Tuesday, February 18, 2014
How About Stupid Lists?
Todd Rhoades on "11 Signs you are NOT a good leader." Reasonable point all, but sometimes I tire of lists. It seems to me that to our peril we continue to externalize that which is deeply internal. Leadership is about, more than anything else, character and personality. You can give a nasty selfish person a precise formula for how to act like a good leader and it will never happen. That's because being a good leader, like being a good Christian, is not an act.
As I look at the world today, and especially the church, the problems are all "out there." "We need to change the paradigm." "We need to structure a new organization." "Six Steps to Being God's Man." You know that part of scripture where it talks about the Holy Spirit interceding for us with groans too deep for understanding? We've even externalized that and made it about tongues.
The real thing is hard, hard work. We build a hard shell around ourselves and make it very difficult for genuine change to happen. And yet the church seems to be trying to find ways to accommodate that hard shell rather than finding ways to break it. I like the hard shell analogy here. It emphasizes that sometimes the Holy Spirit is in fact a bull in a china shop - He crashes the party enough to break the shell. We act like everyone is made of eggshells.
God help us with our unbelief!
genuine Christian maturity
As I look at the world today, and especially the church, the problems are all "out there." "We need to change the paradigm." "We need to structure a new organization." "Six Steps to Being God's Man." You know that part of scripture where it talks about the Holy Spirit interceding for us with groans too deep for understanding? We've even externalized that and made it about tongues.
The real thing is hard, hard work. We build a hard shell around ourselves and make it very difficult for genuine change to happen. And yet the church seems to be trying to find ways to accommodate that hard shell rather than finding ways to break it. I like the hard shell analogy here. It emphasizes that sometimes the Holy Spirit is in fact a bull in a china shop - He crashes the party enough to break the shell. We act like everyone is made of eggshells.
God help us with our unbelief!
genuine Christian maturity
