Spiritual Life and Leadership
Ministry leadership is about more than just growing your church or organization. It’s about participating in God’s mission in the world. But how can leaders know God’s mission or their unique place in it? Faithful ministry leadership is rooted in a life of deep and abiding faithfulness to Jesus. In “Spiritual Life and Leadership,” Markus Watson and his guests explore what it means to be faithful leaders whose ministry flows from their ever-deepening relationship with God.
Spiritual Life and Leadership
314. Why Good Leaders Sometimes Make Their Churches Worse, with JR Woodward
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JR Woodward is the National Director of the V3 Movement, a faculty member in the Doctor of Global Leadership cohort at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the author of The Scandal of Leadership: Unmasking the Powers of Domination in the Church. In this conversation, JR and Markus explore what it looks like to lead communities that bring the Kingdom of God to life in the places where we live.
THIS EPISODE'S HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
- What it means that Jesus's primary message was the kingdom of God, and how that shapes everything a church does
- Shalom as a holistic picture of human flourishing: restored relationships with God, others, creation, and ourselves
- The NEAR framework for understanding a neighborhood: Narrative, Ethics, Associations, Rituals
- The four spaces of belonging and how Jesus inhabited all four: intimate (3–4), personal (5–12), social (20–50), public (70+)
- Why closed discipleship groups differ from open missional spaces, and why you can't build depth if the door is always open
- How people often belong before they believe, and how behavior changes before beliefs do
- How our desires are shaped by whoever we look up to, and how this creates rivalry and division in churches
- How conflict in a congregation can escalate until one person becomes the target
- What Philippians 2 teaches about giving up honor and titles as a path to healthier leadership
- How love of image, institutional self-preservation, and ideology become corrupting forces in church life
- Oscar Romero as a real-world example of the downward path of leadership
- V3 Movement's interdenominational church planting training
- The Doctor of Global Leadership cohort at Fuller Seminary
RELEVANT RESOURCES AND LINKS:
RELATED EPISODES:
- 288. Leadership That Smells Like the Gospel, with Jason Jensen
- 272. Beyond Church Revitalization, with Josh Hayden
- 247. The Kingdom of God as Present Reality
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