How's your vision?

Is your vision big? Is it gigantic? Is it growing larger every day? If not, you may need a "vision inflater." What is a vision inflater? It can be a lot of things. Usually, it's looking at the next guy's vision and knowing that yours is just a little bit better. Maybe a lot better.
More and more, leaders and visionaries are thinking outside the moxie.
These days, a vision inflater can be a book by a mega-author, a deep discussion session with your creative team, a purchase of new church management software -- or, most helpful of all, a pastor or leader's conference. Nothing recharges, relaunches and repacks vision like an expensive, but worthwhile, conference. So, if your vision needs glasses, look around and find a vision inflater. It will be worth your time.
If Church Leader Alive! is your choice, register soon.

Leadership vacuum explodes once again

When will the average congregation learn that the greatest need in the church is the need for leaders?  Because of this great lack, the sheep will just keep circling the still waters and getting lost in the green pastures. Fortunately, experts are up to the task. High level experts and savvy, intuitive experts. They are ready to offer a "comprehensive approach to help churches facilitate the emergence of a leadership development 'culture' within their church."


The apostles were the first to facilitate emergences. They facilitated emergences and developed cultures like you wouldn't believe, and they didn't even have the help of a "leadership baton" training program like we do today. Imagine what the disciples could have accomplished if they had been gifted with the "vision," "process," and "implementation" for THEIR development pathways.

The leadership vacuum continues to explode. Sometimes, it explodes in immunological ways.
Occasionally, it explodes in functional ways. And in agricultural ways. Sometimes in excavationary ways. The explosion sometimes comes from striding over land mines, resulting in orthopedic leadership vacuums.

In whatever ways these exploding vacuums come, though, the resulting carnage signals bad news for the church.

Sermon on the Move

We all know Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Heh. No, we don’t. Well, sort of we do, but don’t quiz us on it, okay? Because our God is a creative God, and he wants us to be like Him, we should be coming up with our own sermons on the mounts. And because this is a new age and a new day, our ideas need to be new, too. His ideas were radical for his time, and ours need to be, too.
What’s YOUR sermon on the mount? Here’s ours, gathered from the best and most relevant and missional church sites available today.

1. Be Willing to Risk Time, Energy, Manpower and Money to an Idea (especially manpower) as long as you risk other people in making good ideas come to life, no problem.

2. We must exercise our responsibility to tend our own souls. It’s important to tend our own souls because if we don’t, who will?

3. To show honor to leaders is to treat them as being special because in reality that’s what they are. God has placed them in a unique position over you. Jesus honored Caiaphas and Annas, and we should likewise honor our superiors.

4. As the modern church strives to be relevant to a modern generation, I think it is important to remain focused on God and His spirit as the Decider-in-Chief of our collective mission. This is a great point. We should let the Holy Spirit have some say every once in a while, between leadership conferences.

5. All church starts with a very small group of people - sometimes even just a person - with a vision - and then should go global as fast as possible. Don’t forget the vision part. The vision part is THE most important part.

6. You never know when a game-changing blip will appear on the radar screen of your life. No. The game could change at any moment and we gotta be ready. My radar screen is showing a cold front moving in from the west. What does yours show?

7. Too many people both in and out of the church seem to have a vision that is unmovable. Movable vision. That’s what it’s all about. Do you have a fixed stare? The disciples didn’t. Their vision was moving all the time. Get a move on with that vision!

Feeling pumped? Time to be creative. Climb a mountain, or skate park hill, and come up with your own. It's easy!