Ray Selden > Recent Status Updates

The key issue is white church members and leaders choose not to change even when the solutions seem to be staring them in their collective faces. They chose tradition over change. They chose comfort over change. They chose preferences over change. Ultimately, they chose death over change.

Individuals and organizations do not lack the resources, knowledge, and information to survive. They simply do not choose to make the changes that are clear and available. When confronted with the choice to change or die, they choose to die.

There's really no way for one person to win and the other to lose without the marriage itself losing.

What if instead of one person's hand being raised in victory at the other's expense, we could finish with both of our hands raised in victory?

God was with the Israelites, but they (still) had to fight.

The truth is, people aren’t looking for a friendly church; they are looking for a friend.

If you want to keep your church from dying: focus on your own transformation together, not on your church dying. Focus on the mountains ahead, not the rivers behind. Focus on continually learning, not what you have already mastered.

New alternatives cannot be imagined, much less accepted or heard, until the emotional processes that fix the orientation have changed.

Both symptom and cause of a locked-in perspective: an unending treadmill of trying harder, looking for answers rather than reframing questions and either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

The key point here is that for lasting cultural change to occur those in the center and those outside of the center must be truly engaged in valued in decision-making processes.

more shared experience within the greater church, more equality of leadership roles, more valuing of previously ignored voices and more opportunities for shared witness to a world that is profoundly in need of the gospel.

Clearly we are now in a disorienting world, in the midst of situations where cause and effect often do not seem connected. Because most of our churches were framed in a different era, they often seem unable to even understand, much less respond, to what is happening.

How do you regulate the heat (of change)? This is the delicate work of adaptive leadership. We need our people feeling the urgency and healthy anxiety enough to overcome complacency and move.

Red zone leadership we operate out of: survival, acceptance, competence, or control.
Blue zone leadership operates in consistency and effectiveness ... the mission trumps

Transformational leadership is built on leaders making good, wise, discerning decisions for the sake of both the health and the mission of the community — decisions that reinforce the missional conviction — and this requires leaders who are able to stay calm.

Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.

Start with conviction,
Stay calm,
Stay connected,
And stay the course.

As Kevin Graham Ford explains, different people connect to the code of different churches: “code is like a magnet in that it attracts people who resonate with it and are eager to be part of a similarly committed community.“

We have an opportunity closer ... to the early Christians’, whose movement gain credibility (and converts!) at least in part because of the way Christians cared for people during some of the worst epidemics.

as adults, a lack of spiritual maturity threatens even greater blowups; in our marriages, our family relationships, our finances, our careers, and our health. Our underdeveloped faith holds us back from living the life we want. And we tryto hide from others how spiritually immature we really are. That’s why so many people who call themselves Christians live no better than people who have no faith at all.

Contained on page 58 is an explanation of the Weslyan quadrilateral. In explaining the quadrilateral, Olson gives a good understanding of each of the elements, not as we understand them in our current thinking but how they were intended.

But just as salvation may be by faith alone without faith ever being alone (i.e., it is accompanied by resulting good works), so scripture may be the sole supreme source and norm for Christian belief, but it is never alone. And it is Jesus Christ and that which promotes him as a cannon within the cannon.

Some higher standard must come into play or else preference (taste, arbitrary choice) becomes the ultimate standard and Christianity becomes folk religion disconnected from objective truth.

Anyone who pays a price or who suffers for obeying God's will is worthy of our celebration, not our pity.

Martin Niemöller
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist
Then they came for the trade immunity, and did not speak out...
Then the came for the Jews ....
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

if we are not heroically and courageously doing what God wants us to do, God is not interested in our public displays of worship. To sing to God when we are not doing what God called us to do is to be a hypocrite. (Tenses changed)

We don’t change the world around us unless God has change the world within us