All of us are called to follow someone’s instructions. Effective leadership is not forging a solo path ahead of others; it’s learning to follow the right instructions from the right leader at the right time. Dysfunctions in Christian leadership were typically dysfunctions in followership long before they became dysfunctions in leadership.Continue reading.
Leadership: Why I Had to Rewrite My Book on Leadership
An earlier version of this post was published on The Gospel Coalition website.
“‘Touch not mine anointed.’ That’s what this book says!” the preacher stormed, flapping his Bible above his head. “There are people in this church right now who are trying to touch God’s anointed—but I won’t let them stretch their hands against me!”
I was fourteen years old, and common sense was in short supply for me at the time. Still, something about the chapel sermon that day in this tiny fundamentalist school didn’t seem right.
Leadership: What’s the Point of Priesthood in the Church Today?
This post on prophet, priest, and king as leadership typology is excerpted from my book The God Who Goes Before You. You can purchase the book here.
Over the past century, several Reformed scholars and church leaders have presented the threefold office of Christ—the munus triplex of prophet, priest, and king—as a typology for church leadership today. According to this way of thinking, priesthood is connected with caregiving and prophecy is primarily about teaching. Continue reading.
Leadership: A Disposition toward Submission
This post on suffering and submission in leadership was written with Michael Wilder and is excerpted from our book The God Who Goes Before You: Pastoral Leadership as Christ-Centered Followership. You can order the book here.
After a meal with his disciples in the upper room, Jesus made his way to a familiar place (John 18:2) on the western face of the Mount of Olives. His intention was to spend time in prayer. Jesus chose to spend his final hours before facing the cross in fellowship with his Father. Jesus was “distressed”—”horrified,” “dismayed,” even “terrified”—as he approached this moment (Mark 14:33). “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,” he said to his disciples. “Remain here, and watch with me” (Matthew 27:38).Continue reading.
Leadership: Prophets, Priests, and Kings in the Church Today?
This post on prophets, priests, and kings as leadership typology is excerpted from my book The God Who Goes Before You. You can purchase the book here.
Does my personality as a leader land me in the category of prophet, priest, or king? And, if it does, what does that mean for my leadership in the church? I first encountered these questions several years ago while assessing potential church planters. Over the years that have followed, I’ve become convinced that these questions are grounded in a fundamentally flawed understanding of leadership and of the biblical categories of prophet, priest, and king.
“I’m not really preparing to do pastoral care,” one potential church planter informed me when I asked him about his approach to counseling, “I’m more a king than a priest, you know. So someone else will need to do the counseling and visiting when I’m a pastor.” Continue reading.
Leadership: The God Who Goes Before You
Today, The God Who Goes Before You is finally available in bookstores! This book on leadership develops a fresh definition of pastoral leadership that is thoroughly grounded in the storyline and canon of Scripture. As the book unfolds, what Michael Wilder and I have developed together is a vision for the leadership of God’s people that focuses not on particular leadership techniques but on the patterns that should characterize a pastor’s pursuit of Christ.
Here’s what a wide-ranging group of pastors and leaders have had to say after reading The God Who Goes Before You:Continue reading.
Leadership: Kingly Leadership in the New Covenant
This post is excerpted from my book The God Who Goes Before You: Pastoral Leadership as Christ-Centered Followership.You can order the book here.
What does kingship in the Old Testament have to do with church leadership today?
Quite a lot, as it turns out—though perhaps not in the way you would assume.Continue reading.
Leadership: Leadership as Followership in the Life of Moses
This post was written with Michael Wilder and is excerpted from our book The God Who Goes Before You. You can order the book here.
Incompetent Leaders, Omnicompetent God
The opening verses of Exodus invite readers into a story that stretches backward through Abraham to the very beginning of time. Moses wrote that “the Israelites were fruitful, increased rapidly, multiplied, and became extremely numerous” (Exodus 1:7). When Moses wrote these words, he was reminding his readers that God never forgot the purposes he had when he created Adam or the promises he made when he called Abraham (compare Genesis 1:28; 9:7; 17:6; 28:3; 35:11; 47:27; 48:4).
Leadership: Shepherd Leadership as God-Centered Followership
This post on shepherd leadership is excerpted from my book The God Who Goes Before You. You can order the book here.
The Failure of Israel’s Shepherds
Have you ever faced a situation where someone did such a poor job on a project that you declared, “I’ll just do it myself”?
That’s not too different from what God did in response to the self-centered shepherd leaders of the nation of Judah in the Old Testament.
“I will demand my flock from them and prevent them from shepherding the flock,” the God of Israel declared. “I will tend my flock” (Ezekiel 34:10, 15). Faced with shepherds who had abused and exploited his flock, God declared that he was handing a heavenly pink slip to the leaders of Judah and taking over as the shepherd of his sheep (see also Zechariah 10:3; 11:4-17; 13:7).
Leadership: Priestly Leadership in the New Covenant
What does priesthood in the Old Testament have to do with church leadership today?
Quite a lot, as it turns out—though perhaps not in the way you would assume!
Priestly leadership isn’t about becoming a priest; it isn’t even about becoming a caregiver or counselor for the people of God.
To understand the implications of Old Testament priesthood for the church today, let‘s first take a look at an overlooked aspect of priesthood in the Old Testament.Continue reading.
Sermon: The Wisdom that Comes from Peace
“Peace be with you.” Christians all around the world repeat these words every week—but what would our lives look like if peace really was woven into every part of our lives? The book of James provides us with a clue: “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace,” James writes, “by those who cultivate peace” (James 3:18).
Seen from the Spirit-inspired perspective of James, peace produces a harvest of righteousness. What becomes clear throughout the rest of the epistle of James is that this harvest of righteousness is closely connected to wisdom—a true and authentic wisdom that comes “from above.”
So how do we live in this peace that produces wisdom? That’s what we explored together in this sermon, preached at the Midtown congregation of Sojourn Community Church, where I serve as one of the pastors.
Church History: When Did Churches Stop Baptizing by Immersion?
As part of my research for the chapter on baptism in a recent book written by the faculty of Southern Seminary, one of the questions that I wanted to answer was, “When did churches leave behind the New Testament practice of immersion?” The answer is, “Far later than you probably think.”
Most of the students I teach seem to assume that the practice of immersion was already long-forgotten by the time of the Reformation—but this assumption doesn’t fit the historical facts. The facts are considerably more complex, but this much is clear: baptism by immersion was far from forgotten in the Western church in the era of the Reformation.
Sermon: The King Who Died with an Open Hand
In 2007, a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman wove a new phrase into the vocabulary of Western culture. This new phrase also happened to be the name of the movie: The Bucket List. A bucket list is a series of experiences that you want to have before you “kick the bucket.” Near the end of the first book of Chronicles, we find the bucket list of Israel’s most revered king, David the son of Jesse—but it’s not the type of bucket list you might expect a king to keep. There was, in fact, only one item on David’s bucket list, and it was this: “It was in my heart to build a resting place for the ark of the covenant of the LORD” (1 Chronicles 28:2).
God, however, refused to allow David to fulfill that one item on his bucket list. Instead of building the temple that he had envisioned, David gave everything he possessed to build a resting place that his eyes would never see. David died with an open hand.
Writing: If You Want to Remember It, Write It By Hand
Words and writing matter.
In the opening chapter of the Scriptures, God speaks, and a cosmos bursts into being (Genesis 1:3). When he constitutes Israel as his people, God speaks and writes, and a covenant is born (Exodus 31:18). John described the incarnation of God in Christ by declaring, “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Continue reading.
Sermon: Learning to Live in Awe
“For this reason,” Paul declared in his letter to the Ephesians, “I fall to my knees before the Father” (3:14). When people fall to their knees in the Bible, we tend to assume that the primary purpose of their prostration is prayer—and that was indeed part of what Paul was expressing here. But that’s not all that Paul seems to have been saying here. Kneeling is, in this text, more than a convenient posture for prayer. This is Paul’s moment of surrender in response to something that had inspired deep awe in his soul.
So what was it in this text that caused Paul to fall to his knees in prayerful awe? It wasn’t a miraculous vision, and it wasn’t a voice from heaven. It was something that may seem quite mundane to many of us. It was something that is experienced today by billions of people around the globe.
Church History: The Centrality of Scripture in the Ministry of Macrina
Two years after the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, Macrina the Younger was born. She—as Coleman Michael Ford has pointed out—
lived between two worlds. One world was the age of Christian persecution by the likes of emperor Diocletian and others. For many Christians in the three centuries before Macrina’s birth, persecution leading to death was an ever-present reality. At best, Christians were merely tolerated. At worst, they were brutally executed. The second world was the emerging Roman empire of Constantine, an empire in which Christianity was officially recognized and privileges towards churches and leaders grew steadily.
Two of her brothers—Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa—became known, along with their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, as “the Great Cappadocians,” due to their contributions to the widespread establishment of an orthodox view of the Trinity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Basil was a man of action, Nazianzus was a great orator, and Nyssa was a deep thinker—but Macrina should be revered and remembered no less than these three Cappadocian fathers.
After her family’s wealth was divided among the children, Macrina convinced her mother to establish a religious community for women on the family’s property in the province of Pontus, on the banks of the River Iris. The family’s slaves were set free and the female former slaves became members of a new religious community, where Macrina worked alongside them as an equal. In the words of her brother Gregory,
Now that all the distractions of the material life had been removed, Macrina persuaded her mother to give up her ordinary life and all showy style of living and the services of domestics to which she had been accustomed before, and bring her point of view down to that of the masses, and to share the life of the maids, treating all her slave girls as if they were sisters and as ones who belonged to the same rank as herself.
Basil established a men’s monastery across the river from Macrina’s community, but Macrina contributed to the spiritual leadership of both communities. On July 19, in the year 379, Macrina died in the religious community that she and her mother had founded.
Church History: The True Story of St. Patrick
This week, in the year AD 461, Patrick of Ireland passed away. Ever since the early seventeenth century, churches have designated March 17 as St. Patrick’s Day. Prohibitions on feasting during the season of Lent were traditionally lifted on this day, and green had been associated with Ireland at least as early as the seventeenth century. The result has been a tradition of kisses and pinches, partying and wearing emerald hues on March 17.Continue reading.
Writing: If You Want to Remember It, Write It By Hand
Words and writing matter.
In the opening chapter of the Scriptures, God speaks, and a cosmos bursts into being (Genesis 1:3). When he constitutes Israel as his people, God speaks and writes, and a covenant is born (Exodus 31:18). John described the incarnation of God in Christ by declaring, “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Continue reading.
Family Ministry: When and Why Did Weekly Children’s Classes Begin in Churches? (Part Three)
This research into the history of age-organized catechetical classes in the church is based on an academic paper that I presented to the practical theology section of the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 16, 2017.
This post is the third in a three-part series.
Click here for Part One in the series.
Click here for Part Two in the series.
“The Church of God Will Never Preserve Itself Without a Catechism”: Confirmation and Catechetical Instruction in the English Reformation
Following the death of King Henry VIII in 1547, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer grew a beard that suggested solidarity with the continental Reformers—but it was not merely in his pogonotrophic proclivities that the Archbishop of Canterbury imitated what was happening on the other side of the English Channel. Cranmer—not unlike Calvin—required catechesis of children in the context of the church.
Family Ministry: When and Why Did Weekly Children’s Classes Begin in Churches? (Part Two)
This research into the history of age-organized ministries in the church is based on an academic paper that I presented to the practical theology section of the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 16, 2017.
This post is the second in a three-part series.
Click here for Part One in the series.
Click here for Part Three in the series.
“At Midday, There Is to Be Catechism”: Weekly Classes for Children in Sixteenth-Century Geneva
John Calvin provided instructions for catechesis in the same section of the ecclesiastical ordinances in which he described the frequency and locations for weekly pastoral proclamations of Scripture. He directed that each Sunday “at midday, there is to be catechism, that is, instruction of little children, in all the three churches.” The individual responsible for this instruction in each congregation was to be the pastor.
These weekly catechetical classes were designed as a distinct and separate gathering for children, and children’s attendance was not optional. Continue reading.
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