Enjoy Your Unique Contribution
As God’s bond servant, your service is unique. Your contribution to the Master’s kingdom and family is uniquely customized to your calling, personality, gifting, and stage of life. In other words, you administer God’s grace through your unique gifting. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace […]
Serve the Master’s Family
The bond servant chose to stay with his master because he loved him. He wanted to express his love continually through his service because service is the full extent of love. When Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, He was “show[ing] them the full extent of his love” (John 13:1 NIV). The servant’s service to the […]
Learned Helplessness and the Need for Community
Martin Seligman’s research in the 1960s on “learned helplessness” is still widely respected among psychologists. Seligman and his team placed a dog in a cage designed to receive electric shocks. When they hit the cage with a jolt of electricity, the dog jumped and yelped as expected. They waited a few minutes and shocked the […]
Why People Are Not Sharing Their Faith
For years, I have heard church leaders bemoan the reality that the majority of Christians never or rarely share their faith with unbelievers. Though declaring the good new of Jesus to others is the responsibility of every Christ-follower, few people in our churches embrace the holy assignment. Why? In his book Contagious, author and professor Jonathan […]
Blueprint for Discipling People with Wisdom
The apostle Paul described his ministry as skillful building in response to and empowered by God’s grace. He said, “According to God’s grace that was given to me, as a skilled master builder I have laid a foundation” (1 Corinthians 3:10). In other words, the apostle Paul did not just “wing it” or “go with […]
Five Resources on Multiplication
Each month, in conjunction with the Creature of the Word book that I wrote with Matt Chandler and Josh Patterson, we list questions and action items for church leadership teams to consider on the Facebook page. We recently listed some of our top resources on multiplication. Here are several that have impacted me: The Master […]
Not Smelling Our Own Stench
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells a fascinating story about the launch of Febreze. The researchers and product development team at Procter & Gamble really believed they had developed a product that consumers longed for—a product that would eliminate, not merely mask, bad smells. During the product development phase, people expressed a deep […]
Three Responses to a Fading Spotlight
In the landscape of ministering to the church, the tide of a leader’s influence often rises and falls. From an eternal perspective, the Lord uses different messengers in different seasons to accomplish His purposes. From a human vantage point, some leaders experience seasons of great influence: people read every word they write, they speak at […]
Dieting and Church Strategy
There are many different diet strategies that work. For example, one person may use the Weight Watcher program—counting calories and increasing fruit and vegetable intake—and see great results. Another person may go the low-carb route, an entirely different approach, and also see great results. The key, of course, is picking a strategy and sticking with […]
Offensive vs. Defensive Discipleship
There is mammoth difference between offensive discipleship and defensive discipleship. And a leader’s approach reveals his theology about the heart of people. Defensive discipleship plays to not lose the hearts of people to the world because defensive discipleship believes the hearts of people are pure. Consequently defensive discipleship focuses primarily on protecting people from influences […]