Barnabas File

Hardly a week goes by without someone posting an article or blog about reaching millennials for the church,  even though the real challenge may well be the internet generation, the next wave on the scene.  We recognize that younger generations have their own distinctive interests, values, and styles.  The face of the young adult population continues to change.  Few seem to consider the changing face of senior adults and the impact this has on the church. If you watch television commercials directed to senior adults, you will see that the advertising community is much more savvy about this age group than is the church.  They realize that not all senior adults are going to be playing golf or bingo (not that there is anything wrong with that!). In fact, senior adulthood may be both the best of times and the worst of times for those who have lasted that long. Although the traditional retirement age of 65 is no longer sacred, this is s...

Mentor was the friend to whom Ulysses entrusted his son, Telemachus, when he went off to the Trojan War.   We use the term “mentor” now for any trusted advisor, especially an older person who trains and guides a younger person.   The person guided by the mentor is often called a mentee or sometimes an apprentice but I think protégé is a better term. I have benefited from a number of mentors in my life.  Most of these were on an informal basis; others were supervisors who guided my work.  On a couple of occasions, I purposely sought out a person to be my mentor in a particular area of expertise.  They agreed to share information, suggestions, and life experiences with me. Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, “There are two ways to acquire wisdom: you can either buy it or borrow it.  By buying it, you pay full price in terms of time and cost to learn the lessons you need to learn. By borrowing it, you go to those men and women who have alrea...

Mentoring is a very popular term today with a number of definitions and formats.   Mentoring allows us to benefit from the skills and experiences of others as we identify our own strengths and areas of potential growth.   The practice is important not only in corporations but for churches and not for profit organizations as well.   Several of types of mentoring are suggested in a blog from the Harvard Business Review, and I have added one more. 1.  Buddy or peer mentoring is much like an “apprenticeship” that helps a person “learn the ropes” in a new setting.  Formal peer mentoring helps a new person to mesh into an organization, but much of this type of orientation and assimilation takes place informally.  In a ministerial setting, we often find this type of mentoring with fellow students in seminary, other staff members, or in lunch or coffee groups with ministers in the community.  Although this may be done informally, the process is very imp...

“Empowerment” has become something of a catch phrase not only in businesses and other secular organizations, but in the church as well. We talk about being “empowering leaders” who call forth the best in others.   We want people to “feel empowered” to exercise their gifts.   We hope those with whom we work will “become empowered” as the result of our leadership. Recently, I came across this quote from Robert E. Quinn in Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within that changed my paradigm completely. "We do not, however, empower people. Empowerment cannot be delegated. We can only develop an appropriate empowering environment where people will have to take the initiative to empower themselves." This caught my attention.  Empowerment is not something I do to someone else.  Just as I cannot motivate another person to do something, I cannot empower that person to release his or her gifts.  I cannot force them to be all that they ca...

Experts in psychosocial development  claim that the experiences we have between the ages of 12 and 15 shape our values, world view, and beliefs.  When I was that age, the President of the United States was Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Because of that and the fact that he was the first Republican my parents ever voted  for, my visit today to the Eisenhower Museum and Library in Abilene,  Kansas, was especially moving. Eisenhower is the quintessential American success story, one of seven sons born on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Midwestern town who went on to become a military hero as leader of the Allied forces in Europe during World War Two, worked alongside figures like Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Charles DeGaulle, and served two Presidential terms during a time of both prosperity and unrest. Those who were part of the Greatest Generation—men and women who fought and won the Second World War—saw “Ike” as one of them and rewarded him wi...