Leadership
Leadership Development: From Program to People
By Chris Backert; Ecclesia Director & Organizational Architect The Changing Nature of Leadership Development in Emerging Networks In many established associations, there have been programs put in place for leadership development among both congregations and clergy. As with several of these other practices, leadership development was carried out through the centralized office of the denomination, [...]
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Church Coaching: From Expert to Co-Laborer
By Chris Backert; Ecclesia Director & Organizational Architect Within established church associations, the trans-local leadership has historically been viewed as experts in their particular areas of ministry. Whether it was music, Christian education, or family ministry, those who ended up in denominational (i.e. network) work were staff that had excelled in their area of ministry [...]
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The Death of Leadership: Christ, Co-Leading, and Missional Living
by Geoff Holsclaw / Read Geoff’s blog / Follow Geoff on Twitter In these postmodern times we are used to hearing of the death of the author, the death of the text, and even the death of the book (unless you have a Kindle). Well, today, it is the death of leadership, for Christ our [...]
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As Pastors: Can We Be “down” on Christians?
By Adam Gustine Recently, I have seen a slew of blog posts and twitter updates from pastors, both high and low profile, who have said something like, “I’m down on Christians who ____”, or “I can’t stand Christians who ______.” This isn’t the, oftentimes, intense online dialogue between church leaders who hold differing views. Passionate [...]
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Mid-Sized Communities
by Ben Sternke of Christ Church in Ft. Wayne, IN. Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time looking into church planting practices, approaches, methods, etc. I’ve also been looking at the mission context we’re working in here in Fort Wayne, listening to the Spirit, and learning about how I am wired [...]
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David Fitch on “Flat” Leadership
David Fitch has an excellent post on the topic of “flat” leadership on his personal blog. It’s worth reading as it is sure to stimulate some good thinking about leadership in your context. He writes, “Much has been made about flat leadership in the missional church. Flat leadership of course refers to non-hierarchical forms of [...]
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What Do You REALLY Want?
An interesting thing happened to me on the way to church planting. I got offered a 70k a year job out of the blue. Before we felt drawn (or pushed… pushed probably fits better!) to plant a new community here in Portland, I had been sending out a lot of resumes. I knew it was [...]
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Imperfect Community
In a recent blog post called “The Pleasure of an Imperfect Community” Bob Hyatt hit on something very simple, yet something very important about this thing we call “church.” He writes, “Yeah- we’re going to annoy the crap out of each other. You are going to hear some bad sermons. Someone will say something stupid [...]
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