Barnabas File

What is your definition of “discipleship”?     In general usage, a disciple is one who follows the example and teachings of another person.     In the Christian context, a disciple is a follower of Jesus Christ, one who seeks to practice his teachings and make them a part of her or his life.     Living out the teachings of Christ is generally called the act of discipleship. Several years ago, I joined my colleague Mark Tidsworth in training church leaders to use coaching principles to help others to grow as disciples. We called the process “Disciple Development Coaching.”  Both Mark and I have a rather comprehensive view of what it means to be a disciple. Our concept (and I think the belief of many others) is that discipleship encompasses all of life—not simply our spiritual practices but the way we care for God’s gifts to us, act in our relationships with others, and pursue our vocational callings. In a recent conversation, s...

Life Coaching or Personal Development Coaching can take many forms.     I recently was involved in a conversation with a colleague about coaching seminary students around their financial habits.     One of the things we discussed was whether a person needs to be a financial expert to coach someone about finances.     We agreed that helping a person to break old habits or, perhaps more proactively, develop new habits or behaviors was the key to financial coaching rather than financial expertise.     Developing new habits is not easy. Some suggest that, on the average, it takes more than two months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact . More realistically, how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In a study by researcher Phillippa Lally, a key finding was that it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit. This i...

When we consider New Testament scriptures relating to the work of the church, we usually interpret the terms applied to leadership as specific offices when we should actually think of them as functions.     For example, consider Ephesians 4:11-12 in The Message translation: “He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.” What we interpret as offices are really gifts that have a function in the Body of Christ to develop or equip mature believers.  These various gifts embody some of the skills we use in coaching, walking beside people as they discover, define, and pursue what God has in store for them. We are seeing these coaching skills being ...

As they swam past each other, one fish asked another, “How’s the water?”     The other fish replied, “What’s water?”     The point of the story is that it is easy to forget what surrounds you and fail to examine it because it is what you know.     To an outsider, those same surroundings might seem strange. We are immersed in culture with its artifacts, values, and assumptions.  Unless something happens to challenge those givens, we rarely think about the culture we find ourselves in.   For those of us who work with churches, the term “culture” has at least two meanings.  On one hand, culture is the larger environment in which we live.  For Christians, culture can be both a gift and a challenge.  Our culture--language, political structures, customs, relationships--provide a stage on which we perform our ministry.  Early Christians like Paul discovered how to use the Graeco-Roman culture t...

Charles Chandler The reality is startling: Over 20,000 clergy in Protestant/evangelical churches are forced from their ministry positions in the United states every year. Just over half of these ministers will return to full-time ministry roles. One consequence is that fewer seminary students are choosing parish ministry. Only half of the seminary graduates will be in ministry roles ten years after graduation.  Charles Chandler, President of Transforming Clergy-Congregational Health Network, Inc., shared these statistics with 25 participants called together for a “think tank” in Ashland, Virginia, earlier this month.  The group was challenged to provide input on these topics: Characteristics of healthy relationships in congregations; Conditions contributing to unhealthy relationships; and Strategies fostering healthy relationships. John Killinger and Trisha Miller Mandarijn Being part of this two-day meeting was an intense, enl...

You can always count on your students to bring you back down to earth!     In the seminary class I teach on Missional Imagination, we challenge students “to think, imagine, innovate, and lead in ways that foster ministry startups and nurture established ministries that are missional in nature.”     At least that is what the course description says.     Another way of describing our goal is helping students to reimagine Christian ministry as part of the   missio Dei --the mission God given to the people of God and empowered by the Holy Spirit.     Of course, it takes a whole semester to unpack this concept, but eventually someone will ask a question or write a paper that includes a statement like this:  “Although missional ministry is often slow and may not have quantifiable results, the truth of the matter is those who are funding the ministry will always want to have a visible and measurable outcome as proof that their dollars...

In one of my seminary classes, I ask students to write a final paper describing what they have to offer as a missional leader--one who leads a church or organization to embrace the missio Dei --mission of God.   On several occasions, students have cited the quality of resilience. Resilience is defined in the dictionary as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  Much like grit and mindset, this has become a topic of research in positive psychology where it is seen as the  ability to cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. In most cases, those students who cite resilience as a personal characteristic have identified it as a result of life experience--failure in a project or program, loss of a job, rejection by a significant other, or death of an important person in their lives. This is not a theoretical attribute but one that they have practiced and recognized in themselves. What are some things that ca...