The church seemed to always be fighting someone \u2013 city zoning office, neighborhood association, building contractors, other churches, etc. Once I asked the pastor about such fights and his reply was to the effect that if he could keep his church members busy fighting an outside entity, they wouldn\u2019t turn on him. One day they ran out of outside targets and turned on the pastor. His strategy proved to be effective but short-term. The culture of this particular church was one of survival fighting. It fed their purpose for existing. The late management consultant, Peter Drucker was famous for saying, \u201cCulture eats strategy for breakfast.\u201d In this case, the church\u2019s DNA of always needing someone to fight, caused them to turn on their pastor and his strategy. May I propose another strategy? How about focus in the place of fight? How about, \u201cSeek first the kingdom of God . . .\u201d (Matthew 6:33)? How about, \u201cLooking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith . . .\u201d (Hebrews 12:2). It seems to me that focusing on Jesus rather than fighting a common enemy, is a better way to grow the kingdom of God.<\/p>\n
Join me this week in remembering the following global concerns:
\n\u2022 Pray for Poltava to see two sports camps (along with 2 parallel VBS camps) this week in two areas of Poltava, Ukraine.
\n\u2022 Pray for the workshop in North Africa\u2013that each group would learn and understand despite the multiple translations.
\n\u2022 Pray for International World changers and others who are working in the World Cup Ministry this week in Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The church seemed to always be fighting someone \u2013 city zoning office, neighborhood association, building contractors, other churches, etc. Once I asked the pastor about such fights and his reply was to the effect that if he could keep his church members busy fighting an outside entity, they wouldn\u2019t turn on him. One day they…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}