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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Remaining Centered This Christmas

It is ironic that Christmas is often the time we as pastors find ourselves least centered on Jesus. With the emergence of social media and new technologies, this problem has reached proportions. The following is an adaption of my top 10 lessons for leadership applied to this Advent season. 1. Be yourself. You and I are uniquely crafted by God to lead. That means we cannot do what others can. You may be able to do more or less. The great challenge of leadership is to calmly differentiate your “true self” from the demands and voices around you. Discern the desires, vision, pace, and mission the Father has given as you lead. Take off Saul’s armor. How much activity can you sustain without losing your soul? And remember, “to live unfaithfully to yourself is to cause others great damage” (Rumi). 2. Your first work is to be contemplative before God (to be with him). Our. Read more.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Pastor/Leader Life Cycle

   I just completed an Updated/Expanded version of The Emotionally Healthy Church that is to be released in February, 2010. So this led me to quite a bit of reflection on what is the process for pastors and leaders to engage EHS, especially now that 30+ churches (as of last spring) have finished the Church-wide initiative.  1.     Begin the Journey   The most important thing we can do is to engage the message in our own lives, and to apply personally the powerful biblical themes explored in this book. Begin reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Nelson, 2006) and/or The Emotionally Healthy Church (Zondervan, 2003 and 2010).  Remember, we lead out of who we are.     2.     Introduce to Leadership (EHS in Small Group)         Gather a small group of your key leaders around The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Workbook (Willow Creek Publishing, 2009) and begin providing an experience for your leaders to “go beneath the tip-of-the-iceberg” in. Read more.

Reflections on Singapore Leadership Conference, July 2009

Geri and I have just begun our yearly, summer “sabbatical” rest (our old term was “vacation”). We are in Thailand, beginning to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. Yet we wanted to take a few moments and share with you several highlights from our time in Singapore at the Eagles Leadership Conference where we spent the last 6 days. 1375 delegates (pastors and leaders) from 19 countries attended this very well-run, powerful conference. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand were the top four countries represented. Geri and I did a plenary session around our story and the main insights of EHS. This was followed by a full day workshop for around 200 leaders, and then 2 shorter workshops around “The Leader’s Spouse (by Geri) and Insights of Monasticism for the 21st Century (me) on the final day.  We were very well-received and felt greatly honored. We also learned quite a bit. The following are a few. Read more.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Conference Online

We are now in the midst of our Pastors/Leaders Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Conference at New Life Fellowship in Queens, NY.  Geri, myself, and the rest of our staff had a wonderful time with Pastors/Leaders and their spouses yesterday at our pre-conference.  We are looking forward to the next couple of days in journeying together toward healthy God-centered lives and marriages. I have asked Drew Hyun, one of our associate pastors who also serves on our Teaching Team, to connect you with the blogging/twittering that is going on at the conference.  If you’d like to follow real-time updates on our conference (as well as updates from the pre-conference yesterday), you can click below at the following link: www.twubs.com/ehsconf For those of you on twitter who would like to join the discussion, you can use the hashtag “#ehsconf” and include it in any tweet that you post. Meanwhile, there is a list of blogs found at. Read more.

Slow Down to Lead with Integrity Part 1

As I was reading Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What, by Peter Steinke (an excellent read), I began to wonder.  Are we being honest about the depth nor extent of the fundamental illness afflicting our leadership of the church in the 21st century?  Maybe better said, am I being honest with myself? As we work with denominations and pastors, many of whom are now doing the church-wide initiative in emotionally healthy spirituality, it is becoming increasingly clear that the call to slow down our lives so we have integrity, is much more comprehensive and far-reaching than we initially realized.  Our faulty training and models for church leadership have so negatively shaped us that, to sustain long-term change, we need an enormous inward passion from within and external support for a new direction. Steinke cites an illustration out of the medical field.  For thousands of years, women were dying of fever at childbirth. This. Read more.

Lakeland and Todd Bentley

One of our staff asked me recently my view on what is happening and if I had seen the meetings on YouTube. I have not and do not know too much about it. But I do believe and affirm Paul’s  counsel to the Philippians: “It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so in love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.  The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. But what does it matter? The important thing is that in very way, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice” (Phil.1:15-18). I have had the privilege to participate in many of the streams of God in His mighty river called the church – from the Reformed tradition of my seminary (Gordon-Conwell) to the. Read more.