Leadership

Good church leadership begins at home, the first speaker of this year's annual pastors conference hosted by the Desiring God ministry at the Minneapolis Convention Center said Monday.

"The apostle Paul considers the fruit of a man's behavior in his home as one of the central qualifications for pastoral office," Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, told those in attendance and an online viewing audience.

"He says that if a man does not know how to manage his household well, then how will he know how to care for the church of God as he says in 1 Timothy 3-5? From this we learn that fatherhood in the home and pastoral care in the church are analogous activities." more >>

Prominent evangelical pastor John Piper along with other church leaders plan to tackle the issues of men becoming strong Christian leaders in today's world during the Desiring God ministry's annual pastors conference held Monday to Wednesday at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Joining Piper at this year's conference, titled, "God, Manhood & Ministry – Building Men for the Body of Christ," will be Doug Wilson, Crawford Loritts, Darren Patrick, and Ramez Atallah. The main sessions –which begin with Wilson's message, "'Father Hunger,' in Leading the Home" – are Webcast for free at www.desiringgod.org starting at 7 p.m. EST.

In a short video clip introducing the conference, Piper said, "It seems to us that a really important thing to us is helping men be men – Helping men discover what is [their] unique contribution to life, church, family, mission as man, not just as human, but what is God calling [them] to be as a man." more >>

WASHINGTON – A professor of public policy has recently argued that the significance of religion in the lives of former U.S. presidents has been largely "understudied" by scholars.

Professor Mark J. Rozell of George Mason University was part of a panel that met Monday at the National Press Club to discuss the role of religion in American politics.

"Many social scientists in particular dismissed the importance of religion as a variable in American politics and I think that was a mistake," said Rozell in an interview with CP. more >>

An increasing number of Christians are drifting away from their faith because of the lack of good answers to their spiritual questions, warns apologetics author Mark Mittelberg in an interview with The Christian Post.

The author of The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask as well as his latest release, The Reason Why Faith Makes Sense, believes that the plethora of misinformation found in bestselling, so-called religious books, and the rapidly growing number of skeptical websites have Christians second-guessing themselves.

Mittelberg's passion for getting answers to the myriad of questions about Christianity in the hands of believers and non-believers led him to team up with author and speaker Lee Strobel more than a year ago. The two apologists have formed The Institute at Cherry Hills, an apologetics and evangelism ministry at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Colo. more >>

One of the co-hosts of the second installment of the Elephant Room, a theological roundtable featuring blunt conversations among seven influential pastors, says he purposefully toned down his aggressive line of questioning from his moderation of last year's conference in order to make sure relationships were built.

Church leaders who had watched both events (Rounds 1 and 2) and posted their observations online about the conference said they noticed a more friendly dialogue during the sessions that were simulcast live to 70 host locations throughout North America on Wednesday.

Pastor James MacDonald, who shared moderator duties with Pastor Mark Driscoll, may have helped eliminate the fireworks that took place during Round 1 of the Elephant Room but there were plenty of repercussions before and after the Round 2 discussion. more >>

Every pastor is susceptible to burnout, Wayne Cordeiro, pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship, told a group of seven influential church leaders Wednesday.

Cordeiro was speaking at an event called the Elephant Room in Aurora, Ill., which featured "conversation's you never thought you'd hear from pastors." The Honolulu pastor acknowledged that getting burned out isn't an issue many pastors discuss publicly from the pulpit. But he recently released a book called Leading on Empty that centers on a period of burnout he went through in the ministry.

"It doesn't matter if you are in a small church or a big church," it can happen to anyone, he said at the conference, which was broadcast to over 60 locations across the U.S. Cordeiro explained that when he first started feeling burned out he didn't acknowledge it, and tried to keep going. more >>