Better to be a loving person without knowing how you got there, than an expert no one can stand to be around.
— John Ortberg
I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church.
Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.
When someone is in crisis, don't start by teaching, leveraging, or explaining. Just be with.
Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.
The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man.
Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.
We call an obsession with having someone's approval 'co-dependency;' the Bible's word for it is idolatry. A country can be an idol. A family can be an idol.
Authentic spiritual authority is what puts you in touch with reality.
Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.
My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.
Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.
God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure - people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.
At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.
Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.
Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.
When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.
The question isn't if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it's just who and what our spirits will be formed by.
I have given up the idea that there is an opposition-free church out there. But I have gained something else - an appreciation for the gift of opposition. When it comes, I learn something about my motives. When it comes, I get to test my courage.
Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.
No one wants pain. Not even long-time, mature Christians who want to grow. We will always find ways to avoid pain. Pain itself is a bad thing.
Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.
Jesus' life as a foot-washing servant would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue.
Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.
I know that those of us who go into church work are to regard ourselves as servants, are to offer our lives as a gift.
Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.
This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.
The hurried can become unhurried. But it will not happen by trying alone, nor will it happen instantly. You will have to enter a life of training.
God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.
Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.
Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love.
People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.
A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.
Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader - the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general.
Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit.
Some leaders are not intimidated by opposition; they actually thrive on it. It wakes them up. It energizes them. It calls them to battle. It causes them to mobilize their thoughts and energy.
We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis.
For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.
Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.
The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.
As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus.
Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.
One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.
As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.
In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.
Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.
Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.
As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this.
The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.
