Off the Agenda: Conversations for Building Church Leaders

Several months ago, BCL’s Rachel Willoughby interviewed Nancy Ortberg for a download on BuildingChurchLeaders.com. Nancy had some fantastic things to say about how to lead and teach well. Below is a brief excerpt of Rachel’s favorite section of the interview. To access the full interview and other insightful articles on the theme of teaching adults, click here.

Rachel: As you prepare to speak, how do you plan to engage the audience?

Nancy: You have to think provocatively while you're preparing the message so that you are prepared to use stories or something from your research to put a new slant on a familiar idea. When you're speaking to people who have been following Christ or have been in church a long time, familiarity with a passage is sometimes your worst enemy. People assume that they know what a passage says and how to live it out.

Scot McKnight writes that people change in two circumstances: when they're on a quest or when they're in a crisis. Now, I can’t send people on a quest, but I can create a crisis. Part of my job as a communicator, then, is to create a rhetorical crisis in the lives of the listeners. The stories I tell, the questions I ask, and the tension I set up should cause some cognitive dissonance in people's minds, so that they walk away thinking about the message.

What about you? When you prepare to speak, how do you go about setting up a “rhetorical crisis?” As you listen to others teach, what moves you most?

If you’ve been visiting BuildingChurchLeaders.com or receiving the BCL newsletter for long, you’ve probably noticed that our downloads come in a variety of formats and under a multitude of names. You may have even noticed more than one download on the same topic. If you’re new to the website, you may wonder what BCL is all about. With the short descriptions below, we hope to explain—to old friends and new—just what you can expect to find here at BuildingChurchLeaders.com.

To summarize, our editorial staff is committed to providing church leaders with practical and useful downloadable resources that can be used in and adapted to virtually any church environment. To do that, we develop nine different kinds of downloads, each with a specific purpose.

Practical Ministry Skills
This is our staple download: practical, brief, and ready for use in a discussion. These downloads are collections of between seven and nine articles that address a single topic from multiple angles and are designed for quick reading.

Continue reading "Understanding BCL Downloads"...

I’ve been attending my church for a little over a year, and right from the get-go I was on the watch for a mentor. In my spiritual growth thus far, nothing has impacted me more than the examples of women who had vibrant, thriving relationships with Christ and who have poured truth, grace, and love into me. So I was eager to be in a mentoring relationship like that again.

I prayed to that effect. I got involved in an inter-generational Bible study, attended Sunday school classes, and kept my eyes open on Sunday mornings for women who had that tangible aura of spiritual maturity about them; women whose lives I wanted to emulate. But the truth is, it takes time to build relationships, and asking a stranger to commit to meeting with you and taking an interest in your life is daunting. After six months, I still hadn’t become close enough to anyone who I felt comfortable asking to listen to me for an hour a week.

Continue reading "Finding a Mentor"...

Talk about a timely book! In light of the current economic crisis The Shortest Investment Book Ever: Wall Street Secrets for Making Every Dollar Count by James O’Donnell is the perfect thing to be reading. But amid the savvy saving and investing tips O'Donnell offers, I found something more—a story of the author’s mid-life decision for less pay and more meaning. Here’s the excerpt. Enjoy!

I never thought that I would become a college professor. But at age 46, I had a chance to take an 80% pay cut (who could pass that up?) and move from cosmopolitan Boston to small town Indiana (who could pass that up either?).

Why in the world would I have done something so crazy? And crazy is what some friends of mine back in Boston thought it was. Well, for me, the reason arose about nine years earlier, with a very unexpected mid-30s change in my spiritual life. Simply put, I discovered I had one. In that discovery, I began to believe in God, and to take God seriously: in other words, as something (or someone) more than a curse word. And I began to see that whatever I had accomplished so far in life was not just because of me and for me. No, now I began to see so much of what I had been given as gifts from God. And in realization and out of gratitude, I wanted to return, if I could, to this world and to my God more than just the space I was taking up.

Continue reading "A Mid-Life Shift Gives Meaning"...

When my daughter was getting ready to enter second grade, she was really anxious. Every time we asked her how she felt about it, she said she was scared and nervous and she didn’t want to go to second grade—ever.

We talked about her feelings and tried to figure out why she felt so anxious. She couldn’t really explain it. Then one day, after I asked her to tell me what she thought would be the worst thing about second grade, I realized that she had no idea what second grade would be like. Between kindergarten and first grade, we had moved across the country and settled in a whole new community and (obviously) a whole new school. Everything had started over for her. She didn’t realize that going to second grade wouldn’t involve so much transition. In fact, it would look a whole lot like first grade.

Continue reading "Leading Anxious People Through Change"...

I spent my summers during high school working as a telemarketer. Every day, I called strangers to request money for the Leukemia Society, March of Dimes, or any other organization name that appeared on the script I was supposed to read.

The script always started with a standard “we need your help” spiel, and then the haggling began. Judging by the tone of the person’s voice, I’d suggest a dollar amount:

“Would you be willing to donate $75?”

Measuring the outrage in their response, I’d determine whether I recommend $50 or drop straight to $25.

“Okay, I understand that…sure…of course…but let me assure you that even the smallest bit helps. Could you spare $10? What about $5? Hello? Are you still…”

Dial tone.

If someone agreed to send money, we sent him a pledge card for the amount he agreed to contribute. More importantly, whenever I made a “sale,” I earned a tick on the white board:

Tyler C.—1

We were expected to average one sale per hour. I was lucky to get one before lunch. So eventually I decided to try a new script.

Continue reading "I Pledged To Do What?"...

One of our goals for BuildingChurchLeaders.com is to provide space for ministry leaders from all over the world to share their insights, struggles, and experiences with other men and women in the trenches. Off the Agenda is a major part of that. But we have other venues for discussion, as well.

One of those venues is our “Your Turn” discussion forum, in which you pose questions to your ministerial colleagues, and they respond with advice, stories, and resource recommendations they believe will point you in the right direction.

I found this question, and your responses, particularly interesting: What ministry worry are you dealing with daily right now that keeps you up at night?

Here’s what some of you said:

Continue reading "What’s On Your Mind?"...

As a show of solidarity with my seven-year-old daughter, I recently reread the classic Little House on the Prairie books and Anne of Green Gables. One phenomenon I noticed this time around (probably because I’m in the habit of thinking about church leadership) was that the books’ good, churchgoing characters didn’t have to choose between churches of various sizes and stripes. They simply attended the church in town and enjoyed (or put up with) the teachings of Reverend So-and-So every Sunday.

My, how things have changed. Along with the constant and dizzying array of choices we face every day, we have the luxury of choosing the church we like best. I know some small towns and villages in our country still have only one church. But in most of those cases, people live within driving distance of other communities and might choose to drive to one of them to attend another church. And the situation is very different where I live—in some areas I can find a church on every block. And on a recent trip to the area around Fort Worth, Texas, I thought I saw at least two churches on every block.

Continue reading "Should Churches Differentiate?"...