Leadership

I mentioned yesterday that I completed the training to become a certified lay speaker. The "text book" for the basic lay speaking class is an overview of the many ways that a lay speaker can serve in the church, including preaching, teaching, leading -- bunches of "-ing" paths of ministry. In my basic course, we concentrated on preaching, but I decided to read through the book, as a way to complete the course, in my mind.

I doing it rather slowly (it's not a very thick book), and I just finished the chapter on leadership. The authors (John P. Gilbert and Nancy C. Zoller) built the leadership chapter around the acrostic for LEADER -- one characteristic for each letter. I thought it was kind of a silly way to do it, but I really liked the characteristics they use to define a leader. I like them so much, in fact, that I thought they would make a good series of blog posts.

Each letter in their chapter is the first letter of a leadership characteristic. They then give biblical examples of that characteristic as well as explain what it is and why it is important. Each day in this blog series on leadership I will take one of those characteristics, talk a little bit about it and perhaps give living examples of leaders I have seen in the "wild."

So here we go. Next post --> Loyalty.

Image: Fog on the hills near the VA.