Barnabas File

Leadership guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Effective innovations start small.” Some would disagree with that approach. At least one consultant has suggested that if change is necessary in an organization, do it on the grand scale so that all of the pain is experienced at one time and the people can move on! In most churches, Drucker’s advice seems to be more practical. Unless a church is facing imminent meltdown—reduced to an unsustainable core of members, overcome with debt, ready to close its doors—incremental change is the best course to take. Why? For one thing, small changes allow for experiments in the life of the church. These are things that we try because they seem like a good idea to meet an identified need. If they do not succeed, we learn from them and move on. If they succeed, we have a new and effective component of ministry that can be enhanced and expanded. Small changes also allow the church to innovate without “upsetting the apple cart.” Someone once told me that when...

Eileen Campbell-Reed was awarded the Betty Galloway Advocacy for Women in Ministry Award at the General Assembly of the Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Nashville on Saturday. The annual award recognizes a person, church, or organization that excels in encouraging women in ministry roles. In her remarks, Campbell-Reed observed that it would be a great day when such awards were no longer needed because the day had come when both women and men could exercise their gifts for ministry without regard to their gender. Unfortunately such a day is not on the horizon for moderate Baptists in the South. Last summer the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship completed a “discernment process” to shape priorities and strategy for the national organization in the next several years. The cause of women in ministry ranked rather low in that list of priorities. This past Saturday, the Tennessee CBF Transition Team presented their report on the future of the state organization. A portion of the repor...

If you have been around long enough, you have seen the “life cycle of a church” diagram. My understanding is that Martin F. Saarinen introduced the concept with The Alban Institute. Most of us in Baptist ranks were first exposed to the idea by Bob Dale. George Bullard has amplified on and expanded the idea. The basic concept is that the life of a church (or any organization) can be represented by a bell shaped curve with birth or dream at the bottom on the left side, health or maturity at the apex of the curve, and death or dissolution at the bottom on the right side. Church consultants have used many variations on the idea, especially to help churches that are on the downward slope from maturity to death to adopt an intervention that will kick the church into a new rising growth slope. Although the concept has become an accepted representation of a church’s life cycle, few consultants have been ready to help a church accept that perhaps “death” is the appropriate destination for their...

On Easter Sunday 1967, I worshipped at the Calvary Baptist Church in Bangkok, Thailand. The worship was typically Southern Baptist in design including an evangelistic sermon preached by a pastor named John C. Calhoun (I am not making this up). The church was a beautiful colonial structure that would have fit in the downtown area of any county seat in the southeastern United States. It was a great time of worship! I was a First Lieutenant in the U. S. Army on R and R (Rest and Recreation) for a week in Thailand. It was a touch of home. After the morning service, some other servicemen and I were invited to lunch at the home of an Army veterinarian and his wife. They were graduates of Auburn University and we discovered mutual friends. Learning of my interest in Christian missions, the husband invited me to attend a service that afternoon held in a Thai home. Of course, the small, informal service was conducted in the Thai language. Some of the hymn tunes were familiar although the langua...

The Digital Revolution has changed the way we communicate, learn, and understand our world. If we fail to understand it, we will miss significant opportunities to be part of the missio Dei (the mission of God). Whether you are digitally literate or not, you will be impacted by this change. One of the people who is not only taking the Digital Revolution seriously but seeking to understand how Christians can minister within that context is Chris Hammons of the Wayne E. Oates Institute. I recommend this article in the latest issue of the Oates Journal .

For many in my hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Good Friday will now have a connotation beyond the day to remember our Lord’s crucifixion. Shortly before one o’clock today, the first of two tornadoes of the day ripped through the northern part of our city. A mother and her nine week old child were killed, at least 30 people were injured, and numerous people lost their homes. A second storm reportedly moved through the southern part of the county a short time later. Our family was fortunate. The storm moved north of us and just south of where our daughters live. It was closer to their homes than ours. All in all it was a frightening experience. It was a reminder of the transitory nature of our lives. Perhaps it is appropriate that this happened on a Good Friday, the day after our Lord told his disciples, "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:33, NIV) Lord Je...

No one ever said that change was easy. General Motors provides an appropriate case study. In 1985, GM CEO Rogers Smith announced the Saturn initiative: “A Different Kind of Company. A Different Kind of Car.” The goal was to remake the way that Americans made automobiles in order to be more competitive with the Japanese. I was personally co-opted by this effort. I bought a Saturn in the early 90’s. It was new, it was relatively inexpensive, and it was made in Tennessee. In fact, after that one car was long gone, we bought a used Saturn for my wife to drive. Despite some glitches, we liked the car and the dealer service was excellent. We even knew people who worked at the plant. In the current issue of Newsweek , journalist Paul Ingrassia explains why Saturn failed. He explains the difficulties of true innovation, dealing with entrenched interests (such as the UAW), and envy (from within the company). For the theologians among us, the story has all the classic ingredients—greed, pride, s...

For some time I have struggled with my aversion to the term “strategic planning” and the idea of a “strategic planning process.” Part of my discomfort has come from being exposed by Alan Roxburgh to the idea of “discontinuous change.” I don’t think that I do any harm to Roxburgh’s presentation to summarize it as “everything tied down is coming loose.” Where we once thought linearly, assuming that the future would be like the past and planned accordingly, reality has shown us that this is not the way things are. The unexpected happens (Internet, 9/11, Iraqi war, financial chaos) and all of our great plans go out the window. So what are we to do? In a recent article in Christian Century , writer Jason Byassee (who does good work) refers to something written by Sam Wells in Improvisation . Byassee writes, Sam Walls takes this metaphor further . . . [when] he argues that Christian living is like improvisational acting rather than script-based acting. Players practice intensely in o...

Baptists in the South, along with mainline churches such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and some others, once prided themselves on their lay religious education programs. They emphasized that the “church school” was not just for children and youth but for adults as well. Baptists offered opportunities for laity to take “study courses” based on books that covered everything from Bible survey to Sunday school growth methodology. How are we equipping lay people for church leadership today? In reality, most of our churches are not. I am not calling for a return to the “Church Study Course,” but I do think this is a neglected area in many of our churches. We do a good job of Bible teaching but little to equip lay leaders. As we think about this challenge, let me share a few observations about the adults we have the opportunity to equip for ministry. Some of these are based on my experience in leading a couple of lay learning experiences in our church. They are not meant to be perceived as po...