The Ten Commandments of Steve
The news of Steve Job’s death was a huge shock - for our generation he had become an icon of creativity, vision and leadership. The Daily Beast has 10 core ideas that sum how Steve Jobs led Apple into a new age of creativity:
- Go for perfect
- Tap the experts
- Be ruthless
- Shun focus groups
- Never stop studying
- Simplify
- Keep your secrets
- Keep teams small
- Use more carrot than stick
- Prototype to the extreme
What can church leaders learn from Steve Job’s leadership style?
An evangelical is someone who is transformed by the person and work of Jesus Christ, finds the Bible to be authoritative for life and doctrine and practice, and actively works to make the world better.
Kurt Fredrickson - Fuller Theological Seminary
Fredrickson’s is a definition of ‘evangelical’ that I can get excited about.
Check his post out about why the term evangelical has been hijacked by a group of judgemental people with their own agendas, and why we need to recover a much richer understanding of what it means.
5 ideas to make your talk stand out
Every day, the people we lead are bombarded by thousands of advertising messages, videos, images and news items from different sources all competing for their attention. This makes the art of communicating with an audience or congregation that much more difficult and that much more exciting, as we need to find new ways to engage with people.
Here’s five ideas I’ve pulled together over the last few years for delivering a sermon, talk or presentation that people really engage with.
Be careful who you put on a pedestal, because they just might fall off. Also, be careful of placing yourself up there - especially if you’re scared of heights.
Everybody falls eventually. Well, almost everyone.
5 reasons to practice silent contemplation and how to get started
Practicing silent contemplation is something a lot of Christ-followers would associate with old, worn-out, traditional Christianity. I’ve found it to be a hugely significant part of my spiritual life - here’s why I think you should give it a go and how you can get started.
It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought - and is seeking - to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.
20 points on leading young adults
Brad Lomenick has this great list of pointers for people working through the challenge of leading young adults (or Millenials - the generation who came of age around the millennium).
Why faith-based youth work offers a solution to the London Riots
Youthwork Magazine editor, Martin Saunders, wrote this piece in the Guardian looking at the London Riots from the perspective of a Christian youth worker:
Faith-based youth work has something special, something inherently different to offer them, because it offers something distinctive: transformation. And we in the faith community must not be ashamed of where that transformation comes from: an engagement with young people’s yearning sense of spirituality – something which promises rewards even greater than financial gain.
Sheldon Thomas from Target Against Gangs and former gang member Gavin McKenna talking about the deeper issues surrounding the recent riots in London and around the country.
First broadcast on 10 Aug 2011 on the Sky News Channel.
Jesus refers to himself as the ‘good’ shepherd. But our word ‘good’ doesn’t really catch the full meaning of the word John has written here… The word John uses can also mean ‘beautiful’. This doesn’t refer to what Jesus looked like. It’s about the sheer attractiveness of what, as the shepherd, he was doing. When he calls, people want to come. When they realize he has died for them, they want to even more. The point of calling Jesus ‘the good shepherd’ is to emphasise the strange, compelling power of his love.
