The Mission Central Blog
Resources on Effective Leadership, Emotional Health, Spiritual Growth, and Faith and Work
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There’s no silver bullet for restoring faith in our leaders, but I think that a basic principle of spiritual formation can provide clarity: Growing leadership responsibility can only be faithfully sustained by a commensurately growing depth of character. That’s how spiritual formation is relevant to our present moment. It provides a lens through which to see these cultural crises as a matter of what kind of spirit has been formed in a person, in a leader, and in a community. That spirit—that character—is what we should be looking for as we find a way forward.
One news story after another has revealed lurking cases of abuse in faith communities that, from the outside, looked vibrant and whole. These stories can be disorienting. They leave us asking difficult questions. How can I know if a new church community is a safe place? When is it right to extend my trust to the leaders of a church? If I’m serving in leadership, how can I tell whether my own community is a good place for people to find their spiritual footing?
Part of growing up in God is discovering our spiritual DNA, learning and reckoning with what we have inherited—good and bad. When we make that reckoning, we start to make a map of our distinctive spiritual heritage. Like the genome sequences, that map can help us chart new discoveries in spiritual life that bless everyone around us.
As we attempt to make our media habits prayerful, we give the Lord an opportunity to work his purposes into our apps, screens, and conversations. He can change our engagement with media from aimless or destructive to thoughtful and even spiritually fruitful. That’s the kind of experience with media that we won’t regret.
As we attempt to make our media habits prayerful, we give the Lord an opportunity to work his purposes into our apps, screens, and conversations. He can change our engagement with media from aimless or destructive to thoughtful and even spiritually fruitful. That’s the kind of experience with media that we won’t regret.
When we look at others' needs in competition with our own, it’s easy to think about life as a zero-sum game. But if the way of the cross is the way of life, then there’s a new dimension to self-sacrifice.
We can feel hurried for many different reasons. Life, work, relationships, responsibilities. There's a standard iPhone ringtone that still makes my skin crawl whenever I hear it. It was my morning alarm during a few months of intense stress when chimes signaled the start of. a cortisol-packed morning routine. Turns out, I'm not the only one familiar with that minor trauma." The hurry from that season is still with me in the feelings that ringtone invokes.
The end of the year can be heavy, both symbolically and emotionally. It's a chance to anchor ourselves in time and consider making a new start. That means the end of the year is a great opportunity for spiritual reflection. Here’s a 20-minute prayer exercise to help you bring your year to a close in the presence of God.
There might not be a clear moment of crisis when we shifted from one kind of life to another. But we can still give testimony to how God is at work in our lives. When I was in student ministry and shared my story, I discovered that people responded to genuine vulnerability and honesty more than to a slick rhetorical presentation. It wasn’t about whether I “said things right,” it was about whether what I was saying connected to who I really was as a person. When the experience of Jesus that we describe matches what others see in our lives, that’s true witness.