Over the years, I have had more than a few coffees and phone calls with local church pastors struggling with elements of their personal faith. People have confessed how incredibly torn they are inside because their make jobs make change incredibly difficult. Many felt...
Some more thoughts around metapastoring… I asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok to ‘Create an image of a Pastor helping someone in grief.’ You can see the images attached. To be honest, I was glad they weren’t all middle-aged white guys. Gemini (owned by Google)...
I have been trying to put words to an emerging company of people I keep encountering. And in this short essay I will do my best to unpack some core thoughts around what I am witnessing, and daringly, give it a name – metapastoring. Many would shudder at the...
Yes, I believe the Christian Church is ripe for a significant split (and it is AI-assisted). [ I appreciate from the outset that my Christian/religious peers and my AI-interested university/academic peers and may not fully ‘get’ this collision of thoughts,...
So you are looking to hire someone and are browsing potential candidates when you come across a work history that includes work at a local church. Is that a red flag? What transferable skills could they have? Will there be a conflict of organisational values? Can they...
We continue to explore the Christian experience through lenses of different theoretical frameworks. This episode continues from the last. I do a deep dive into applying Ecological Systems Theory (EST) to religious experience. EST is pretty easy to understand, and...
Cosmo and I just published our first podcast of Season 2. In response to requests from friends and followers I am exploring faith deconstruction and spiritual wounding, but through differing theoretical perspectives. This episode introduces Ecological Systems Theory...
The faithfulness of God is showing itself to be very different to what I was told and sold from pulpits of prosperity and protection. If faithfulness was to be understood in terms of God being a faithful friend, who was always there to delivery us from pain and...
Years ago, while visiting Israel, a rabbi came to speak to the small group I was travelling with. I recall very little from the lengthy monologue except for one thing. A single truth that echoes back to me in times I struggle to reconcile life, and the movement of God...
10 years ago this week, I filed for voluntary bankruptcy. After a string of bad luck were simply unable to pay bank debts back. We tried for some time to negotiate and liquidate the few assets we had but the banks were like relentless wolves after meagre prey. I would...
On this day, 28 years ago in ’95, I sat in the lounge room of a youth pastor’s humble home and said a prayer commonly known as The Sinner’s Prayer. That day felt like a remarkable moment, and the 10 other teens in that little Bible study on Bribie...
On the other side of the global disruption known by many names, many social gatherings – including CHURCH ATTENDANCE – are DOWN. I have no empirical statistics to give you, but I know plenty of Christian church workers in Australia who have told me weekend...
I’ve been actively applying jobs since early June. I’ve applied for over 40 jobs, adjusted my resume 19 times, and learnt a whole new recruitment dance. It has left me scratching my head, wondering why the hell, in an age where soft-skills ARE the hard...
This was the alarming start of a recent conversation.”Is it just me, or are older guys willing to be mentors really hard to find?””Yep.” I replied, “At this age and stage of life, they are harder to find.” Let’s call this...
It is almost a decade since I went into voluntary bankruptcy. In 2006 Natalie and I had sold up and sold out to do missions work in Japan. We returned in 2008 with our second child due . As it happened, we landed back in Australia on the doorstep of the Global...
I don’t recall sharing this perspective on my thoughts around Ephesians 4:9-16 publicly. Partly because, when I developed it in 2017 I was travelling among several church circles which held a more exclusive view of those worthy to be called an apostle, prophet,...
It was a simple workshop exercise; write down one word or more that describes how a Church Pastor should behave. The 100+ counsellors and pastors attending the webinar hit their keyboards and the chat stream filled up faster than you could say ecclesiastical theology....
There is an emerging area of leadership practice and theory called Authentic Leadership. If you’ve studied leadership principles for a while you’ll know they are often relabelled (and repriced) social science theories. After all, leadership is grounded in...
A few years back I heard a story of a family who were serving in a regional church community as Pastors. The husband was doing much of the work but, as we know, expectations always extend to the Pastor’s family, so his wife and two teenage children were...
In 2011, researcher Marlene Winell coined the phrase Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) in an effort to define the set of symptoms found in those who ‘participated in or left behind authoritarian, dogmatic, and controlling religious groups and belief...
