What are the two greatest gifts given to us? According to Stephen A. Macchia in Becoming a Healthy Church: 10 Traits of a Vital Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books 2003) the Word of God and prayer are the two greatest gifts given to us. The two should be woven into the fibers or our daily lives. “The lesson of the cross is that God is interested in us reaching up to Him vertically while we reach out to one another horizontally.” (p. 53).

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One of the things my wife asked for Christmas was the missing volumes to her series of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, that outrageously (and refreshingly) “dark” children’s books. While many adults enjoy the wry humor in Snicket’s prose, the more significant aspect is children’s response to a cycle of stories that have no happy ending and exploits children’s worst fears (the children in the story are orphaned in the first book, and then it gets worse from there). Kids are eating up this series of stories.

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I recently received an e-mail from a Leadership in Ministry Workshops participant asking about the distinction between role and function often made in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). This distinction is often difficult for folks to make, but I think it’s simple a matter of defining and delineating terms and concepts. Here’s my thinking on this and my explanation (I’ll count on other readers to provide a corrective if I’m not clear on this): generally speaking functions are specific to one’s position in the system, roles are negotiable and interchangeable. Functions have to do more with emotional process, while roles have more to do with management of systemic relationships.

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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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