Congregations Without Conflict Fail to Learn How Not to Escalate Conflict

In my book, Every Congregation Needs a Little Conflict, I share the following about congregations without a healthy intensity of conflict:

“Congregations without a healthy intensity of conflict do not learn how to keep conflict from escalating to an unhealthy intensity. Because they do not know how—or refuse—to deal with healthy intensities of conflict, significant conflict situations get out of hand too quickly.” [9]

I like this thought on conflict. However, I would add that it helps if the conflict/tension is about something important.

Too often I see conflict in Churches around unimportant things, usually associated with worship: music style etc.

How much better would it be if our disagreements and resulting conflict is about how we are engaging with our local community in mission?

The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter

This post is a 20-minute guide to Twitter for non-techies. (If you don’t know what Twitter is, you can start with my first post on the topic, Twitter-dee, Twitter-dum. If you still aren’t convinced, then read 12 Reasons to Start Twittering.)

Saturday night over dinner, I helped my friend, Karen Anderson, get started on Twitter. Yesterday, my son-in-law, Chris Crimmins, got started. He was having some difficulty getting his phone hooked up to Twitter. I thought, I wish I had a simple, step-by-step guide to give him.It doesn’t take long to get set-up with Twitter, but it helps if you know the basics. So, I decided to document these eight basic steps:

This is a great beginners guide to Twitter. So, if you want to get into twitter - make sure you read this.

Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now

My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.”

His words were meant to get us out of letting the customers run our business mode we often found ourselves falling into.

Some great leadership and change management lessons here. Sometimes our leadership is governed by lowest common denominator and while listening is a key criteria for leadership it is not always the key indicator on whether something is right.

I guess the trick is to work out which is which!

I like twitter and think it is more than just letting people know what you are doing. But, this is pretty funny!

wonderful presentation on how to make presentations interesting and effective!