Resources

I’m pulling together a list of resources for congregational leaders in my Presbytery and will share it here too… What other resources would you add to the list..? Resources Church of Scotland Church of Scotland newsletters Link: churchofscotland.org.uk/news-and-events/newsletters1 You can subscribe to the various Church of Scotland E-newsletters: News and Events on the web Link: churchofscotland.org.uk/news-and-events2 Children’s and Youth Ministry Now your talking Facebook group. Worship Resources Stirling Presbytery List…

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Enabling the Impossible

It’s only impossible until it’s done”, words attributed to many including Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. On a Thursday morning in January 2022, 24 ministers, elders and others from within the ITsForMinistry Facebook group meet on Zoom for a Conversation triggered by some of Seth Godin’s thinking around Leadership always being qualified by ‘this might not work’.The Seth Godin’s Video which all had watched prior to the conversation was this…

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Take time to reflect.

Socrates is attributed with saying “The unexamined life is not worth living” And more recently Charles Handy quotes: “It’s like the Irishman Frances Crick once said: ‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?’” Do you take time to listen to yourself..? To reflect and ponder what you really believe and think about life, the universe, faith, God, yourself and everything…

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Membership and Belonging

What are you a member of? What groups and organisations do you belong to? Within the Church we sometimes talk of membership, and we sometimes talk of how some of our most committed folk are not members, and yet many of our members aren’t active in the community of faith. The understanding of membership has certainly changed over the years. In our post-modern world… are we still ‘post-modern’ or gone…

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Make time for the Important

Stephen Covey spoke of ‘First things First’, important things first. He borrowed Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Matrix Michael Heppell and others speak of allocating time to the categories: ‘Me’, ‘Key’, ‘stuff’ – where ‘Key’ projects are the mission critical important ones… yet how often all the urgent stuff pushes out the important. ‘Me’ times – are, well it says it on the tin doesn’t it – times for YOU – and that’s…

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Respond don’t React

In our fast paced world when communication can be instant there can be the temptation to react swiftly with an email reply. Remember though the slightly older technology that facilitates full duplex synchronistic conversation – the telephone – and its modern counterparts the Voice call or video call. You can engage much better, reach a full solution rather than just the next step… and there’s less opportunity for misunderstanding. See…

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Where are the bottlenecks?

The late Eli Goldratt (1947-2011) was a scientist who building on models and ideas from the natural world and turned the focus of his work to the leadership of change. He coined the phrase ‘Theory of Constraints’ – which at its simplest says ‘No system is operating at maximum potential, if it were there would be infinite and perfect output, there will always be at least one limiting factor, or…

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