Matt Tebbe

A few years ago I had the unusual freedom to attend a Christmas Eve service I wasn’t leading. In fact, it wasn’t in my home church at all. I was visiting friends and family out of town and attended a large, well-known church in their area for Christmas Eve.

But it wasn’t a great experience, unfortunately. It was all I could do to make it through without surrendering my Christmas spirit.

[Read more…] about How (Not) to Preach on Christmas Eve

In a previous post, we talked about two pitfalls of leadership: Top-down, hierarchical leadership and Bottom-up, flat leadership. Each exists in an imaginative construct on opposite ends of a binary. Each sees power as a zero-sum game, a scarce resource either to hoard or disown. In this unhelpful paradigm, power is abusive. We must limit it (checks and balances in top-down leadership) or actively work to mitigate against it (no one is in charge in bottom-up leadership). [Read more…] about Center-Out Leadership: A New Framework For the Church

One of the simplest instructions Jesus gave his disciples came during the last supper before his crucifixion:

“You are not to be like that.”

[Read more…] about 2 Ways We Get Leadership Wrong in the Church

One of the skills we train people to practice in our coaching is compassionate curiosity about ourselves, God, and others in discipleship.

Cultivating a genuine curiosity at the core of our being is vital if we want to grow and mature as followers of Jesus. Without curiosity, we become rigid ideologues seeking data to confirm our existing biases. Without curiosity, we cannot grow as disciples of Jesus.

[Read more…] about Why Compassionate Curiosity is Vital For Discipleship