Friday, August 08, 2014

Focus talks

The Focus Talks are now up here. My pick of the bunch was Archie Coates on finding strength through weakness.  It was real, honest, encouraging and hopeful. Great talk and one to linger and reflect on.

Craig Groeschl's talk on 'Increasing your capacity' is the sort of talk you might want to play to a leadership team or indeed to your church as you envision them in September for the post-summer season. It takes a bit of time to recover from him looking like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise but once you're over that there is some wisdom to glean. It's very glass half full, North American and can-do but these are not bad things but will annoy some readers (and in some ways is rather antithetical to Archie's word). However, let's be honest, the C of E is not always brimming over with optimism so I hope this talk gets a wide audience and will encourage folk to step in to all God has for them.  Be warned though, he's going to ask you at the end which of his five points applies to you, about which I was wracked with indecision which is probably why I don't pastor a church of 60K!

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Craig- Sam Wells (Rector of St Martin in the Fields) gave a thought-provoking talk on the incarnation.

Sadly, R T Kendall's talks have not been posted and they were absolute rocket-fuel on assurance from Romans 8.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, just seen and happily surprised to see all the talks on there. so you can catch up on RT Kendall talks. Claire

Saturday blog-sweep

 Some interesting books for pastors The State we're in Attack at dawn Joseph Scriven Joy comes with the morning When small is beautiful