Is now online here.

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A bit of razzle dazzle over at the Geneva website: a new logo brings a new skin for the website.

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I was comforted and encouraged by this section in Driscoll’s 2012 Christmas sermon (at 31-32 minutes):

Will you love and lead the family God has given you, even if it’s not the one you envisioned? “Had I known that she would be like this, I would have not signed up for a lifetime. Had I known that the kids would be like this, I would not have signed up for a lifetime. Had I known that they would get sick, or I would get sick, had I known what their extended family would be like, had I known the sins in their past that have haunted us in the present, had I known that they would betray me in this way or fail me in this way, I never would have signed up for a lifetime of this.”

And Joseph says, “That’s fine. It’s going to be hard, but I trust the Lord, and his vision for my family is my vision for my family.” And let me say this—let me say this to you men. I feel inclined to the Holy Spirit to press this point home. If God should give some of you men a difficult family, it’s not a burden, it’s an honor because God has entrusted to you a great responsibility for the woman and children that he loves very dearly. And perhaps he didn’t give it to another man because he wasn’t sure that his daughter would be loved well and that his children would be raised well.

It applies as well to women as to men and I wanted to share it with those of my readers who are struggling with really difficult family situations.

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1. D’s, oddly, often seem to act like S’s! That is, a D can often be clumsy in communication and fixated on familiar patterns of doing things and even sometimes anti-social in a way that might look introverted at times. But it’s for different reasons:
   
   
   
   • An S is clumsy in communication because they worry so MUCH about what’s going on and the right way to say stuff… the D is clumsy because they don’t worry AT ALL!
   
   
   • An S finds security in familiar patterns, feels comfortable in them and feels like they are a safer and predictable way to benefit others… whereas a D is so solipsistic that they often don’t realise they are stuck in a rut - they just haven’t asked other for input!
   
   
   • An S finds small talk in large crowds intense and overwhelming and prefers a small circle of close friends… a D finds small talk in large crowds tiresome and inefficient and prefers a small circle of henchmen.
   
   
   
   


2. In Christian circles I move in, and in the last few decades of Australian education/organisational culture I think it is frowned upon to be a D. As a result, I think many people, especially those in Christian leadership, who would be more comfortable in a D-style leadership have been trained to ape an ‘i’ style leadership - they try to be more inspirational and collaborative than suits them. Better to help them be a loving and humble ‘D’, rather than keep trying to force them to become an ‘i’ or ‘S’.


3. D’s feel deeply about being in control. They’re not argumentative because they’re rude, they genuinely feel passionately about where they’re going and feel stressed and attacked when that is questioned. Learning to take God very seriously and to not take themselves seriously is very important. Laughing at themselves is a very important step in enabling them to collaborate with others.


4. Young D’s are some of the most difficult people to work with - they don’t have the discipline to get much done yet, they don’t have the patience to get the details right and they don’t have the people skills to motivate others. They are best used on ‘high risk, short-deadline, low—social-impact’ assignments that others would find scary.


5. It might help non-D types to realise that a D actually feels emotionally stressed, depressed, and demotivated by lack of control, ineffeciency, slow pace, group work, routine activity. They’re not just abrasive and impatient. They actually thrive in change and challenge and feel exhausted by the lack of these things.


6. 
   

   The way to influence a D is to either:

   
   
   
   
   • Sow ideas, inception-style, and gradually let them think of them as their own.
   
   
   • Show them how they will make a larger impact with your ideas.
   
   
   • Don’t tell them what they ‘should’ do, or what is ‘right’ or why ‘other people are worried about you not doing it’. These will all make them angry.
   
   
   
   


7. D’s can often be cagey and suspicious in the way they relate to other people. Rather than resenting this, you need to learn what gestures and patterns of behaviour will gain their trust and respect. Show you respect them and their autonomy. And don’t annoy them!

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One of our student leaders made this comment on our Facebook Page the other day:

Our society has a tendency to place ‘great men’ on pedestals, while ‘common man’ is seen to be potential unfulfilled. Fact is, though, I’ve been raised, taught, discipled and encouraged by ‘common men’, men who did not necessarily build nations, or megachurches or movements, but homes, families and communities. So who decides what counts for greatness?

Wise young man. I think of him as our resident druid.

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For senior ministry positions I’m in favour of tenure, rather than contracts.

For apprentices, support staff and junior staff I think contracts have their advantages, but I think there are some important reasons why employing staff on contracts that require renewal in keeping with job performance is problematic:

1. It weights performance too heavily. Those who preach and teach need to build ministry over the long haul and not be measured to closely by their performance.


2. It puts a major responsibility on the assessing body (the elders? a committee? the senior staff leader?) on assessing the performance of the staff rather than sitting under their spiritual oversight.


3. It doesn’t protect the leader in enabling them to teach unpopular truths and lead through unpopular changes.


4. It can produce a mercenary mindset in the staff themselves: ‘I’m just here for 3 years, after that is anyone’s guess’.


5. It establishes the relationship between the leader and the congregation as someone who is here only temporarily to do a task, rather than someone who is here for the relationship.


6. It is generally in the best interest of the church to have leaders there over a long period.

All of this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t review our senior staff and consider performance. It doesn’t mean we can’t think seriously about getting to a point where we might take steps towards encouraging a staff member to move on. It doesn’t mean staff themselves can’t resolve to move on after a season. But I just believe the emphasis shouldn’t be put on these factors. They should be hard to do, they should be done against the grain. But good leaders should still have the conviction to help unsuited leaders move on if need be.

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1. Randy Pope of Perimeter Church planting fame recently spoke at Queensland Presbyterian Theological College on ‘Go and make disciples… how?’
   
   
   
   • Session 1
   
   
   • Session 2
   
   
   • Session 3
   
   
   • Session 4
   
   
   • Session 5
   
   
   
   


2. 
   

   Is ‘being a radical disciple’ the new legalism? Could be:

   
   

   
   

   Today’s millennial generation is being fed the message that if they don’t do something extraordinary in this life they are wasting their gifts and potential. The sad result is that many young adults feel ashamed if they “settle” into ordinary jobs, get married early and start families, live in small towns, or as 1 Thessalonians 4:11 says, “aspire to live quietly, and to mind [their] affairs, and to work with [their] hands.” For too many millennials their greatest fear in this life is being an ordinary person with a non-glamorous job, living in the suburbs, and having nothing spectacular to boast about.

   
   

   
   

via Blog - Christian Reflections http://genevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/mirrors-7th-june-2013 (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)

I love a minister whose face invites me to make him my friend - a man upon whose doorstep you read Salve, “Welcome”; and feel that there is no need of that Pompeian warning, Cave Canem, “Beware of the dog.” Give me the man around whom children come, like flies around a honeypot: they are first-class judges of a good man…. So you will find that children have their instincts, and discover very speedily who is their friend; and depend upon it the children’s friend is one who will be worth knowing….

A man who has no geniality about him had better be an undertaker and bury the dead, for he will never succeed in influencing the living…. A man must have a great heart if he would have a great congregation. His heart should be as capacious as those noble harbours along our coast, which contain sea room for a fleet. When a man has a large, loving heart, men go to him as ships to a haven, and feel at peace when they have anchored under the lee of his friendship. Such a man is hearty in private as well as in public; his blood is not cold and fishy, but he is warm as your own fireside. No pride and selfishness chill you when you approach him; he has his doors all open to receive you, and you are at home wit him at once. Such men I would persuade you to be, every one of you.

The Christian minister should also be very cheerful. I don’t believe in going about like certain monks whom I saw in Rome, who salute each other in sepulchral tones, and convey the pleasant informaiton “Brother, we must die”; to which lively salutation each lively brother of the order replies, “Yes, brother, we must die.” I was glad to be assured upon such good authority that all these lazy fellows are about to die; upon the whole, it is about the best thing they can do; but till that event occurs, they might use some more comfortable form of salutation.

.... Some of the biggest rogues in the world have been as mortified in appearance as if they had lived on locusts and wild honey. It is a very vulgar error to suppose that a melancholy countenance is the index of a gracious heart. I commend cheerfulness to all who would win souls; not levity and frothiness, but a genial, happy spirit. There are more flies caught with honey than with vinegar, and there will be more souls led to heaven by a man who wears heaven in his face than by one who bears Tartarus in his looks.

(Lectures to my Students on Preaching)

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We use the DiSC profile with out staff team.* I’m a high D, high i, with a fair bit of C and hardly any S. It’s really helpful. And because it is simple and behaviour-oriented, it’s easier to process, in my experience that the EYUT, GHTJ, ABCD Myers-Briggs thingo. Better to have a slightly simplistic, Mickey-Mouse tool that’s easy to use, than a highly accurate and hard to remember tool, in my opinion.

Anyways, I thought I’d share some random bits and pieces about the DiSC profile. Some of this is observations I have picked up that I haven’t read so explicitly in the typical profile descriptions. Please don’t be offended if some of my observations might seem critical of your personality type. I assure you that I will be just as critical of the other types - including mine!

Some observations on S:

1. S loves familiar routines and rhythms. If you can give a familiar routine and rhythm you will get more out of them.


2. But in this, S types can find it hard to thing outside that routine. If criticised they will defend the familiar. They will tend to present evaluations within the bounds of the familiar.


3. S people can seem details-oriented but often it’s in the sense of a hobbyist or a specialist, rather than seeing everything globally and analytically as a C type might. They may even completely discount facts and ideas for personal/intuitive reasons. As a result, beware of putting too much trust in their reports and systems.


4. S people, while highly relational, are relational in an introverted, holding things close, feeling things deeply kind of way. As a result sometimes they can come across quite clumsy - or even harsh - in personal interactions because they have over-thought stuff so much first!


5. The less comfortable with something an S it seems like the less it fully exists in their world. Giving an S a task they are not familiar with will probably lead to vague or non-existent reporting and lack of urgency.


6. In a big way, caring for the people they care about is caring for them and motivating for them.


7. Because S types are so relational they are often hopeless with task-oriented communication - like SMS and email. Frustratingly vague, curt, muddled. But they are masters at social media - S types makes the best bloggers and Facebookers, if they can handle the negative comments!


8. It is so important to raise ideas, plans, and especially criticisms with them early, and then give them time to think and process and feel through it all - and then invite them to share their thoughts, worries and feelings.


9. If you want to motivate an S, don’t give them more information and inspiration. Instead draw close to them. I’ve been amazed how investing in the personal life of S type personalities ends up re-energising them with work, helping them feel focussed, confident and empowered.

*You can purchase it here - we used the Workplace Profile. You can also take a free one here.

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Hours works (and leave taken) are inaccurate measures. They focus on physical presence, rather than work done. Sometimes physical presences is a crucial part of a job. Sometimes it is a secondary but still valuable thing. It is always one measure of work. But you can be physically present and not working. Or working badly. Or working inefficiently.

Even worse, even to the extent that hours worked measures work done, it is measuring activity rather than outcome.

Someone can work a 60 hour week and produce little gain for the kingdom - dithering in a million little projects, crawling through unnecessarily detailed sermon preparation, meeting every single pastoral need, sitting on badly chaired committees and fussing about bullet points on powerpoint. Another person can sometimes work a 40 hour week and write a better sermon, train more people for ministry and invest in key new ministry initiatives.

I’m not too fussed how many hours my staff work, or how much leave they take - as long as they get the job done.

I tend to only drill down to tracking hours and counting leave when someone doesn’t seem to be getting the job done. Partly it helps me to hold them accountable. Partly it helps THEM to build in some basic disciplines around time management.

Sometimes I wonder if we focus on hours worked because we’ve never done the hard work of figuring out what outcomes we actually want. That requires too much hard thinking and clarifying. Easier just to cram up our lives with busyness. We feel godly because we feel exhausted. And others admire us because we are so frantic. But we are making little objective gain for the cause of the gospel.

Now this can be taken too far, where someone can be ruthlessly pragmatic, and produce thin or loveless results. And not be present enough to add the extra value that deeper relationships and engagement can bring. But then you can build in some basic expectations into the job description - and even better, employ the right kind of people!

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I love the book and I’m a believer in the movie. Nikki and I are going to see it on Saturday.

I reckon Baz is a great director. I really loved Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. And Moulin Rouge was an ordinary film with some great songs and visuals. Australia. Well. Let’s pretend that never happened. But I reckon Gatsby will be great. It give me heart that David Stratton liked it. I’m more of a David man than a Margaret man.

I heard this fairly brief interview with Baz on Triple J yesterday. I love his voice and his humour and manner. Good times. The interview itself it typical Triple J fluff. But this quote at the end is brilliant:

It speaks about who we are where we are.

Look:

Is there a lot of razzle dazzle that be people go on? Yes.

Are there parties? Fantastic.

Can you dress up? Go for it.

But at the end there’s a contemplation. There are basically four characters in a room, five characters in a room, saying ‘But you love him?’ and it ends with a devastated young man going: ‘Materialism cannot be the focus of your life. It might be nice to have a good suit and go to a great party, drink a few cocktails… but you gotta have a purpose and you’ve gotta have a cause. And that’s what he learns from Jay Gatsby: have a point to your life.

(listen here from 11:56-12:39)

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From the short story The Wall:

At that moment I felt that I had my whole life in front of me and Ithought, “It’s a damned lie.” It was worth nothing because it was finished. I wondered how I’d been able to walk, to laugh with the girls: I wouldn’t have moved so much as my little finger if I had only imagined I would die like this. My life was in front of me,shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn’t pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing. I missed nothing: there were so many things I could have missed,the taste of manzanilla or the baths I took in summerin a little creek near Cadiz; but death had disenchanted everything. ....

Tom was alone too but not in the same way. Sitting cross‐legged, he had begun to stare at the bench with a sort of smile, he looked amazed. He put out his hand and touched the wood cautiously asif he were afraid of breaking something,then drew back his hand quickly and shuddered. If I had been Tom I wouldn’t have amused myself by touching the bench; this was some more Irish nonsense, but I too found that objects had a funny look; they were more obliterated, less dense than usual. It was enough for me to look at the bench, the lamp, the pile of coal dust to feel that I was going to die. Naturally I couldn’t think clearly about my death but I saw in the way things fell back and kept their distance, discreetly, as people who speak quietly at the bedside of a dying man. It was his death which Tom has just touched on the bench.

In the state I wasin, ifsomeone had come and toldme I could go home quietly, that they would leave my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm - because of my; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it anymore. I had to touch it and look at it to find out what was happening, as if it were the body of someone else. At times I could still feel it, I felt sinkings, and fallings, as when you’re in a plane taking a nose dive, or I felt my heart beating. But that didn’t reassure me. Everything that came from my body was all cockeyed. Most of the time it was quiet and I felt no more than a sort of weight, a filthy presence against me; I had the impression of being tied to an enormous ermin.Once I felt my pants and I felt they were damp; I didn’t know whether it was sweat or urine, but I went to piss on the coal pile as a precaution.

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It is important to come up with some kind of basic roll-out plan, for something like this. And better to do it slower and steadier than you think. People feel unsettled by fast new changes: give them time to get used to it. There will inevitably be bugs, so better to fix them with a smaller group of people affected. After you’ve spent ages getting your head around the software, the different features are all obvious, but it is too confusing to give them all at once to someone cold.

I recommend planning a communication schedule, where you will talk about the introduction of the Church Community Builder, why you are introducing it, how you are introducing it and so on. This should be done through emails, announcements and even in leadership meetings.

And then gradually roll it out, talking about what you are going to do, before you do it, step by step by step. Baby steps like:

1. Get leaders to log in and update a photo and adjust their privacy and communication settings: 2-3 weeks


2. Start using it for broadcast emails: 2-3 weeks

It might seem annoyingly slow. But each step will be more fully understood, more widely adopted and more effectively implemented.

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Although I probably end up at a similar conclusion, I think the logic of this common maths equation is unhelpful:

The committed church member works in their job for 40-50 hours and then works 10-15 hours for church. The minister should do at least the same amount.

I think it is unhelpful because it introduces a whole bunch of categories for thinking about ministry work: that it has to be ‘fair’ compared to a lay leader, that it is about ‘duty’ vs ‘free service’. I don’t think this perspectives are especially constructive for the mindset of the paid minister or for the lay leaders.

Moreover, I think it is misleading because the kind of work and work hours are incommensurate. School teachers get big holidays. But a mate of mine who’s a school teacher commonly responds to those who complain about this: “Well why don’t you become a teacher then?” :-)

Here are a couple of ways that the lay leaders’ 10 hours overtime for church doesn’t quite match the paid minister’s 10 hours:

1. For the lay leader, this work is a recreational and social break: finally getting to see church friends and do something that matters. For the minister this is more of their day job.


2. For the lay leader, even if it is harder stuff (doing finances for church, sitting on an elders board), there is the satisfaction of doing something that makes a lasting, eternal difference.


3. For the lay leader, church social function can be purely an enjoyable occasional, for the ministry leader even the most pleasant church social occasion has a dimension of ‘work’ to it.


4. For the lay leader, they have the free choice to invest this discretionary time with church - shouldn’t a paid minister have similar discretion to perhaps give this time to a range of causes: The Australian Kendo Renmei, political lobbying, the parent-teacher association, writing the Great Australian Novel, involvement in some parachurch ministry?

This list might not be complete, nor completely true for every paid minister or lay leader, every paid ministry or lay leadership position. But it is an example of why trying to do work out a simple analogy just doesn’t work. I suppose you could spend time and effort trying to find the closest possible analogy and get some benefit from this process. But largely I think it is a red herring, that will be both inaccurate in terms of thinking about the work and psychologically unhealthy for everyone involved.

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1. Why Shiloh likes the idea of homeschooling.


2. When meeting with a team member, make sure you regularly ask, ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?’, suggests Dave Moore. I love the Manager Tools suggestion that the first 15 minutes of every such meeting should be focussed on just that question.


3. How respectful is your Facebooking about your little kids? Will they be hurt by your comments when they are older?:
   

   Parents, before you post about your small children, imagine a 13-year-old version of them reading over your shoulder. Your child bears the image of God just as you do. Does what you communicate honor them as equal image-bearers? Does it provide short-term gratification for you or honor long-term relationship with them? Does it potentially expose them to ridicule or label them? Does it record a negative sentiment that an adult would recognize as fleeting but an adolescent might not?

   
   


4. The legacy of Keith Green. I loved that book ‘No Compromise’, but I must admit, I could never get into his Billy Joel sort of music. I could never get into Billy Joel either.


5. Ed Stetzer reminds us that the horror story of the Cleveland sex slavery kidnappings gets repeated millions of times the world over, through the sex trade.

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To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes Calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,

The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,

The pangs of disprized Love, the Law’s delay,

The insolence of Office, and the Spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his Quietus make

With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn

No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of.

Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,

And thus the Native hue of Resolution

Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard their Currents turn awry,

And lose the name of Action.

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I find doom and gloom pieces about how social media kills community and learning and small puppies annoying. There are new risks that the internet brings. But it’s silly and simplistic to invest the internet with these unique and disastrous powers.

Paul Miller spent a year offline. And this was his discovery:

As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did.

By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.

A year in, I don’t ride my bike so much. My frisbee gathers dust. Most weeks I don’t go out with people even once. My favorite place is the couch. I prop my feet up on the coffee table, play a video game, and listen to an audiobook. I pick a mindless game, like Borderlands 2 or Skate 3, and absently thumb the sticks through the game-world while my mind rests on the audiobook, or maybe just on nothing.

Tim Challies reflects:

It has long fascinated me that our technologies don’t do anything to us that we don’t want. We can say we hate the Internet or email or cell phones, but if we hated them as much as we insist, we’d do something about them. We may hate them, but we love them just a little bit more.

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From his great little book, Metroland:

There were a few private things which I didn’t confide to Toni. Actually, only one: the thing about dying. We always laughed about it, except on the rare occasions when we knew the person involved. Lucas, for instance, wing-forward int eh Thirds, was found one morning by his mother, gassed. But even then, we were more interested in the rumours than in the fact of his death. A girl friend? The family way? Unable to face the parents?

There must, I suppose have been some causal connection between the arrival in my head of the fear of the Big D, and the departure of God; but if so, it was a loose exchange, with no formal process of reasoning present. God, who had turned up in my life a decade earlier without proof or argument, got the boot for a number of reaosns, none of which, I suspect will seem wholly sufficient: the boringness of Sundays, the creeps who took it all seriously at school, Buadelaire and Rimbaud, the pleasure of blasphemy (dangerous, this one), humn-singing and organ music and the language of prayer, inability any longer to think of wanking as a sin, and - as a clincher - an unwillingness to believe that dead realtives were watching what I was doing.

So, the whole package had to go, though its loss diminished neither the boringness of Sundays nor the guilt of wanking. Within weeks, however, as if to punish me, the infrequent but paralysing horror of Big D invaded my life. I don’t claim any originality for the timing and location of my bouts of fear (when in bed, unable to sleep), but I do claim one touch of particularity. The fear of death would always arrive while I was lying on my right side, facing towards the window and the distant railway line. It would never come when I was on my left side, facing my bookshelves and the rest of the house. ONce sarted, the fear could not be diminished by simply turning over: it had to be played out to the end. To this day I have a preference for sleeping on my left side.

What was the fear life? Is t different for other people? I don’t know. A sudden, rising terror which takes you unawares; a surging need to scream, which the house rules forbid (they always do), so that you lie there with your mouth open in a trembling panic; total wakefulness, which takes an hour or so to subside; and all this as background to and symptom of the central image, part-visual, part-intellectual, of non-existence. A picture of endlessly retreating stars, taken I expect - with the crass bathos of the unconscious - from the opening credits of a Universal Pictures film; a sensation of total aloneness within your pyjamaed, shaking body; a realisation of Time (always capitalised) going on without you for ever and ever; and a persecuted sense of having been trapped into the present situation by person or persons unknown.

The fear of dying meant, of course, not the fear of dying but the fear of being dead. Few fallacies depressed me more than the line: ‘I don’t mind being dead; it’s just like being asleep. Its the dying I can’t face.’ Nothing seemed clearer to me in my nocturnal terrors than that death bore no resemblance to sleep. I wouldn’t mind Dying at all, I thought, as long as I didn’t end up Dead at the end of it.

via Blog - Christian Reflections http://genevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/quotes-about-death-1-julian-barnes (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)

Dan Godden has become a good friend of mine over the last few years. We really got to know each other during a junket to the USA in 2011. It turns out that when you order a ‘double room’ in the US it means ‘double bed’... you get to know someone well when you have hotel check in clerks thinking you’re a gay couple, and when you have to drive on the right side of the road in a foreign city while jet lagged.

ANYWAY. It’s really exciting what God is doing through Dan and his team in the Salt Church church plant in Wollongong. I can say that it would be a great ministry to be a part of and Dan would be a great guy to work with.

Maybe you should apply? (Eccles 11:1-6)

via Blog - Christian Reflections http://genevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/you-should-go-and-work-with-my-mate-dan (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)

Ministry is not best talked about in hours-worked at all really.

Ministry payment is not a wage paid on a per hour basis or a salary for a full-time or part-time job. Not really.

Better to think of ministry payment as a stipend to free someone up for the task. Any particular tasks, duties, meetings, hours that might give some form to this are very much secondary.

You are paid to be freed up to be you. You are paid to be freed up to fulfil a role. Particular tasks or particular hours are a sometimes necessary and very inadequate proxy for this.

via Blog - Christian Reflections http://genevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/ministry-work-hours-2-stipend-not-salary (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)