• Please Stop Leading All the Time

    It's time to add a new word to our conversations about leadership: stop.

    While books, conferences, training, and other materials provide an (overwhelming) abundance of guidance for leaders who seek to grow, accomplish, and strategize, a search for references on how and when to turn leadership off will produce few results—with the exception, of course, of the need to take periodic extended breaks to avoid burnout.

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  • A Great Children's Ministry Leadership Failure

    Last week, I spent several hours with a group of children's ministry leaders that represent a church denomination. We discussed a spectrum of topics, we brainstormed without barriers, we freely debated issues—because we drank coffee and enjoyed a good lunch; key ingredients for any productive meeting.

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  • A Community of Leaders

    Often our vision of leadership is that of a single drum major leading the parade. What if we turned this on it head, and saw leadership as a function of a community that develops people and creates a context where leadership can occur?

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  • After the Vision Statement, What Next?

    When I came to my church in 1991, it was celebrating its fortieth anniversary with the theme "A Vision Revisited, A Vision Renewed."

    During a Concert of Prayer, we had people contribute their vision ideas, and as leaders we compiled them into five "vision points":

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  • Shaping Holy Disciples

    When we talk about church discipline historically, we talk about formative church discipline and corrective church discipline. Formative discipline is all the teaching we do—the positive statements, the modeling, the instruction and sermons and Bible studies and books that we pass out.

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