Geri joins me in this podcast as we share four ways to transition from surviving to flourishing during this COVID-19 pandemic. Using the framework of a Rule of Life (an intentional tool to help us remain in the center of God’s love), we share ways to structure our days amidst our involuntary isolation. Looking at the four areas of prayer, rest, relationships and work, we provide examples from our own lives to stimulate your thinking before God so you can create your own Rule of Life: In this podcast, we seek to answer the questions: Prayer – How do we rest in His love, and be still before Him, with all the anxiety around us? How do we pour out our sadness, anger, and fear before the Lord? Rest – How do we intentionally rest from paid and unpaid work each day rather than live in the guilt and anxiety of feeling unproductive? Relationships. Read more.

In this podcast, I apply more fully and specifically last week’s message from the story of Job on the three biblical phases of grief –to us personally and to our leadership. We live in a culture that values control and continued ascent through life. We like things rising, whether that be the stock market, the economy, the growth in our churches, or our conquering of problems. The problem is we are in a season of descent and decline. This pandemic’s disruption of our life plan reveals the illusion we were ever in control. There are three main approaches to the enormity of grief around us and our loss of control. The first, and most common, is to get busy and try to keep the momentum going strong. We may strive to hold things together by embarking quickly on new strategies and plans. The problem is that by pushing the sadness of this season to. Read more.

In this podcast, I share my initial reflections on the difficult season of the coronavirus pandemic that we have just entered. Challenging, hard-to-believe news is coming at a pace that is demanding to absorb for ourselves – let alone the people we lead. Geri and I find ourselves also in a voluntary self-containment with millions of others around the world. What is God saying? How is He coming to us? How do we lead others in such an unprecedented time of crisis? I am not sure. But what I do know is that part of good leadership involves normalizing and helping people grieve biblically. The disorientation in which we find ourselves in will not be going away any time soon. Thus, we must remember, and remind others, that the way we grieve in the new family of Jesus is very different from the world. So, in this podcast, I share with you a very. Read more.

There is no movement of God in and through us unless we listen attentively to the Holy Spirit. This led me to ponder, over the past few weeks, my leadership journey around listening to the Holy Spirit. I spent most of my first seventeen years as a Christ-follower and leader in different expressions of the Pentecostal/charismatic stream of the church that emphasized the Holy Spirit. But a dramatic shift, both theologically and practically, happened as God led me into the journey, we call Emotionally Healthy Discipleship in 1996. With that came surprisingly new roads to listen to the Holy Spirit in fresh, powerful ways. In this podcast, I examine three unique ways emotionally healthy discipleship enables us to tap into the explosive power of listening to the Spirit. I begin by examining the life of Philip in Acts 8 as a model for us of listening to the Spirit, contrasting it with Peter’s posture. Read more.

In last week’s podcast, I explored the issue of caging “tigers” that emerge under our leadership. I defined a “tiger” as someone who invades and damages the overall health of our community due to their own lack of awareness and immaturity. These are among the most difficult, and revealing, moments for us as they test our level of differentiation like few others. In this week’s podcast, I focus on the taming of “tiger” behaviors that happen on every team. This is the work that must be done regularly if we are to create healthy cultures. I begin the podcast by briefly reviewing a theological foundation for this work:  Leadership is reparenting people to live in the new family of Jesus; it is slow and takes lots of time, and we must embody the healthy culture we want to create. I then address the ten top questions that people ask around taming tigers and creating. Read more.

In this podcast, I explore the issue of caging and taming “tigers” who emerge under our leadership. These are among the most difficult, and revealing, moments for us as they test our level of differentiation like few others.  I define a “tiger” as someone who invades and damages the overall health of our community due to their own lack of awareness and immaturity. I frame the podcast from a parable called “The Friendly Forest” out of a book by Edwin H. Friedman called: Friedman’s Fables. Friedman was a well-known ordained rabbi and a practicing family therapist who applied family systems concepts to synagogues and churches. The fable describes a Tiger who is allowed the join a Friendly Forest community of animals but, by his presence and nature, threatens a lamb who eventually feel obligated to leave the community. A number of questions emerge out of this story such as: Why do the other animals. Read more.