Tag Archives: ministry

My Top Ten Lessons of Leadership

If you ask 10 different leaders what they had learned over a long period of time, you will receive 10 different lists. It is determined by your unique journey and your strengths and weaknesses. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of what a leader needs to learn. Rather it is what I wish a mentor had helped me understand from the beginning. I wish some kind mentor might have said the following words to me: 1. Be Yourself Pete, calmly differentiate your “true self” from the demands and voices around you. Discern the desires, vision, pace, and mission the Father has give you as you lead. Take off Saul’s armor. Be clear about yourself. Learn to control your reactivity. And remember, “to live unfaithfully to yourself is to cause others great damage.” Rumi 2. Your First Work is to be a Contemplative before God. (i.e. to be with Him) You are not. 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.

Silence and Accountable Leadership

I am in the midst of two books that reflect the challenge of integration of “Emotionally Healthy Contemplative Leadership” — Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, by Abbot Christopher Jamison and Winning on Purpose: How to Organize Congregations to Succeed in Their Mission, by John Edmund Kaiser. They draw on very different parts of our spirituality as leaders and can seem opposed to one another. I believe, however, that we must find the kind of leadership found among many of the early church fathers (Origen , Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Ambrose -to name a few). Many of them were bishops, leaders, monks and theologians with a profound love for God. Finding Sanctuary is filled with practical insights. Perhaps the most significant for me is his section on silence. Reflecting on his own life, he notes how “before I could offer sanctuary, I had to find it.” He notes that exterior silence. 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.

Marriage, Singleness and Spirituality

This weekend Geri and I are leading a retreat for 16 couples in NJ. It is the fruit of over 12 years of thinking about a theology of sexuality, marriage and spirituality. We limited the retreat purposefully and spent an inordinate amount of time creating a one and a half day experience in Scripture, small groups, time alone with God and emotionally healthy skills. It will be the first of 2 parts that we hope to make more permanent a part of NLF culture for all marrieds. It was a challenge for me to clear my life the last two weeks in preparation. I find myself easily pulled into larger, more “grandiose ministry”. God used her groundedness and this weekend to pull me down to earth (humus-humility) about what is really important. That is integrity in our spiritual lives and vocations — whether we are single or married. Paul makes clear that if we are skimming on. Read more.

Teresa of Avila's Seven Mansions – Prayer

This past summer I got to know Tom Ashbrook, one of the founders of an evangelical monastic order called Imago Christi, a ministry of spiritual formation within Church Resource Ministries http://www.imagochristi.org/default.aspx. He later gave me a copy of his doctoral dissertation on Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle and I was deeply impacted. I reread the Interior Castle as a result and found his work immensely helpful in my own prayer journey as well as our work in helping others to pray. Most evangelicals, he argues (rightly in my opinion), do not get beyond the 3rd mansion to the 4th and beyond. There are seven mansions. He writes: “As the believer enters the 4th Mansion, there develops a divinely bestowed absorption in knowing, loving, and seeking God. God has now enflamed the heart. The motivates are driven by love rather than by obligation, personal gain, blessing others, or even doing the right thing The beloved has heard the. Read more.

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