Barnabas File

Will Mancini is one of the most creative church consultants on the contemporary scene.  In a recent post on “11 High-Impact Planning Ideas for Senior Pastors for the New Year, ” Mancini provided a list of actions that could transform a church of any size.  One that particularly caught my attention was: “#9 Create a stop doing list and execute.  Whether our church is growing, plateaued or declining you will greatly benefit from identifying and eliminating the 20% of church’s activity that is the lowest return on mission. . . . As a team, ask the question ruthlessly, ‘Why do we do what we do?’” As churches, we often keep doing the same things and see declining results.  Even so, we are hesitant to give up certain activities.  Why is this? First, some people in your church want to maintain the familiar.  A pastor friend announced that the church council had agreed that Sunday night services should be ended.  He had a visit from a group of...

Memo to self at the beginning of a new year: This is going to be a good year.  You have just come through a period of both rejoicing and reflection, but it is time to move on.  If you want the new year to be good, even great, I suggest you do the following: First, take care of yourself.  This means that you are going to have to exercise, see your doctor and chiropractor on a regular basis, take your medications, get enough sleep, and eat right.  I know that doesn’t sound too exciting, but we know what happens when you don’t, right? Second, love your family and friends.  These are the people that God has placed into your life to both encourage and challenge you.  They have an investment in you and you in them.  Take it seriously and enjoy the present. Third, be intentional about personal and professional growth.  Although you may have good intentions, “sharpening the ax” does not happen without commitme...

My Netflix subscription this year was a good investment if I had only watched one series:  The Crown .  Although I have viewed several of the streaming service’s original series,  this is the best so far. The series plans to depict the life of Queen Elizabeth II.   The first season begins with her wedding in 1947 and goes through the first years of her reign up to 1955.  Although this all happened within my lifetime, I would have to call it historical drama.  Visually extravagant with meticulous attention to period costumes and furnishings, the series rarely makes a misstep.  The series functions on two levels—family drama and politics.  On one level, we have the soap opera of family relationships impacted by both royal privilege and responsibility.  The other level is the political and historical realities of the period.  For example, in “Gloriana” (episode 10), Prime minister Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) is deal...

Actor George Clooney playing a rather  confused Roman Centurion in Hail Caesar! The writer of Ecclesiastes observed, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” (12:12, NIV) I will not attempt to comment on the second half of this statement, but the first part is certainly true.   We live in a time when the production of all types of media grows exponentially—books, journals, films, plays, blogs, and many things unimagined in the day of the Hebrew writer. How are we to deal with all this information?  I find myself becoming more dependent on referrals from friends and reviews by people I trust.  Some of these writers come from a faith perspective and others do not. As I read the work of reviewers who are Christ followers, two perspectives usually emerge.  On one hand, there is the writer who hungrily seeks to find a word of witness in a film, a TV show, or a book.  On the other hand, there are those writ...

Although I say that I am not a theologian, my seminary professor friends persist in saying, “Every believer is a theologian.”  From their perspective, whenever you ask a question that involves faith, your relationship to God, or God’s relationship to the world, you are doing theology. When my twelve-year-old granddaughter brings up the violence in the television miniseries “The Bible” and I ask her, “How do you handle that?,” I am asking a theological question.  Why does God not only allow violence but, according to the Hebrew Bible, condone it? We ask theological questions all the time. First, we ask these questions in the midst of life.  When we encounter pain, death, and violence, we try to make sense of it all and, as religious people, practice this sense-making in the context of our Christian commitment. Second, we often ask these questions when we experience personal relationships that confuse or hurt us.  When trust is broken, commitment i...