like in their respective areas. Our Mountainview mission statement is similar to many others: to reach unchurched people and turn them into fully devoted followers of Jesus. We understand what it means to be unchurched. But what does a "fully devoted follower of Jesus" look like? What does that mean on the…
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I'm passing along this post from Christopher Witt entited "Words to Avoid." It's a good thought-starter for those of us who speak for a living. ********* Words to Avoid I always love lists of overused, trite, important-sounding words. The list from Lake Superior State University (found here) holds these words (rightly) up to ridicule: Shovel-Ready Transparent/Transparency Czar Tweet App Friend as a verb Teachable moment In these economic times…. Stimulus Toxic assets Too big to fail Bromance Chillaxin’ Obama-prefix or roots My least favorite phrase — it’s been around a long time — is “to make a long story short.” I appreciate the concept, but in my experience people who use the phrase are merely pausing in the middle of a boring recitation to catch their breaths. They then continue making a long story longer. What phrase or word irks, irritates, or rankles you?
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I heard this commercial on the radio for Head and Shoulders: "You don't have to live up to your potential as long as your hair does." What an encouraging message! Slack off, eat more ice cream, get carpal tunnel from playing too many video games. It doesn't matter as long as you have nice hair. For what it's worth, I didn't know my hair had potential.
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You might remember having a car with a power antenna for the radio. As a kid, I thought that was the coolest thing. It was like, "Where did that come from?" Of course, when the antenna was down (or broken off), the quality of the reception went way down. In the same way, prayer raises our spiritual antenna. When we diligently seek God in prayer, our spiritual antenna goes up and we begin seeing things that we didn't see before. In some cases, they may not have been there before. More often, they were there all along but we didn't notice them until we started praying. So, if you want to see and seize more spiritual opportunities for growth and impact ... begin praying. And watch your antenna go up.
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In our last Friday morning men's group, we asked for requests and closed in prayer. The fellow leading the prayer is an engineer and one of the requests was for help in running a half-marathon on Sunday. So he prayed for God's help in running a half-marathon, all "13 miles." And then he corrected himself, "13.1 miles, that is." When we joked about it later, he said, "I wouldn't want to be responsible if he got hurt in the last tenth of a mile."
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