Ministry Opportunities For 59 Year Olds

What a great way to start this day…

*Well, it’s not really the “start” of my day. The start of my day was (per usual) wrangling two small children, bundling them in layers and layers of winter clothes, and driving them up to daycare (while singing our ABC’s at the top of our voices).

But once that was all sorted, I settled in in front of my laptop, opened my web stats site (I use GetClicky.com because it shows real time stats) and saw that I someone found Kingdom Strategist by searching Google for:

“ministry opportunities for 59 year olds”

Let it sink in for a...

Planning the Next Phase of Haitian Relief

The devastation of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (and the 49 magnitude 4.5 or greater aftershocks) is heart-wrenching. The pictures of the damage… of the hurt and suffering experienced by the people there… of the chaos of a massive world effort to provide the basics: emergency care and medicine, food, shelter, security… are haunting. (Click the following links to see pictures from January 13th , January 18th, January 22nd, and February 1st. WARNING: the images are graphic.)

According to a...

The Pending Squirrel/Human War Is No Laughing Matter

You may have thought I was joking when I wrote about the human/squirrel conflicts that defined the last decade. But believe me, this is serious.

News broke today that the conflict in Walnut Creek, CA has escalated to such levels that the local government has resorted to unconventional methods for annihilating the squirrel population. According to East Bay News:

There are squirrels everywhere and doing damage, but the people would rather see them plucked from the sky than be poisoned on the ground. Beth...

Online Excellence Conversations – DJ Turner of Denver Seminary

As part of the Excellence in Online Ministry research project, I have gotten to speak with a number of thought leaders in the area of online ministry. Recently I spoke with DJ Turner, Director of Communications for Denver Seminary and she shared with me about their challenges and success in leveraging the web to serve their broad audience. DJ provided tremendous insight into how strategically approaching your online activities can help a ministry to be excellent. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

In your experience, how does research contribute to online excellence? I think research is very important for ministries to be excellent online. I wish I had more time for it because it’s so important. If you don’t know where your audience is, you can’t achieve excellence. Having an understanding of where...

Strategy Principles – Simplicity

In order to be effective, good strategy must be simple.

Simple to understand.

Simple to communicate.

Simple to execute.

As strategists, our job is to achieve simplicity while not sacrificing the quality in our content or purpose. We are the ones who lead people to the simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity.

Today’s Management Tip of the Day from the Harvard Business Review presents three C’s to help you and your organization eliminate complexity and achieve simplicity:

Collaboration. Silos are the enemy of simplicity. Work across the organization to identify where the complexity is and together improve the way business is done. Coordination. Smooth coordination is critical to finding simple solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve. Communication. Once you’ve gotten rid...

Some Thoughts on Leadership

Gabe Taviano, founder of DigitalDisciples.net and all around good dude, recently posted a few things about his struggles with leadership. I can appreciate where he’s coming from and recommend you check him out. His posts (here and here) have agitated something that’s been brewing inside of me for awhile and instead of hijacking his blog, I thought I’d address it here.

Why Leadership is Not the Same as Kingdom Influence

I personally have never been comfortable when people (especially Christians) emphasize leadership and focus on the discipline of leadership.

To me, when you focus on leadership outside of the context of...

Excellence in Online Ministry Project

Update: The project has officially been named the Excellence in Online Ministry project. You can follow the progress of the research at the State of Ministry Online website. The results will be presented later this year at the Christian Leadership Alliance’s Ministry Internet and Technology Summit and later at the NRB’s