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You Can’t Do Discipleship in an Hour

A few years ago, a Christian publisher strongly recommended we reduce EHS discipleship into four, one-hour sessions because that was all that most American Christians can handle. “Let’s keep it simple,” many pastors and leaders argue. “If your people attend weekend services, participate in a small group and serve, that is all you can expect.” People are not experiencing deep transformation in our churches. Large numbers of people live off other people’s spirituality (e.g. worship teams, sermons, Christian radio and podcasts) and do not intentionally cultivate their own personal relationship with Jesus. We now have tens of thousands of believers in Jesus who are not necessarily disciples. And we continue to work day and night to add to this number. This raises a number of questions: Can a person be a Christian without being a disciple who makes daily, intentional choices to follow Jesus and remain/abide with Him? Can a nominal Christian who has. Read more.

Sacred Space in a Divided World

The anger and fears unleashed after the USA Presidential election last week took a lot of us by surprise – especially as it now bleeds into the church. I speak daily to my 21-year-old daughter, a college senior, protesting Trump’s win on the streets of Manhattan, as well as to my older brother, a professor in the Midwest, boasting about the end of the Democratic Party’s arrogance and elitism. How are we to respond? I am not fully sure, but I am sure of one thing: Loving well is the essence of true spirituality, requiring that we practice the presence of people within an awareness of His presence. But learning this is no small task. Martin Buber, however, a Jewish German theologian, can serve us here. In the early years of his life, the “religious” for Buber was the mystical experiences that lifted him out of the so-called earthly, ordinary experiences of life. Buber. Read more.

Transitions & The Art of Letting Go — EHS Leadership Podcast

Transitions and letting go are critical leadership tasks every leader must master if we are to do God’s work, God’s way, in God’s timing. If we don’t discern the endings God has for us, we will surely miss his new beginnings—both personally and in our ministries. In this podcast Rich and I will talk about the 2 questions I consistently ask myself: What is it time to let go of in my personal life and leadership? And, what new thing might be standing backstage, waiting to make its entrance? Then, we engage in a robust discussion around the interior blockages we carry that hinder us from letting go (e.g. fear, loss of control, power, unbelief). Click on the video below to watch or click on the button to listen. LISTEN HERE Save

The 25 EHS Truisms

The following are 25 powerful Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (EHS) truisms that have stood the test of time. They capture, in a memorable way, profound biblical truths about EHS as a discipleship paradigm. I use them often in my teaching and invite you to do the same. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. Jesus may be in your heart but grandpa is in your bones. We cannot give what we do not possess. What I do matters. Who I am matters much more. Limits are often God’s gifts in disguise. As goes the leader, so goes the church. For an expectation to be valid, it must be conscious, realistic, spoken, and agreed upon. If you skim on your inner work, your outer work will suffer as well. You can’t separate knowing God from knowing yourself. We cannot change what we are unaware of. Loss marks the place where self-knowledge. Read more.

10 Reasons Successions and Transitions Go Poorly

Robert A. Caro’s towering biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, offers a penetrating insight about power and leadership: Although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins. (xiv). Nothing reveals our character like succession and transitions. It reveals not just the character of the Senior Pastor or CEO, but the Board, the senior staff, and the congregation. Why? Power always reveals.. Read more.

Lose Your Life to Find It

Jesus said we must lose our lives to find it. One essential way we do this is by learning the art of interior silence. This choice to turn away from internal and external noise in order to be with Jesus is work…a difficult work. Externally, we face the unrelenting pressure of our culture– the noise, the clutter, the grasping, the confusion, the distractions, the excessive amount of information – all of which make it difficult to hear ourselves think. Internally, our stillness and silence muscles are weak. As beginners, we have problems focusing attention and facing the normal distractions of body and mind. Just like we cannot simply read a how-to book on running a marathon and run, so we must build up muscle and stamina slowly over time. Maggie Ross, in her Silence: A User’s Guide – Volume 1: Process, argues that the tradition of silence was handed down unbroken from the time. Read more.

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