The Poison of Costly Narcissism

This article puts its finger on a real poison, to which gospel ministers are not immune.

Those selected for development have one universal trait in common: They are by definition high achievers. But there is a difference between those superstar achievers that can make the leap to CEO and those that will implode: To what degree do they feel invigorated by the success and talent of others, and to what degree does the success of others cause an involuntary pinch of insecurity about their own personal inadequacies?

On a related note: I'm not such a fan of their suggested appeal to self-interest as cure. I think there's a better way.

Together, on Singleness

Last night a dozen or so of us gathered at the church office for a ministrylab on the topic of Singleness. It's one of those tricky topics, I reckon--singleness is viewed with such suspicion by many these days, but the topic has our 'hearts', big time.

One of the stories that came out quite clearly was the significance that single people have in the lives of married people, and that married people have in the lives of single people. That's why singleness is a topic for our whole church: because we love one another in community. As long as we reduce 'singleness' to merely 'coping with singleness', or 'the problem of singleness', then of course we'll leave it to single people to figure out amongst themselves. Rather, we'd do well to honour singleness as a legitimate, intelligible, and even good way of being in the world--and that's a call to married people as much as to anyone.

Kudos to the married people who came along :)

You'll find the notes to the ministrylab here.

Segue in Story Telling

Last night I listened to this address from Ken Robinson at the School of Life, last March.

From a public-speaking point of view, the thing that stood out to me was the strength of each segue between stories. It seems to me that the mainline--so to speak--of his lecture was very short. He spent most of his time exploring one digression after another. And he waffled, rambled, occasionally stumbled around looking for the right way to say something.

But here's the thing: his segue from digression-to-mainline was seamless every time. He did not miss a beat *there*. His pace, his wording, were bang-on at those points.

And so I never felt that the address had lost its way, which is pretty remarkable for what was almost an hour telling stories.

Very Early Manuscripts. Like.

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog has just linked to a quick interview with Dan Wallace regarding recently discovered manuscripts of the Gospels and Paul. It's less than 4 minutes long and worth a listen.

Still have to wait until 2013 before they're published, though.

I should probably say: I'm not expecting anything dramatic in those manuscripts. More likely, we're talking about adding to the already vast wealth of evidence we have for the reliability of our Scriptures. But they *are* early (or so Wallace says), which is nice.

Bargains Galore.

Ok, not actually 'Galore'. One bargain, to be more precise.

I grabbed a book from the 'markdown' section at Koorong today. $3. When I got to the counter I was informed that all markdowns are a further 50% off.

$1.50 for a copy of Mother Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love'.

Crazy mystics at crazy prices.

How Cool is their Swag Bag?!

I've had my eye on the 99% for a while now. They've just had another of their conferences this week. And their swag bag caught my eye, as well as my imagination.

I reckon it would be cool if...

• My church produced a grab-quote video for occasional post-church display, featuring the most incisive Christian thinkers of our day.
• FOCUS produced an infographic poster blending info on Christianity/Church/Tasmania.
• Uni Fellowship produced an infographic of the Christian life at uni, with a slightly activist bent.
• Uni Fellowship produced a grab-quote video engaging with typical defeater beliefs in Hobart.
• My church produced a grab-quote video of testimonial Christian-growth mini-stories.
• My church produced business-card sized info cards on ministries we partner with (all on one card)--just the barest of details, and with our own brand graphics.
• We updated the graphics on our lanyards (we're still back in 2006 there--they've dodged all our updates!).

Brushing-up on Email Use

Email is a key communication tool for the ministry teams at Crossroads. So that's one place I'm investing a bit of effort right now: helping our teams with best practices.

Best practices with email go way beyond basic etiquette, of course. And it's stuff that deserves a regular brush-up, too.

Here are two helpful articles (via Communicate Jesus) to cast your eyes over, if you're due for a tune up:

• How to improve your email etiquette - all about the ABCs.
• How to send a personal email - 'personal', that is, rather than 'raw information exchange'.

Both are a little dated, but remain current in their essence.

If you've got a go-to email etiquette article, I'd love to hear about it :)