January 2008

Lead as You Are

After a difficult morning filled with tantrums, a sass mouth, and general disobedience from my normally lovely preschool-aged daughter, I lost it. As we walked back to the car after dropping my son at kindergarten - or I should say as I walked and she stomped through every snow drift I told her to avoid - she yelled ahead to me, "Mom, STOP! I want to be the LEADER!" ...

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Food for Thought - Jan 28 2008

I was a reporter for 12 years. One of the first things I learned in researching a story was "garbage in, garbage out." If your raw data is flawed, you end up with a faulty conclusion. The same is true with how we see ourselves. If we lack self-confidence, maybe we're working with flawed data.

The reality is, in hundreds of subtle ways, our culture, family, ...

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Top 10 Articles from 2007

This week, as I reflected on Gifted for Leadership's first year, I decided to do a little analysis. I checked back through our "traffic patterns" for the last 12 months to find the most-read articles on the blog. I though you might be interested in this information, as I was, so I've decided to share it with you. Here's a list of the Top 10 most-read articles of 2007, along ...

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Battling a Negative Self-Image

When I read through our new download for this week, I thought: Great, my first week contributing to Gifted For Leadership and we're discussing one of my nemesis: Self-image. Of course, I suppose I also could have thought: Wow! This must be a God-thing?I've learned a lot about this issue over the past year. Yes, that probably would have been the better way to approach ...

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Food For Thought - Jan 21 2008

The downside to our personal pietistic tradition in the Western church is that devotionally minded people can become lost in themselves. My spiritual development should not be just for my own sake, but for the sake of the church as well. It is the church that calls me into ministry, that confirms my ordination. It is the church that Jesus is coming for someday.

Those ...

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Engaging in 'Sustained Dialogue'

You don't have to strain your eyes to see them - the cracks that run down racial, gender and doctrinal lines, splintering the Church into a multitude of factions. We're good at conflict. Too good. We build our self-assured walls, oblivious to the tragedy we create by our divisions. At the root of our disunity is closed ears; we aren't hearing each other. In ...

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Is the Church Ready for Iron Ladies?

I have a confession to make, one that I often sheepishly keep to myself: I have very rarely felt discriminated against for being a woman, but often because I am not a certain type of woman.

I stand on the shoulders of giants who labored to make inroads for women's rights, for equal opportunity in our culture, our workforce, our political system, and our churches. ...

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Food for Thought - Jan 14 2008

The New Testament writers adopted agape as the standard word for love. We think this means that agape must also have some softer meanings besides sacrifice, death on a cross, giving away our possessions, and giving our body to be burned. But agape didn't make the Cross; the Cross made agape. The Cross isn't a subset of agape; agape is a subset of the Cross. The ...

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Reproducing What We Are

"We will reproduce what we are." That statement, made by Wayne Cordiero at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2006, proved to be a turning point for me as a leader. Like most leaders, my type-A, high-capacity leadership gifting has me traveling pretty fast most of the time. If I'm honest with myself, I tend to like it that way. After listening to Wayne's ...

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Confrontational Compassion

Donald P. McNeill in Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life offers a profound perspective: "Honest, direct confrontation is a true expression of compassion... The illusion of power must be unmasked, idolatry must be undone, oppression and exploitation must be fought, and all who participate in these evils must be confronted. This is compassion." Not quite ...

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