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How Much Truth Can They Handle?

December 7, 2020 by Admin

I’ve been mulling a bit lately on T-units, also known as truth units. It’s a concept I learned from Sunlife many years ago. The idea being that when you provide a teaching in a ministry setting, you are communicating a unit of truth. A good talk or presentation really has one focal point.

A lot of talks, if you look at them, actually have many points. I’ve noticed a lot of sermons lately actually often would work as two sermons. There’s so much content in there and they’re pretty long. A lot of sermons I’m seeing these days are 45-50 minutes long, and I think it’s important to note that there’s not a lot of preachers who can do it for 45 or 50 minutes and do it well.

Of Course It’s a Tough Job

November 30, 2020 by Admin

As I continue to wade through my notes from the past, I came across another talk full of nuggets. This is a talk from John Ortberg way from the Global Leadership Summit of 2002. Now this is a talk he gave on the seduction of a leader and there were some great one-liners in there that caught my attention as I reviewed this and wanted to highlight both for myself and for you.

He started by asking the question, when does God in scripture ever give anyone an easy job? It’s funny that we sometimes think when stuff is tough, we must be not where we’re supposed to be. But when you’re in leadership, it’s going to be tough and it’s going to be ideally over your head. You’re going to be facing things that you can’t handle in your own strength, which is actually the way it is when God calls us to something. A quote from Max Dupree, “Never insult anyone by giving them an easy job.” Again, the whole point in leadership, God doesn’t give easy tasks.

Are You Being True To Yourself?

November 23, 2020 by Admin

We’ve come to the end of another transitional role in the community after being here almost two years. We’ll have been here 23 months when all is said and done. In preparation for a move we’ve been shedding, whatever we can shed and I’ve been continuing to scan documents. I’ve dropped another file box worth of documents just in the last weekend.

I came across a file of documents which I’d actually already scanned, but hadn’t tossed out because I wanted to read them through again. These are documents from conferences and sermon notes I’ve done, but they were so good I didn’t want to chuck them out yet, so I’ve been reading them through again and taking more notes as I think about them.

Morning Routine

November 17, 2020 by Admin

One of the things that has helped me maintain at least some sense of level headedness in unsettled times of this past year has been a fairly consistent morning routine. It’s not a rigorous morning routine, but it’s a pattern of the way I do my first part of the day that doesn’t really change no matter what’s going on.

Podcasts Worth Checking Out

November 4, 2020 by Admin

Welcome back to the Priority Pastor blog post. I’d like to highlight for you some of the podcasts I listen to that I think are worth checking out, especially if you are in ministry, though they’re not all ministry podcasts.

Overall, I subscribe to 33 different podcasts. Some I listen to every single new episode and some I just selectively listen to based on the topic. Others I save for road trips because they’re so good to listen to on the highway and they help the time fly by. I’ve got a selection of marketing, ministry and news-related podcasts, as well as more general interest kind of podcasts.