
12 causes of pastoral staff conflict
Tensions can get high on a pastoral staff. Chuck Lawless offers the most common reasons he's seen through years of consultation.
Tensions can get high on a pastoral staff. Chuck Lawless offers the most common reasons he's seen through years of consultation.
We are living in a day when societal acceptance of gambling is beyond anything we would have thought possible in our times. I have seen statistics that reveal there are as many as 48 states in the U.S. that have some form of legalized gambling.
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I am living in my favorite season of life so far. Last November I turned 60 years old and found myself pleasantly surprised by that reality.
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If you have been preaching long enough to have become comfortable with the rhythms of producing weekly expository sermons, you do not have to acquire some different skill set to be able to preach a good funeral sermon. If you have reached the point that you can pull together a good sermon from most places in the Bible, then you can write a good expository funeral sermon from more places in the Bible than you might realize. The sermon you preached last Sunday might easily have been developed into a funeral sermon, depending upon whose death the funeral marks.
For reasons beyond the scope of this post, my younger self went many years without reading anything not at least indirectly related to pastoral ministry or my Christian growth. Commentaries, works of theology, homiletics, and church leadership comprised the bulk of my reading. Biographies had to be missionary biographies…unless they were biographies of Christian athletes.
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of a computer or machine to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as learning, decision-making, problem-solving, and language understanding. AI systems can be trained to perform these tasks using data, algorithms, and machine learning techniques. There are several different types of AI, including narrow or weak AI, which is designed to perform a specific task, and general or strong AI, which has the ability to perform any intellectual task that a human can.