I recently heard a speaker say that “…everything and everywhere is a classroom and therefore an educational setting….” While the hyperbole makes its point, the use of the term “classroom” posits a danger for misunderstanding. My concern is that, while I agree with the sentiment, there is risk in using a classroom as a metaphor for anything other than . . . well, a classroom.

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I recently read a post at Learnings at Leadership Network, by Warren Bird, Ph.D., Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 19 books on various aspects of church health and innovation. This was posted on May 16, 2008 in Church Visits.

Warren wrote, “Unfortunately, too many churches exist where the senior pastor is a tremendous leader but an even bigger bottleneck. In such churches nothing of importance can happen unless the senior pastor is at the hub of it. Neither long-term volunteers, nor senior staff, feel empowered to take initiative on anything major. They feel underutilized – and they are.

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Pastor led churches often struggle with how to most effectively utilize the time and talents of their pastoral staff without creating burn-out and rapid clergy turnover. Sue Mallory’s book The Equipping Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) has provided a biblical sound option for churches in search of finding the right balance between pastor/ teacher and pastor/ burnout.

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I will start by saying that I found R. Paul Steven’s book The Equipper’s Guide to Every-Member Ministry (Regent College Publishing, 1992) to be every practical. I also found myself wondering how different churches would look if the things in this book were applied in the widespread congregations across the country. Dividing the book into eight chapters Stevens takes on the challenge of moving our current church culture forward by examining different areas in which the whole congregation can get involved in living out their biblical call to be ministers.

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On a recent trip to my local library, I checked out Suze Orman’s The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom in an effort to better learn about investing. So, I opened the book and started to read; the first chapter had nothing to do with how to budget, save, invest, etc. Instead it was about family systems!

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For a recent course we invited several guest speakers visit the class and share their experiences and thoughts about ministry. After each visit students in the class posted on the course website “Best Quotes” they heard in the presentations.

Here are some “best quotes” from our guests that the students posted:

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A recent guest lecturer in one of my courses was Lynn Turner, Associate Pastor of Youth, Career, and Discipleship at the First Baptist Church of Richmond, VA. Lynn was asked to share her thoughts about ministry with our seminarians. Here are her thoughts about “Growing Into Ministry: Nine Tips I Have Learned”:

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The following is from the book Myths: Fact and Fiction about Teaching and Learning by Israel Galindo. How well do you know fact from fiction?

Fiction: You can tell the age of a tree by counting the rings in a cross-section cut of the trunk.

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What’s the difference between religious thinking and “religiosity”? Or, what’s the difference between faith and magical thinking? When I worked at a state mental hospital during my CPE it seemed rather easy to tell the difference in the “closed ward” where patients spent the first stage of their admittance. When a patient claimed to be Jesus Christ it was easy to identify that as delusional thinking. When a patient used religious language disconnected from the reality of their circumstance it seemed easy to diagnose “religiosity.” But what about for most of use church-going religiously committed (no pun intended) run-of-the mill believers? How do we distinguish authentic belief from magical thinking? What distinguishes prayer from wishful thinking?

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GRACE member Mike Harton as a featured piece in the denominational newspaper The Religious Herald. Check it out here. Mike currently is Interim Dean of the Faculty at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.