Leadership, Followership, and Mission
Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big personality” so often identified with leadership. He described himself as “leading from the middle,” that is, bringing people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that produced results but not heroes. Talking about this issue brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus. We began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different approaches to…
ContinueThe New Bohemians
Not long ago, Janet and I had a long talk with a twentysomething man I’ll call Zeke, who manages a local coffee house during the days. At night he assumes another identity as a musician in an AltCountry band (a genre that he says fuses country music with an alternative rock vibe to create a new sound). I’ve heard his band in a show (and liked their music) so we started asking Zeke questions about culture, music, and spirituality. The motivation to ask the first question is the difference between mind-blowing learning experiences and just another jolt of caffeine. What we heard described “Bohemia,” a distributed nation with representatives in most major US cities, but with concentrations in places like the Bay area,…
Continue13 Things I Like About the Southern Baptist Convention
Today I spoke at some workshops for the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. Located at North Phoenix Baptist Church, the ACE conference is attended by about 1500 leaders from local churches who come together for a day of training. But in this case, even though I did some teaching, I also did a lot of learning. The conference was my first exposure to the inside of SBC culture. So I asked a lot of questions, made some observations, and generally tried to find out everything I could about these new friends. In light of all the critical things that appear in blogs these days, I want to concentrate this one on the things I like about the Southern Baptists. This is not to…
ContinueLearning Communication from the Transformers
A few nights ago I attended a preview showing of the Transformers movie at the invitation of a group of students from our seminary. Having grown up watching Superman in black and white I was almost totally ignorant of the robot-as-Swiss-Army-knife genre. But the mostly twenty and thirty-something crowd that packed the darkness around me did have this memory. So I started interviewing Ryan and Joel, the two students seated on either side of those clever, drink-holding armrests that locked me into a reclining seat. My initial question was how eight of us had ended up attending a screening that was not advertised. In response, Ryan described how he discovered the preview on Yahoo Movies (which I have never used)…
ContinueThe Call and the Pull
Walking through the process of committing to the Berkeley, church planting project, and then through the approval systems at US Missions and the Northern California-Nevada District, Janet and I have seen two forces at work: the call and the pull. 1. The Call: We never compiled a list of “pro’s” and “con’s” about the Berkeley project. Instead of a cost-benefit ratio, we opened ourselves up to a season of discernment. First, I went to Byron Klaus, President of AGTS and my boss at the time, and told him what we were considering. He counseled, prayed, and pastored us through the entire journey. I also asked David Watson, a trusted friend, and professor at North Central University to pray with me one…
ContinueViral Dis-Marketing
I was delighted to learn recently that my local Borders converted its coffee shop area into a Seattle’s Best, one of my favorite caffeineries. But my first visit was a tragedy. The tall drip (no-room) I ordered was two-third’s fresh and one-third dregs from a container that had only 10 minutes left on its digital timer, lending it the flavor of burning tires. In a conversation with Paul Martinez, our seminary’s director of development, the disturbing feelings generated by such disappoints began to acquire some vocabulary. (Good friends, and good sermons, help us articulate what we’ve been sensing, but may not have ever expressed.) What is really bothering me about the declining quality of my visits to ‘Bucks (and now…
ContinueLandfill Repentance
As Janet and I work through the application process to become church planters we continue to transition our lifestyle, mainly by throwing or giving things away. Our goal is to downsize radically in preparation for spending a lot of time on the road raising support (that’s how our system works) and for moving to Berkeley, where the housing makes Ikea stuff look too big… The process of changing your life in this way is about choices. In our case, the first choice is whether an item has value, and, if so, exactly what kind of value. The junk (like dozens of old CD cases) will head to the landfill. And the good stuff (like some rocking chairs) will end up…
ContinueDoes Information Matter
The flash drive in my pocket holds astronomically more digital data than existed on earth fifty years ago. But part of me is growing increasingly suspicious over whether volume storage like this, apart from functions like backing up or sharing files, really adds value to what I do in ministry. This issue has ripened as I make the transition from seminary professor to church planter and go through the process of giving away all the books I should have borrowed for free from the library but instead bought on Amazon. The pile that remains is smaller than the pile stacked up for our students to scavenge. My growing doubts about the value of information stem from a market reality: As quantity grows,…
ContinueWe Live in a Circus: The Culture of Pre-Adult Women
Janet and I spent two hours recently at a Starbucks (that’s a whole ‘nother blog) interviewing three young women. All were Christians living in the seam between their late teens and their early twenties. While typed and Jan wrote, our new friends answered one question after another fueled by the caffeine and sugar supplied by ‘Bucks. It was heartening to know that Trisha, Debbie, and Lisa (their new code names) recognized that their responses were conditioned by the framework of a Christian experience. They did not regard themselves or their answers as necessarily typical, and that made them all the more credible to us. We opened the interview with some general questions about the culture of young American women, but followed many…
ContinueBenchmarking My Virtual Self
Like a lot of people who got into the Internet later in life, I spent years admiring and using the sites of others while feeling that an net presence of my own was somehow out of reach. My seminary had a faculty page for me, but that’s not quite the same as having your own electronic home. Today, I have this personal site that includes blogs, articles, and podcasts. None of this happened by accident. And I suspect that my net journey reflects developmental phases that a lot of older leaders go through. They look something like this: 1. I need for lots of help from much younger people: With my first primitive Xanga blog set up, my twentysomething friend…
ContinueOff-Road Disciplines
In Off-Road Disciplines, Earl Creps reveals that the on-road practices of prayer and Bible reading should be bolstered by the other kinds of encounters with God that occur unexpectedly—complete with the bumps and bruises that happen when you go “off-road.”
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Earl Creps—a popular speaker and leader—is director of the Doctor of Ministry program and associate professor at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary (AGTS) in Springfield, Missouri. He has been a pastor, ministries consultant, and university professor. Along the way, Creps earned a Ph.D. in communication at Northwestern University and a doctor of ministry degree in leadership at AGTS.
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