Are you receiving Pastor Rick's weekly message? Are you receiving the Epiphany STAR, our monthly newsletter? Find out how to stay connected through these and other exciting ways by entering your email address above!
In a postmodern culture shaped by baby boomer values and marked by a consumerist approach to nearly everything, it’s little wonder that there is much confusion about who and what the church is supposed to be in the 21st century. According to Pastor Rick Barger, “the church too often comes off, or is perceived as, some sort of spiritual version of a community recreation center, simply offering up programs and experiences to meet people’s needs.” In this contemporary situation, congregations are increasingly put in the position of offering a deal (membership in exchange for salvation), a cause (becoming a sort of religious activist organization), or a service (playing chaplain for life transitions). To many people, joining a church is simply the “icing on the cake” to complement their already full lives.
In A New and Right Spirit, Barger argues passionately for congregations to reexamine what it means to be an “authentic church” in a culture where authenticity is hard to come by. He demonstrates the pitfalls of technical solutions to congregational problems and shows the way to making adaptive change. As the key to congregational transformation he boldly reclaims and lifts up an ecclesiological vision of the church as a “witness to the resurrection.” Recognizing the spiritual needs of a success-oriented society, he exhorts leaders to turn away from the story of our culture and to return to the story of the church, which is grounded in Christ and the resurrection. Driven by that authentic story, the church becomes a powerful witness to God’s love for all and an effective minister to the needs of the world. Foreword by Mark Allan Powell.
Crucial Conversations
Tools for Talking When Stakes are High By: Patterson, Kerry Grenny, Joseph McMillan, Ron Switzler, Al Click Here to Purchase Online
"Most books make promises. This one delivers. These skills have not only helped us to change the culture of our company, but have also generated new techniques for working together in ways that enabled us to win the largest contract in our industry's history."--Dain M. Hancock, President, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.
A powerful, seven-step approach to handling difficult conversations with confidence and skill
"Crucial" conversations are interpersonal exchanges at work or at home that we dread having but know we cannot avoid. How do you say what needs to be said while avoiding an argument with a boss, child, or relationship partner? Crucial Conversations offers readers a proven seven-point strategy for achieving their goals in all those emotionally, psychologically, or legally charged situations that can arise in their professional and personal lives. Based on the authors' highly popular DialogueSmart training seminars, the techniques are geared toward getting people to lower their defenses, creating mutual respect and understanding, increasing emotional safety, and encouraging freedom of expression. Among other things, readers also learn about the four main factors that characterize crucial conversations, and they get a powerful six-minute mastery technique that prepares them to work through any highimpact situation with confidence.
Does life in the suburbs kill our souls? Without a spiritual focus we start acting as if the world's highest priorities are a perfect lawn, a daughter on the honor roll, and A son's victories in soccer. David Goetz shows that the suburbs are a real world, but a spiritually dead one.
For many busy American suburbanites, attending to one's spiritual life has become just another box to check off the daily to-do list. We heed the call to join committee after committee and are promised that the more time and energy we give to the church community, the closer we will feel to God. But although we seem to have it all together, with our yards perfectly manicured, our children's homework done, and the items for the church clothing drive folded neatly in plastic bags, we find that our suburban spirituality and religious life seem as artificially flavored as soda pop.
This book is a wake-up call to suburbanites who have put their spiritual life on cruise control and let the caffeine-driven culture of speed wreak havoc on their relationship with God. Combining witty anecdotes and a suburban insider's sometimes surreal experience, Goetz offers eight spiritual disciplines that can help you create what he calls a "thicker spiritual life" without having to leave your cul-de-sac comfort zone. Whether it means creating room for the ancient traditions of stillness and silent meditation or battling the hyper-competition that breeds in the suburbs, Goetz spells out concrete methods for nurturing the spiritual life amidst the noise and routine of daily suburban experience.
Open the door to any church in America and you'll find once-enthusiastic Christians just going through the motions. Some have even abandoned the Body. Dan Schaeffer diagnoses this spiritual defection as a subtle heart issue: If our primary motivation for Christian service has become approval from others, we're on the road to faking church. Schaeffer deftly explores the common traps that seduce believers into becoming spiritual fakes and prescribes ways to adjust our fellowship and our lives so that the Holy Spirit can create in us a genuine servant's heart. Timely and provocative, "Faking Church" has the power to transform the body.
A Powerful Road Map for Surpassing Everyone’s Expectations
Break through your self-imposed limitations by learning how your own brain can be your biggest obstacle—or your greatest ally.
You’d expect your brain to be an always-reliable ally in your quest for a successful, satisfying life, but surprisingly the opposite is usually true. That’s because your brain is pretty much the same model your ancestors were using thousands of years ago when mere survival was everyone’s primary goal. It tells you now what it told them then: Play it safe. Avoid risk. Evade confrontation. Don’t venture outside the territory you already know. And never break the habits that have gotten you this far.
Coming at just the right time to help you deal with the growing demands of our pressure-packed, fast-changing world, Robert Cooper’s Get Out of Your Own Way helps you understand what’s going on in that head of yours. Once you know what really drives you, you can switch off the counterproductive parts of your brain, engage the helpful parts, and set out on the path to accomplishing what everyone else thinks you can’t. Based on more than two decades of worldwide research, Get Out of Your Own Way shows you the five keys for making the choices that let you engage and triumph over the realities of today’s world:
• Direction, not motion
• Focus, not time
• Capacity, not conformity
• Energy, not effort
• Impact, not intentions
Filled with wonderful stories—about everything from the note written by one of the author’s ancestors upon leaving Dublin for America in 1829 (“On the horizon is where hope lives . . . I am going there”) to the unlikely exploits of the world record–setting Jamaican bobsled team—this groundbreaking book confirms that the next frontier is not only ahead of you, it’s inside of you . . . and what everyone else thinks is impossible isn’t.
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.
The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
You know what the leading causes of death are. But have you ever thought about the Leading Causes of Life? The Leading Causes of Life helps guide us through that question. The five leading causes apply to individuals, churches, and even hospitals that care about life. If you have ever cared for others; looked for meaning; stepped out in faith; found hope when life looked hopeless; or been changed by a blessing, you will appreciate this book.
Have you ever wondered how different our worship experience is from those who walked with God through the pages of Scripture? Here's your chance to learn from people like Isaiah, Job, David, Hannah and others who lived their worship of God. This biblical guide to authentic worship will lift you out of the petty concerns of the "worship wars" raging in many churches today and transport you into the very heart of worship—giving you the tools for establishing a lifestyle of worship and intimacy with God.
Expect to be challenged, enlightened, surprised, and encouraged as you travel through the Scriptures in anticipation of being transformed—in mind and heart—by Living Worship.
Includes discussion questions for individual or group study.
Synopsis:
This thought-provoking book exposes the chaos and pressure of “normal” living and points toward a better life where community and church are authentic, rich, and as close as the neighbors on your street.
Description: What If You Could . . .
•get all your work done by 6:00 p.m.? •eat dinner with your family every night? •form deep, satisfying relationships? •naturally blend the world of church with your everyday life?
•spend hours a week on your hobbies?
You can! Making Room for Life reveals how to make all of these things a reality. Not by working faster or having more gadgets, but by simply choosing a lifestyle of conversation and community over a lifestyle of accumulation.
Randy Frazee’s practical, motivating insights call you back to the kind of relationships and life rhythms you were created to enjoy. In Making Room for Life, Frazee shows you how—and why it’s so important—to balance work and play, establish healthy boundaries, deal with children’s activities and homework, bring Jesus to your neighbors, and build authentic bonds with a circle of close friends.
Share these insights with those around you and help usher in an amazing transformation: your life and the lives of others blooming, in the midst of the chaos and fragmentation of today’s culture, into communities of purpose and peace.
Cast a vision, set a strategy, rally the troops, and take the hill—you don’t need another book to rehash the well-worn principles of modern leadership. But if you’re looking for something different, something that . . . approaches leadership as an art as well as a science inspires hope and expectation in those of us who aren’t born leaders challenges those with leadership roles to explore new possibilities
. . . then Leonard Sweet wants to help you discover a very different kind of leadership vision. It’s one you hear if your ears are open, and it could summon you at any time. When you respond, the puzzle pieces of who you are will fit together into a leader others follow because you’ve answered a call, not trained for a position.
“The church has it all wrong. It is trying to train leaders. Instead, it ought to train everyone to listen and to develop their own soundtrack.”
Leaders don’t see a vision, says Sweet, they hear one. “Sound becomes
sight. Leaders hear life.”
For a sonogram of “acoustic leadership,” Sweet takes us inside the incredible account of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the celebrated polar explorer who led his entire crew of twenty-seven from disaster in the Antarctic to safety. Called “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none,” Shackleton objectifies the goals of Sweet’s own exploration in search of wisdom for today and tomorrow’s truly compelling, voice-activated leaders.
Right now, you may be leading many people or just yourself. But who knows what tomorrow—or a minute from now—will call forth in you. Are your ears open?
We are all, as Erwin Raphael McManus states, broken pieces of the image of God. And as Christians, too often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.
The reason is simple: we ourselves have never been radically transformed. McManus explains how many people unknowingly block God from changing us and teaches readers the "texture of the heart" required to unleash God's transforming power within us. He also demonstrates the passion and purpose that lie ahead when we undertake the journey that leads us to the true source, the very character of God. Fascinating stories from McManus's personal life and ministry, paired with fresh biblical teaching and profound insights, will astonish and challenge readers to break free from negative habits, destructive emotions, and other strongholds that hinder lasting transformation and to turn toward a life marked by enlightenment, nobility, and virtue.
By: Rick Barger
