As I have always said, good software is worth paying for. The free version works very well and is good for 10 articles, but if you are willing to shell out $4.95, the pro version bumps it up to 250 articles and gives you an in-app dictionary, functioning very much like Kindle’s.

Try it out. It has helped me to clear out a bunch of articles I have wanted to read but never had time to read at my desk (e.g. qideas.org.)

1. We are really good at burning people out.
2. We focus way too much on what we don’t have.
3. We are afraid of change.
4. We use “let me pray about it” as an excuse to get out of making decisions.
5. We LOVE meetings.
6. We try to do way too much.
7. We try to be something we’re not.
8. We spend too much time looking at other churches.
9. We worry about people leaving.
10. We don’t feel trusted.

Read the whole post with full explanations here. He included some great quotes from the management and leadership book REWORK.

Seriously, I said AMEN ten times in my heart while I read through it.

I wish I could be as brave as Martin Luther to nail it to the door of my church……

Even if you can’t nail it to the door of your church, please at least repost on your blog or facebook or twitter if you share the same sentiments. It might spark a new reformation in our overly-tired and burnt out churches today.

The embattled scion of Toyota Motor Corp.‘s founding family is admitting that the company strayed from its core values in a quest for rapid expansion.

The priorities of the world’s largest auto maker are supposed to be safety, quality and volume, Akio Toyoda says in a prepared statement he will make on Wednesday while testifying to a congressional committee in Washington.

“These priorities became confused and we were not able to stop, think and make improvements as much as were able to before …” Mr. Toyoda says in the statement, obtained by The Globe and Mail.

Extracted from The Globe and Mail (Feb 23, 2010)

Some questions we can ask ourselves in light of this:

• What are my personal priorities?
• What are my family priorities?
• What are my vocational priorities?
• What are the church’s priorities?

Related posts:

1. God, family, then church?

We say no to good ideas every day; we say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose, so that we can deliver the best products in the world.
……
I think that this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris that you talk about, that happens to companies that are successful but then decide that their sole role in life is to get bigger, and they start adding this and that and this and that, I can tell you the management team of Apple would never let that happen. That’s not what we’re about. So, focus on people, and ensuring that it’s a small list of things to work on and putting all of our wood behind those things, that’s the magic behind us.

This is something that many program/event-oriented churches need to learn from.

It also applies to personal development too.

1. Begin your day by spending 5 minutes planning and setting your priorities for the rest of the day,
2. Pause 1 minute every hour (for 8 hours) to check your progress and refocus,
3. At the end your day spend another 5 minutes reviewing what had happened and learn from your mistakes.

He says: “The power of rituals is their predictability. You do the same thing in the same way over and over again. And so the outcome of a ritual is predictable too. If you choose your focus deliberately and wisely and consistently remind yourself of that focus, you will stay focused. It’s simple.”

Many people have a distaste for liturgy, thinking it is dull and suffocating to the spirit, but few realize the formative potential of an ordered ritual. Gordon Smith (former associate professor of spiritual theology at Regent College) once said that liturgy can make sure our worship is rightly offered to God and not self-indulgence or worshipping our own contructs. It is important because it is in worship that our theology is formed. Ritual is not a problem. Empty ritual is.

Related Books:
David F. Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Zondervan, 2002)
Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church As Worshiping Community (InterVarsity, 2006)
Kendra G. Hotz, Shaping the Christian Life: Worship and the Religious Affections (Westminster John Knox, 2006)

Related posts:

1. Low Church Liturgy
2. 120 Years of Good Shepherd
3. Technology in Worship

Here’s the solution:
Doodle lets you create a poll, forward the link to the poll to the participants, and follow online what the participants vote for. It even supports multiple time options within a day. It’s free, and no registration is required.

Just remember this phrase: “Wanna schedule? Use Doodle.”