Past boldness is no assurance of future boldness. Boldness demands continual reliance on God's spirit.
All Scripture is equally inspired, but not all Scripture is equally applicable or relevant to every stage of life.
Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible - that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.
The church wasn't an organization in the first century. They weren't writing checks or buying property. The church has matured and developed over the years. But for some reason, the last thing to change is the structure of leadership.
Communicators need to figure out how well do they engage people, and they should not talk one word longer than people are engaged.
The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.
You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.
Preaching on Sunday mornings is such a simple thing, and by complicating it, I think we all do ourselves and the audience a disservice. It is very simple. Here is the model: Make people feel like they need an answer to a question.
As a pastor, I've spent 30 years talking to people and heard every kind of story imaginable.
Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.
Success means your options multiply. Size increases complexity, and complexity can confuse vision.
If you're a preacher's kid, you see the church differently.
Preachers prepare with this fear: 'Am I going to be able to fill the time?' The audience never worries about that.
God is a God of systems and predictability and order, and God honors planning.
When a plan or strategy fails, people are tempted to assume it was the wrong vision. Plans and strategies can always be changed and improved. But vision doesn't change. Visions are simply refined with time.
Somehow, what's in our hearts, good or bad is eventually translated into words and deeds.
