Articles

Can You Tell The Time?

 

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Beijing Airport waiting for my plane when a red faced airport attendant came up to me and asked,”Are you Mister Rod Denton?” When I replied that I was, he then said,”I have been searching for you. We have been calling your name. You have missed your flight. Your plane has gone without you.” And the reason I missed my flight was that I could not tell the time. I had forgotten  to synchronize my watch with Chinese time. I had made a serious mistake and would now have to suffer the inconvenient consequences.

My thesis for this paper is One of

Leadership – The Forgotten Key To Growing An Organization

A recent study in America by George Barna concluded that only 7% of pastors in America had the gift of leadership. His conclusion, “Where have all the leaders gone?”

In a recent article by Ed Stetzer called ‘My Love/Hate Relationship With Leadership’, he writes “The difficulty is that leadership has fallen on hard times in evangelical churches…. Everything was leadership in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, but now the pendulum has swung the other way”.

I believe that we are now experiencing a call to a revival of leadership. And not before time. In addition, might I say that hopefully we will see a revival in the mentoring of leaders, because …

The Person Jesus Uses

 

From the time I left the business world to enter full time ministry, I had a conviction that to grow a church I needed to focus on growing leaders who would grow the church. Or as Paul Scanlon has said, “To grow a big church, focus on growing big people.”

This led me to a very important question, “Who is the person Jesus uses?” For I wanted to be a person Jesus could use and I wanted to raise up a generation of people that Jesus could use.

Good leaders know what and who they are looking for and consequently have a better chance of achieving their ultimate goal. …

The A E I O U of Living Your Life Like Jesus

 

A Pastor recently contacted me to ask if there was any hope for his church to survive. The few people in his church were aged, and the church was slowly but surely declining in numbers.  My answer shocked him. I said there was great hope for him and his church  –  because the Father was already at work in his town.

I then opened my Bible to John chapter 5 and shared the story of Jesus healing the man who had been sick for 38 years, and who was lying close to the pool of Bethesda. Unfortunately, Jesus didn’t receive rave reviews for what He did, for the healing …