I am grieving that!As you know, there is no final exam....but the final paper is the equivalent, meant for you to draw from, and integrate course material...with a real practical focus.
I really believe this final project is one you'll want to keep and re-visit at strategic points in your future.
The paper is due a week after our last class session, so that means midnight Oct 25th via email. I have copied in the instructions and guidelines for the paper that Rod Reed wrote for your student guide below..but first some clarifications:
- No special formatting rules (other than the sentence that is to be in bold, and be sure to cite your sources.)
- In fact, I will accept a video or power point as I have with other projects, as long as they show the same level of interacting with course texts and materials, and spell out the action plan etc.. It may be easier to do this kind of assignment as a traditional paper, though a video format where we see you talking through your findings and leadership plan might help the project reflect on the personal reflection that is asked for.
- Be sure to include reflection on your Myers Briggs, and "dark side" profile.
FROM STUDENT GUIDE:
Summary assignment due one week later:
We'll talk about this painting in class..
what does it have to do with:
- "biblical perspectives on leadership"?
- Getting in touch with oureslves, and the dark side of leadership?
and read pages 9-15 here,
if you want get started..
See also: the Trinitarian nature of Leadership (pdf) by Len Hjalmarson
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Here is a short article by Henri Nouwen on Jesus' "temptation to be relevant."
Remember that Nouwen equates to the temptations as
- 1)the temptation to be relevant("Turn these stones to bread."),
- 2)to be spectacular ("Throw yourself from the temple."),
- 3)to be powerful ("I will give you the kingdoms of the world.")
This is from one of the classic, and shortest, books on Christian leadership, "In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership". Grab it for three bucks!
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We'll pick up left brain/right brain discussion.
The following video "test" of which side of your brain is dominant is not a professional test, and it is debated how accurate it is, but try it.
We should note that some see the whole left brain/right brain theory "pop neuroscience oversimplifications"
One more cheap and cheesy "test":
Try this…
Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor and then begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you're doing this, use a finger your right index finger to draw a number 6 in the air. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction and there's nothing you can do about it!
What’s happening?
The left side of your brain, which controls the right side of your body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. The left side of your brain cannot deal with operating two opposite movements at the same time and so it combines them into a single motion.
Try this with your right foot and left hand and you should have no problem!
This experiment was written by Stephanie Weaver
Leonard Shlain (a surgeon), whom we introduced last week, is a more respected left/right brain expert; Read some short excerpts about or by him here and here.
Tonight we'll take his suggested mini-test for brain dominance...don't worry, no wires and electrodes!--
I teach so I can learn from students! (:
It hit me in last week's class discussion
that though polarizations are often false,
and dichotomies are potentially dualistic and dangerous,
there is value in comparing
(on the one hand),
- the "left hand" of Myers Briggs preferences (ESTJ=Extrrovert, Sensing, Judging, Perceiving),
- the "modern" world (RRWI=Rational, Representative. Word-Based, Individual)as Sweet summarizes it)
- the left brain functions as summarized by Shlain (DWAN=Doing, Word, Abstraction, Number)
To the other hand:
- the "right hand" of Myers Briggs preferences (Introvert, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perception)
- -the "postmodern world (EPIC=Experiential, Participatory, Imgae-Driven, Connectivity) as Sweet summarirzes it
- -the right grain functions as summaried by Shlain (BIMM=Being, Image, Music, Metaphor)
- ESTJ INFP
- RRWI EPIC
- DWAN BIMM
...or the supposed "right" answers (the ones that match me!) on the right (:
etc..
Myers Briggs and Left/Right Brain here
EPIC acrostic on PDF, p 36-37 here)
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Here are the last 3 "Leadership Arts" videos by Leonard Sweet, with text condensed from "Aqua Church":
Episode 10 is here
Leadership Art #10-Using the Gyroscope: Creativity
Creativity is the gyroscope for postmodern mariners, and it is understandable why some would make this the leadership art of the twenty-first century. The overlap of the emotions and the intellect is called the imagination, a gyroscope that spins toward transcendent realities in our lives.
The postmodern religious vision is less intellectual than imaginal. “Both the affective and the imaginative, strongly stimulated by audiovisual images, are becoming the central part of human and religious functioning.” Postmodern Christians have clipped the wings of reason and are riding the winds of a prodigal imagination and supernaturalism. Imagination has become one of the church’s most valuable commodities.
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Episode 11 is here
Leadership Art #11-Learning from the Ship’s Log and Library: Intellectual Capital
Postmodern leaders are intellectual capitalists. In fact, knowledge is the capital commodity of twenty-first century culture. The source of wealth today is not material, it is informational. The pursuit of wealth and influence today is the pursuit of information, and the application of information to the world in which we live. Information is power. Leadership is either well-informed or ill-equipped and nonexistent.
Leadership is soul work, but it is also wisdom work. Of all the knowledge occupations out there, leadership is the most knowledge-intensive vocation. Aside from what you carry in your heart, what you carry between your ears is your most valuable tool of the trade.
Postmodern culture is information rich but wisdom poor. Spiritual leaders must know how to wisdomize their ministries and missions.
Cultivating a Learning Culture
All-Time/Just-in-Time Learning
The human brain is only 38 percent developed at birth. All other mammal brains are 98 percent developed at birth. To be a human being is to be a continuous learner.
A leader is always preparing for the next expedition and is always learning more about the sea.
Total Learning Experience
Postmoderns have different cognitive styles and learning capacities from moderns. Some scholars contend postmoderns learn on of three ways: visually (what they see), audibly (what they hear), or kinesthetically (what they feel and touch). David Kolb counters with four discrete modes of learning: concrete experiences (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE). Whether your learning modalities are based on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, or (with Kolb) Divergers, Assimilators, Convergers and Accommodators, total learning experiences incorporate multiple information streams in the learning enterprise.
In fact, a lot of young people with attention deficit disorder are really multiple learners (especially kinesthetics) in need of total learning experiences, not drugs.
Postmodern electronic kids learn not through lock-step, lecture-drill-test marches of Industrial Age classrooms and corridors but through multisensory webs of stimulation and inspiration.
SDL Learning
SDL (Self-Directed Learning) skills set students free to assess their own needs, with direct access to resources to meet those needs, and with critical evaluative skills to assess how well they are doing.
SDL learning is basic to postmodern leaders, whose more active and independent learning styles make them naturally self-directed learners. No one can tech postmoderns how to lead. Postmoderns teach themselves. This is not to say that SDL skills aren’t teachable.
Web-Based Learning to Learn
The Net changes everything, including how one learns. The creation of a learning info-structure is more crucial to ministry than the building of organizational infra-structures.
Postmoderns learn more from electronic resources than from print. These is no option but to fully computerize the educational wing of your church, to install at least on screen in every sanctuary or worship center, to make Internet access easy and abundant. Don’t be and Internot Church (those afraid or reluctant to use the Internet).
Learned Ignorance
Leaders must settle for nothing but the latest intelligence, the best information. But leaders must also realize that information is perishable. If learning is at base “making sense of things,” then we may need to unlearn some things so that we can make sense of things like never before.
Book Learning
Even though print is now a digital enterprise, the notion that people read fewer books in a digital culture is fiction. An old maxim my mother taught me-“Leaders are Reader”-is more true now than ever. Consumers purchased 32 percent more books for adults in 1995 than they did in 1991. In 1998 ten thousand more books were published than five years ago; nine hundred new magazines were launched in 1998 alone.
We can never fully “catch up,” but we can stay close. How? By reading a lot more than we do. Set aside fifteen minutes a day to read a book. That becomes almost two dozen books a year. That increases your lifetime reading by one thousand books, or five times what you read in college.
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Episode 11 1/3 is here.
Leadership Art #11 1/3- Feeling the West Finger: Intuition
Leadership Art #11 1/3 is intuition, putting one’s finger to the winds to help in dead-reckoning (estimating one’s position), to hasten dead-aft sailing (sailing with the wind straight behind you), or to locate the eye of the wind-the exact direction from which the wind blows. Leadership Art # 11 1/3 is the aptitude for distinguishing puffs and tempests, and the artistry of maneuvering and reversing through gusts and gales.
Why is this Leadership Art #11 1/3 and not #12? Because 12 would be too neat a package-the postmodern world is not that simple. Because this one follows and builds from al the others. Because intuition is dangerous without the other eleven leadership arts.
There are some who point the wet finger heavenward after learning the first two leadership arts. They think that once they have found the North Star and can use the compass, all they need to sail is the wet finger. But leaders aren’t ready for the wet finger rite of passage until they have mastered the previous eleven skills. For without the other nine leadership arts, your boat may be seaworthy, but you aren’t.
The wet finger carries the secret of the leadership arts: It’s in the air.
The leadership art of intuition is not simply the ability to jump in over one’s head in places where very few can swim. The leadership art of intuition is an everyday thrival skill in which over-one’s-head decision-making, out –of-left-field observations, and winds-of-change opportunities become wild-card judgments that actually chart the journey itself. Postmodern leadership is a combination of the rational and the intuitive, the visible and the invisible.
For postmoderns, a well-honed intuitive sense is as important as intelligence and as critical as a continually fresh flow of information. Ironically as our lifestyles and life requirements have become more dependent on technology, the worth of a well-read, well-fed intuitive sense has become more precious. The more technologically progressive, the more interconnected humans and machines, the more intuitively adept leaders must become.
Jesus was the ultimate Rule breaker and Rule Maker. As the rules changed for the early Christians, the apostles steered the church with the ”wet finger” of intuition. In their “outside-the-box” leadership, they played hunches, minted some new myths, and proved that it is possible-through the power of the Holy Spirit-to see what we can’t comprehend. Recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, a historic meeting was held in Jerusalem among Peter, Paul, James, and other apostles. The decision reached was not an easy or popular one: to set to the side Jewish law and preach to the Gentiles.
A letter went out announcing this new direction and justifying the decision. It read: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” (Acts 15:28).
Incredible! The apostles picked up the wind of the Spirit and piloted the church in a whole new direction. How? Among those present at this meeting was the Holy Spirit, whose presence and purposes were intuitively received by the apostles. They resisted the winds of public opinion-even majority rule-and surfed the fresh waves of the Spirit.
Rare Necessities
Whatever it is, leaders can develop their intuitive capabilities. One book alone lists dozen of techniques. The following are my favorite ten “rare necessities” for maximizing intuition in life:
- Listen to music, especially unfamiliar pieces.
- Get physical exercise, an essential part of the creative process.
- Mix metaphors and match up opposites.
- Use a variety of materials to build models and mock-ups.
- Acquire dream skills and sleep learning
- Cultivate a “listening logic,” a logic which hears both words and the feelings which lie behind the words.
- Develop “anticipatory consonance with nature.”
- Read poetry aloud, and linger over every word until it sinks into the soul.
- Practice extended seasons of prayer and fasting.
- Stay away from people who are wave jammers.
Ralph W. Neighbour Jr., the reigning expert on cell-group church, says that “I have asked every cell-group pastor I have met on my journeys, ‘When you stared, did you make a trip to see a model of what you have here? Did you attend someone’s seminar before you started?’ In each and every case, the answer has been, ’No, I went to my knees…I had no choice. [God] taught me as I went along.’” The first intuitive step a postmodern leader must take is downward, onto the knees. From that kneeling position every perspective will necessarily be unique and unrepeatable.
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Several of the class chose to do their leadership interviews on video or power point..
Great job, check these out..
Elvia's interviews:
1)Steven Shin, CA State Mktg Manager
2)Steve Marshall, Vice President of Explorer Insurance Company:
Christine's Power Point:
Click here
Lawana's Power Point:
Click here
Lashawn's video:
Robert's videos:
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Leighton Ford, who wrote our main textbook, also wrote a great book, The Power of Story,:" where he suggests the following progression:
Story>Vision>Character>Evangelism
Read all about it here.
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Unfortunately, the "He Led You Like a Bride" video we'll watch is not online, but it is available on the Vol 9 DVD here,
A section of the "Run" video we'll send you off with:
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Gordon Fee (author of your "How to Read the Bible" textbook:
-Another clip of his on reading the Book of Revelation, and Scripture in general
(cmplements the last chapter of the book).Transcript here, and video here)
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Finally, on the Kingdom of God:
The "age to come" (the Kingdom) has in large part already come (from the future/heaven)
into "this age" (in the present/on the earth.
See Matt 4:17...and Hebrews 6:1-8
See also:
Implications for leadership?
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It's an Upside Down Kingdom:
i was glad to find this map on kingPin68's blog:
