Barnabas File

I have known very few real change agents in my life. Sam Davidson is one of them. Sam is a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer who believes that the world needs more passionate people. So he is one!  He also mobilizes others to be passionate about things that matter (or should matter) to each and every one of us. Sam sees the infinite possibilities in each situation and does not hesitate to become an advocate for them. Because of that, he often makes me uncomfortable (but that’s a good thing). In addition to being a very practical theologian, Sam is the co-founder of Cool People Care and Proof Branding . He has a new book entitled 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need . I recommend it to you and provide an excerpt here. One Thing Your Life Doesn't Need: Complaints Without Action Sometimes, there’s no better stress or tension reliever than letting off some steam by complaining. Yell, stomp your feet, or throw something (as long as it’s not at someone’s head). Just don’t let co...

Although a grandchild will sometimes say, “I’m bored,” I rarely hear that from any of the adults in my life. Most of us have more on our plates than we can handle. What makes it challenging is that most of it is “good” stuff. Certainly, we all have those tasks that don’t particularly energize us—taking out the trash, washing clothes, vacuuming, paying bills, maintaining our yards—but most of us have more perfectly good things on our “to do” lists than we have time to complete. When one of my coaching clients talks about finding time to complete “important but not urgent” tasks, I immediately identify with him or her. These are the things that we need to do. They will ensure our personal, spiritual, social, professional and economic security, but they are often pushed to the background due to what one writer called “the tyranny of the urgent.” The urgent things are, by definition, not important but they must be done here and now. Like bad currency drives out the good, so urgent thi...

Evidently in honor of Thanksgiving and anticipated family dinners, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has been doing a series on why siblings differ from each other. In a story entitled “Siblings Share Genes, But Rarely Personalities ,” researcher Robert Plomlin says, "Children in the same family are more similar than children taken at random from the population but not much more." The story goes on to report that, in terms of personality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time. Three theories were presented for this, but one was particularly interesting to me. This is called “environment” but it is actually based on the idea of “non-shared environment.” This theory argues that although it may appear from the outside that siblings are growing up in the same family, in very important ways they really aren't. They are not experiencing the same thing. "Children grow up in different families because most siblings differ in age, and s...

In leadership development, I have often used non-verbal exercises with groups to solicit insights about how we relate to one another. For one exercise, I would ask the group to stand in a circle and lock arms. Then I would ask each person to pick a place in the room that he or she wanted to go to and to move the group to that point. Of course, this involved a lot of pulling and pushing. The smaller members of the group were pulled in different directions by competing larger members. Usually, the pulling and tugging resulted in the circle being broken and one section of the group pulling away from the others. In debriefing, I often asked, “How would this have been different if you could have talked with each other?” After discussion, someone would comment, “Well, we could have negotiated, set priorities, and taken the group to everyone’s spot eventually.” Conversation can help to surface and deal with individual needs and priorities. Of course, this assumes that those involved in ...

The coffee shops of America may be the new Antiochs and Mars Hills of the church. While waiting for a friend at a coffee shop/café this week, I was close enough to the next table to overhear the conversation taking place between three men. It was clear that one was a pastor and that they were discussing the launch of a new church in an adjoining community. Their discussion was intense and purposeful. I could pick up their enthusiasm just through the tone of their voices. I was reminded that just a couple of weeks before, I had observed another man at the same table as he seemed to be interviewing candidates for a ministry position. As I thought about these conversations, I realized that over the last few months, I had seen several small groups involved in Bible study, others in intense dialogue over clearly Christian books, and a couple of people (evidently pastors) working sermons with their laptops. This café is a virtual incubator for church planting and Christian formation. In...

Last week I participated in the Leadership Coaching Project Retreat led by Mark Tidsworth, the president of Pinnacle Leadership Associates. We met in a beautiful setting—Lutheridge Conference Center near Asheville, North Carolina—with some great people. Including the Pinnacle team, we had leaders from Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches. As I facilitated a small group of leaders and listened to the presentations that Mark did, I was reminded that each of us has great resources for growth and ministry. Every believer is wonderfully gifted by God. Retreats like this help us to discover more about ourselves but, in reality, most of us already know much more than we are doing! Coaching is one way to make better use of our gifts and natural talents and to focus those for life balance and more effective service. What are some of the things that keep us from effectively using what has been given to us? You can come up with your own list, but here is mine. First, I...

  Leadership continues to be a hot topic in business, government, academia, the non-profit sector, and the church. Most people realize that the leadership that got us into the situations we find ourselves in today won’t get us out of those situations, so we are constantly seeking new ways to conceptualize the role of leaders who can.   One of the most popular leadership models in recent years is The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership ® developed out of extensive research by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. They first presented their findings in The Leadership Challenge (2002). This spawned additional resources and over 200 doctoral dissertations and academic research projects.   The original book is very thorough and sometimes quite dense, so I was pleased to find that Kouzes and Posner had edited Christian Reflections on the Leadership Challenge . The theme of the book is how Christian leaders can apply the editors’ model “to the work of mobilizing ot...

Dr. Tillman and Jim Whitaker As we observed Baptist Heritage Sunday in our church today, I heard a term used by both our pastor, Mike Smith, and our guest, Bill Tillman, that I rarely heard as a young person growing up in a Southern Baptist church. The term is “Baptist Christian.” The addition of that adjective gives a perspective that I did not have in my formative years. For most of my life, the use of the terms “Baptist” or “Southern Baptist” was sufficient to describe both my orientation and my tribe. We really weren’t that concerned about other Christians and tended to go it alone. We were even unsure about the National Baptists and the American Baptists, much less the independents. We really did not need anyone else to do God’s work. We were the God’s “last and only hope” (to use Bill Leonard’s term). Bold Mission Thrust, the effort to share the gospel with every person on earth, was first and foremost a Southern Baptist effort. But things changed. We took our eyes off t...

Recent news reports tell us that Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in California has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The church leaders disclosed that the church is close to $50 million in debt. Some have seen this as the harbinger of the death of the megachurch. Of course, the reality is not that simple. The Crystal Cathedral is probably unique among others in that category because it has practiced a rather traditional approach to worship albeit on a grand scale. The church has also been embroiled in a leadership transition crisis. The problems at this one megachurch do not mean that this expression of the church is dying out. In fact, Scott Thumma, an authority on megachurches, says mammoth churches aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. In the CNN blog that reports the Crystal Cathedral’s bankruptcy, Thumma states that most megachurches are holding their own financially amid this "great recession." He defines a megachurch as a congregation with 2,000 members and a...

Several decades ago, author and humorist Grady Nutt wrote a book entitled God Don’t Make No Junk . As I remember, the premise of the book was that God has created each of us as unique beings endowed with certain innate abilities, strengths, and gifts. No one gets all the good stuff, but that’s not a problem. We should celebrate what God has done in us and use it wisely. I think of Grady Nutt when I read Albert Winseman’s Growing an Engaged Church . Winseman is part of the Gallup Organization, a group that has done a great deal of research on helping people identify their strengths rather than their weaknesses (see, for example, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths and Tom Rath, Strengths Based Leadership and Strengths Finder 2.0 ). In Growing an Engaged Church, Winseman applies this approach to the local congregation. He writes, “The notion of focusing on discovery and maximizing natural talents tends to go against the conventional wisdom.” He points...

In a recent article at EthicsDaily.com , John Hewett, the first moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, shared hindsight on the position he and other moderate Baptists took at the beginning of the CBF “movement.” He realizes now that his vision and that of his contemporaries was limited by “the narrow constraints of our tradition” and preserving that tradition. “How I wish now I had sent us forth in May 1991 with the call to be free and faithful Christians,” he writes, rather than free and faithful Baptists. As CBF approaches its twentieth anniversary and thinks about its future, Hewett provides this challenge: “Now CBF has an opportunity to catch a fresh vision of what God is actually doing in God's world . . . . I am cheering them on, albeit from the sidelines, praying that the original dream of a brave and progressive Christianity in the Baptist tradition might come to pass, to the praise of God's glory, for Christ's sake, and our sakes.” If CBF atte...