As a Colts fan, it pains me to admit that Tom Brady is one of the best quarterbacks of all time.
The interesting thing about Tom Brady, though, is that everyone almost missed him.
Church Leadership
What If I Told You Power Doesn’t Corrupt?
The phrase is quoted as obvious truth so often that I had never really stepped back to think about it: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It sounds right, partly because we’ve seen so many leaders in positions of authority seemingly change after they came into power.
But does power actually corrupt people? I think a closer examination reveals that it doesn’t. Power doesn’t corrupt. Power reveals and amplifies what was there the whole time. It brings the hidden things of the heart to the surface. Power is a truth serum that exposes our hearts at the deepest levels.
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What Does Grafting Look Like?
This post is the third part of a short series detailing the process grafting our church plant together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne. Check out the previous posts in the series to get the full scoop:
We began this process by simply talking and praying together with another 3DM-influenced church in Fort Wayne, and in the end felt like God was daring us to think outside the box in terms of partnership. As surprising as it was to us, this feels like the next natural step in our original vision, which was to cultivate and multiply communities of discipleship and mission all over the Fort Wayne region (and beyond).
The idea feels like it’s from God, and we’re excited about the big picture, but we also needed a process to help our communities graft well. In horticultural terms, grafting living things together must be done carefully and with great skill if it is to be successful. We felt the same care must be taken in our spiritual/relational grafting situation. After a lot of prayer and conversation with others, this is the grafting process we are implementing:
Both/And: Temple and Oikos
A few weeks ago I was co-leading a workshop for church leaders on discipleship and mission with a friend of mine who leads a larger established church. We have had a lot of fun together leading these kinds of gatherings over the past few months.
During the workshop someone commented that it was rare to see a church planter working with a pastor of a large congregation. It seems that the norm is for larger, more pragmatic churches to be somewhat leery of smaller church plants; they seem ineffective at reaching the lost and perhaps a bit snobby about their smallness. At the same time, the norm for smaller, more theologically-oriented church plants is to be leery of larger churches; they seem to be a mile wide but an inch deep, focused on making consumers instead of disciples.
I have come to believe that this is another false dichotomy that keeps us ineffective and unproductive in the kingdom. We need to adopt a both/and approach to this if we’re going to bear the fruit we’re called to bear.
Centralization Before Decentralization
Why do some missional ventures that look so good “on paper” fail so miserably in real life? Why do some of the best-laid plans for mission end up not actually accomplishing all that much? Because of how I’m wired up, I have a propensity to believe that an efficient system, a simple plan, an elegant strategy should automatically yield good results. But this just isn’t the case sometimes. Why is that?