You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, it’s said. (Actually, I’ve failed to teach our dog any tricks, but that’s a different story) I was mulling this over while preparing a talk once for our Ladies Fellowship, a delightful group of saints, most of whom were in their seventies and many in their eighties.
‘They’re watching’ Not in a creepy sense, I hope, but every Sunday, every meeting, every conversation, you are being watched. Why? Because you are supposed to be a model of being a mature Christian. People learn from you how they are supposed to be Christians. Paul told Titus, ‘Show yourself in all respects to be
I got it wrong again this week. In public, which was a touch embarrassing. .. I was speaking to a group of pastors in training, looking at the priorities of ministry from Acts 6. You know the story – the needy widows were being overlooked in the food pantry, so the apostles arrange for a
Identifying your strengths is a key part of finding a job or moving on in your career at the moment. Knowing your contribution will lead to your personal satisfaction and worth, and to your being productive and energised. Perhaps the most engaging exponent of this view is Marcus Buckingham. A Brit living in the States,
There are several prayers that I regularly pray as a preacher. 1. Lord, show them what you have shown me. Paul told Timothy to ‘Reflect on what I am saying and the Lord will give you insight’ (2 Tim. 2:7) A sermon is always the product of hard reflection, thinking and study, but there’s the
I’m not a big fan of multitasking. I’ve been persuaded, both by the research and my own experience, that working on two things at once makes me less efficient at both. Phone calls while emailing mean we do less well on both fronts, making more errors. So I’ve never really listened to people who have
One of the first, simplest, and best tools for time-management is to distinguish the urgent from the important. But I discovered this week that it has hidden, secret powers. You know how it goes of course: the threat is that the urgent drowns out the important. And so every time management system I’ve seen has
Thom Rainer has been conducting some surveys (here) about how long pastors spend preparing sermons in an average week. They’ve covered a few famous preachers (Piper, Dever, Driscoll, MacArthur etc), and quite a swathe of the rest of us. The findings are fascinating. The big headline is that most of us (70%) spend about 10-12
I was taught at seminary that my role was to do myself out of a job. The great temptation of the pastor is to hoard ministry, and so I must delegate, clear out the desk, equip the rest of the church for ministry, and then my job is done. Move on. There are at least
It was one of the foundational insights of the Reformers – the priesthood of all believers. No more priestly caste, because we confess our sins to “The Reverend One-Another” They even did away with the very word. ‘Presbyter’, or ‘elder’ was preferred, and the anchor point of their work was teaching. But because we are
It’s one of the big theories about the Web. Chris Anderson first outlined it in his book, ‘The Long Tail’, and the marketing guru Seth Godin riffs on it endlessly. And it’s so nearly right it’s important to see that it’s completely wrong. It goes like this: at one time the only way to
You can now order ‘The Message of the Church‘ at 20% discount from IVP-US (the British IVP edition has reached #1 BestSeller on Amazon.co.uk). Just click on the link here. You can order the UK edition from IVP here at a 28% discount. And it becomes even cheaper if you buy several copies to read in your small group
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