Talking to some friends the other day, the subject turned to personality tests, and to Myers-Briggs. ‘What are you?’, we all wanted to know. And the conversation turned into a psychological ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ Those kind of tests do have a useful place, and the MBPTI test in particular
Readers from outside the UK need a quick briefing: at his party’s recent party political conference, the leader of the Opposition, Ed Milliband, gave the traditional keynote speech at the climax. As is his custom, Milliband spoke freely, without visible notes or an autocue, for over an hour. He clearly had prepared, because his notes
Every preacher is a communicator, and every good preacher thinks hard about that part of the work. We think about difficult concepts, and how to make them clear, about whether minor grammatical issues are actually ideas on which a whole argument turns – and so on. We know that
This is a Saturday blog post: on a Saturday if I’m preaching, I’m too preoccupied with tomorrow to write a lot, and every preacher is too preoccupied to read a lot. So, it’s just two words. The two words that swirl round my head as I stare at the material I’m preaching on tomorrow. Two
One of the key aspects for a Christian leader’s character, is self control. Like any element of Christian maturity, no Christian can opt out, but something of the intensity of leadership means it needs to be underlined: ‘An overseer must be… self-controlled’ (1 Tim 3:2) ‘an overseer… must be… self-controlled’ (Titus 1:7-8) Or, put negatively,
