April 2005

I read an article in Fast Company magazine about a year ago that really challenged my thinking about the ministry of the local church. The brief article included a list of the ten make-or-break questions businesses needed to address in order to be successful...

Pastor Wayde Goodall hoped God would do great things in the First Assembly of God church of Winston-Salem, N.C., during  40 Days of Purpose . He wasn’t disappointed. The church started 80 new small groups during the six-week campaign, while care...

There are two ways to learn to become a great leader: Watch a great leader or watch a terrible leader. Watching good leaders motivates you to emulate them. Bad leaders show you the mistakes you must avoid. The lessons I learned through my mistakes have...

"Having a clear faith, according to the credo of the church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. Yet relativism -- that is, letting oneself be carried here and there by any wind of doctrine -- appears as the sole attitude good enough for modern times...

We’re a piled-on, stretched-to-the limit society. Pastors especially are chronically rushed, chronically late, chronically exhausted. Many of us feel like Job did when he said, “I have no peace. I have no quiet. I have no rest and trouble keeps coming.” We have too much activity in our lives, too much change, too many choices, too much work, too much debt, too much media exposure. Most of us are far more overloaded than we can handle, and there is no margin for error in our lives.

Is there a solution? Yes. The solution is to put some margin into your life. Here are four immediate benefits you will enjoy when you begin to build margin into your life ...
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“She plans the day's work. She has no fear of winter for her household, for she has made warm clothes for all of them. She watches carefully all that goes on throughout her household.” (Proverbs 31:15b, 21, 27, LB) Family is important to God and the...

"Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, 'Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.' So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place...

Margin provides a prescription against the danger of overloaded lives. Focusing on margin in four key areas – emotional energy, physical energy, time, and finances -- Richard Swenson offers an overall picture of health that employs contentment, simplicity...