Engaging in Adaptive Leadership involves managing the “thermostat” of your congregation. If it’s too cold in your system, people get stuck in work avoidance. If it’s too hot in your system, people respond with a “fight, flight, freeze, or appease” response. To make progress toward transformation, we must set the system’s temperature above a threshold of learning, and then keep the temperature below the limit of tolerance. Here’s how.
Unlike technical challenges with clear, go-to solutions, adaptive challenges are about changing priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties for a compelling purpose. Solving these challenges requires deep learning to develop new tools, relationships, methods, and practices. “Adaptive leadership” is necessary for these challenges involving significant culture shifts or organizational changes that don’t come with a blueprint.
In ministry, there are often conflicting ideas about where resources should be focused or what ministries should look like. In other words, there’s a gap between our values or beliefs and the reality before us. Dale Matherly, Backstory Preaching Mentor, suggests we can look to our preaching framework for help navigating the gap and casting a vision of the future that unifies our congregations around a shared destination.
Sometimes, one small tip is powerful enough to unlock a new competency or significantly improve a skill or process. That’s why today's blog is all tips, tips, and nothing but preaching tips. As the 2021-2022 Mentorship class wraps up their program and celebrates graduation, I asked current Backstory Preaching mentors and apprentices (mentors-in-training) to offer some of their favorite preaching strategies to help you craft more effective sermons in less time—while loving the process!
Preaching multiple sermons in a short period (like Holy Week) is tough. We have to read multiple texts, research multiple texts, ponder multiple texts, pray over those texts, discern the messages, and then craft the sermons! Ack! But it doesn’t have to be that hard. Here are five simple steps to create an almost endless number of sermons messages, perfect for Holy Week or any sermon series.
Because sermon crafting by its very nature is a creative endeavor, and because ministry by nature is unpredictable, sermon prep won’t always go according to plan. There is much we can’t control about the process. But there is much more we can! We increase the odds dramatically that sermon prep will go according to plan when we do this one thing: show up. And we can increase our odds of showing up by making it as easy, hospitable, and worthwhile as possible.
Discover how to create a theme for a preaching season. Having done the hardest work of all in finding a message for the season, you’ll narrow your focus from the start. There will be far less decision-making and time spent looking for that germ of an idea. Plus, your exegesis time will be shortened because you’ll head into it with the theme mind, allowing you to focus on just the resources you need, decreasing the time spent on fruitless rabbit trails.
We may not be students at the moment, but we still face deadlines, major projects, and of course, preaching happens at a certain time every week
What I’ve learned since I was an undergrad is that study halls don’t have to be inside a library, and they become a lot more meaningful when we design them to be not only productive, but sacred.
