Church Leadership and Adminstration

Conflict manager or expert, writer Dana Caspersen’s book Changing the Conversation: The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution gave a valuable “principle” material for this generation. There is no doubt that every person has conflicting areas and challenges in everyday life, it triggers our inactive strongest emotions, sheers and shakes the rage and ego and so and so forth. This book is all about “changing the conversation,” and converting it into “moment of opportunity” with merely “17 principles.” This book is written in gender-neutral context to make it applicable to the present corporate world or even any level of management organizations. This book is published in a dialogue model like one is dialoguing with other, namely “conflict” with “non-conflict.” This book designer, Joost Elffers call this model as “horizontal production” meaning running two sides in the same equation with equality, in this case, it is “the principles” and “anti-principles.”

Reviewing this book is to abuse it. Not that the following is an abusive review. Tony Payne and Col Marshall have followed-up their earlier The Trellis and the Vine with its bigger and beefier brother The Vine Project: Shaping your ministry culture around disciple making. The Vine Project is crucially a 'project' and not a 'book.' It is itself a 'trellis,' a gospel-trellis, designed to support and enable gospel disciple making in our churches. It's really a project that needs to be reflected upon and implemented, rather than a book to be merely read and reviewed. Now I need to not only confess that by only reading the book I'm breaking Tony and Col's own recommendation, but I also have to confess to have never read The Trellis and the Vine in the first place, despite having had an accusing copy sitting on my practical ecclesiology shelf, along with a number of other unread practical ecclesiology texts. The Vine Project is an implementation manual for developing a church 'culture' and the relevant church structures that promote the work of the gospel, from making initial contact with the lost, through to multiplying disciples. For those who don't know their earlier work, The Trellis and the Vine was a bit of a runaway bestseller amongst broadly reformed and conservative evangelicals in North America. A book that put on paper ideas and practices honed at St. Matthias, UNSW's Campus Bible Study, and other related ministries in Australia, found itself and its authors transplanted into a scene where many of these ideas and practices had few precursors. The theology of "Trellis and Vine" was familiar and persuasive, but their practice

Leadership is a crucial thing in every organization and in the society at large. The growth and achievement of any organization is directly proportional to the quality of the leaders it has.  Leadership pattern and methods may differ from place to place. But the principles are the same. However, this paper shall attempts to look briefly in to the following: what is leadership, types of leadership, qualities of a good leader, methods of leadership in the church today and conclusion.

At times in Christian churches in North America, pastors and clergy are asked to resign from their positions.  While there are certainly honorable reasons for doing so (such as in the case of persistent false doctrine, or if the pastor has a scandalous and immoral life), there are also reasons that may not be as honorable.  In addressing pastoral retention in congregations, however, rather than addressing the question in a man-centered approach, the question should begin by a God-centered approach according to Holy Scripture.  This paper addresses whether or not it pleases God according to Holy Scripture, and also according to the Lutheran Confessions as the correct understanding of Holy Scripture, for a congregation to ask their pastor to resign from his divine call.

As a global Wesleyan-Holiness denomination coming of age in the twentieth century, the Church of the Nazarene has both dramatically confronted and yet largely complied with the emerging hegemony of both federated and nation states, particularly across North America. For all the introspection scholars and church leaders have done leading up to the denominational centenary and following, we have yet to address how the Church of the Nazarene has come to organize itself administratively, especially in declaring district boundaries. Moreover, we have yet to account for how such geo-logistical decisions support or otherwise hinder the church’s local mission. In this paper, we analyze the paradigm shift from organizing districts creatively around urban centers to more arbitrarily dividing districts along geopolitical lines, especially state/provincial lines within the USA and Canada. The former practice was directly aligned with the mission, as P. F. Bresee put it, to “evangelistic and city mission work.” The latter development, however, demonstrates the extent to which the denomination lost sight of that initial, proximal impetus. Instead, the Church of the Nazarene succumbed to a subversive, even if unintended, Manifest Destiny of its own—a colonial, imperialistic agenda in service to “spreading of the doctrine and experience of Christian holiness” divorced from the cities where it took root. Therefore, we suggest new ways the Church of the Nazarene may exercise a prophetic imagination in revising the organization of districts, zones, fields, regions, and other geographically realized administrative areas. That is, as an act of confronting hegemonic structures with which the church has been so complicit and, in turn, recapturing the original vision for a church organized around people rather than in service to political powers.

At the ordination (Gr. χειροτονία) of every elected bishop (Gr. ἐπίσκοπος), the entire church community (clergy and laity) usually makes an acclamation and exclaims “worthy” (Gr. ἄξιος), showing its approval and love towards the new hierarch, father (Gr. πατήρ), master (Gr. δεσπότης), and chief shepherd (Gr. ποιμενάρχης). However, many people would justifiably wonder: How does the Church develop its clergy leaders; i.e., how does the Church prepare and train potential candidates for that ‘top’, vital and honorable office in Church hierarchy? Has the Holy Synod identified and elected, indeed, the ‘right’ and the ‘best’ person for episcopacy? How can the flock trust that their elected, and later ordained, chief shepherd is ‘worthy’? Is he worthy because of the necessary moral, intellectual, spiritual, social, and pastoral competencies and qualities that he had acquired and achieved? How are these competencies and qualities assessed? What do the previous experiences and achievements tell about the candidate for episcopacy? How does the Holy Synod, and others if needed, observe the candidates and get objective feedback about them? Is there a well-developed and clear questionnaire that covers a wide range of dimensions and criteria? Do the candidates do self-assessment? If yes, how? Obviously, the answers to these questions are very few; thus, it is of utmost importance to critically examine the vital role of the bishop in the Orthodox Church at various levels, ecclesiastical, organizational and social. Hence, reforming the office of the bishop must be a primary task in the contemporary life of the Church. Accordingly, the intent of this short paper is twofold: (1) to objectively reflect on the leadership of the bishop in modern times, and (2) to analyze the leadership development of the bishop and its modern aspects, methods, and processes.

Încercare de sinteză, în special biblică, a principiilor bunei-credințe și a buneivoințe, în practica păstorilor bisericii și a păstoriților lor.
Sinthesis of how goodfaith and goodwill affect church life
Published (a little abridged) in ”Hai cu noi”, publicație a Parohiei ortodoxe ”Sf. Voievozi” Săvinești, an 2015, iunie, nr. 22, pp. 46-48; an 2015, iulie, nr. 23, pp. 48-52 and an 2015, august, nr. 24, pp. 56-60.

Whitepaper for Remissioning a Local Southern Baptist Association Through Enhancing the Role of the Director of Mission. Details how a DOM should serve the association in order to see every man, woman, and child in the association's area have repeated opportunities to see, hear, and respond to the gospel of Jesus. Also provides a strategic plan for remissioning an association's office.

Patriarchal ecumenical homophony

ABSTRACT: The establishment in 2019 of a new Ukrainian autocephaly raises the question of the legal basis of exclusive Constantinopolitan canonical prerogatives. As is known, after the Edict of Thessalonica of 380, can. cost. 3 of 381 attributes the Roman prerogatives to the bishop of Constantinople-Νεα Ρωμη.The ethnarchical religious role, assumed by the Roman bishop, guardian of the Romanitas, (conceived as the apostolic heritage of the Roman church), determines the Eastern emperors to confer the patriarchal title (previously reserved for the Jewish etnarch of Palestine), to Roman pope and ecumenical patriarch, to the bishop of Constantinople, which became the only seat of the imperium.The Justinian articulation of the ecclesiastical order comes to highlight in the homophony of patriarchs the attestation of the unity, doctrinal and disciplinary, in the Church of the ecumenical empire. Therefore, today's panorthodox reception of Ukrainian autocephaly cannot be considered an ecclesial burden due to the universal canonical authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople. Consequently, the primates cannot accept it in the name of the respective autocephalous Church, in contrast with canon 34. In respect of the nomocanonical tradition, today's Ukrainian controversy must therefore be submitted to the assembly of patriarchs in order to reach a canonical unanimous (homophone) solution to the controversy.