slschool News

First 10 Months Logged

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 20:49:49 GMT

Finally, I believe the project is nearing completion. I have, for the last several months, been trying to get all of the assignments logged and organized along with the readings. I have accomplished the former and have only one reading left to get entered onto the site.

Check out the "First 10 Months" page and you will see the progress that has been made from there.

Definition Continued

Wed, 26 May 2004 16:53:01 GMT

Rob echoes my thoughts from yesterday with his post this morning on what it is that we are trying to do and accomplish. You can read the entire post here, but the four take-away points that I see are those from the "boiler plate" that he mentions...

The basic principles of The Church of the Saviour are lived out in each of the churches formed from its roots. These principles include:

A serious commitment to following Jesus
A faithful, disciplined life of prayer and scripture study
Active, hands-on involvement, in response to God’s call, to address some area of need in our broken world
Faithfulness to the covenant of one’s particular small church

With brevity being the soul of wit, I'd say that this explains shortly what I was trying to say in my post yesterday.

Servant Leadership Definition

Tue, 25 May 2004 19:10:48 GMT

Saw a weblog post from Rob today that got me to thinking about what exactly we are trying to do with SLS here in St. Louis. I'm thinking that to call this the Servant Leadership School is to say that we are trying to create servant leaders. That seems straightforward enough. My quesiton is: How do we define this? If we had to put a definition on what a "servant leader" looks like, what would we say?

This book, Servant First!, seems to look at it from the standpoint of a comparison and contrast with traditional leadership styles and models. But this ultimately seems to imply that we are trying to create leaders which in and of itself may be a misnomer in the terms of trying to define what we are wanting to accomplish with the Servant Leadership School in St. Louis.

In this case, then, I'm thinking it is important to define leader as someone within the Christian faith who is acting as a disciple of Christ. They are attempting to live out the teachings of Christ in their totality, by demonstrating the inward and outward manifestations of Christ's spirit and seeing the Kingdom of God moving around them. Christ himself was a servant, so by living as a disciple to Christ, this aspect of their leadership in the Kingdom - the aspect of being a servant - comes by default.

In the end, we are looking to change minds. To extract individuals out of the worldly culture and show them a path to submission to and movement in the Kingdom of God. This is a revolutionary path where people within this Kingdom are not seeking their own power and prestige, but are looking to give the Power to the lowest amongst us, to receive blessing for the sake of blessing others, and to do all of this within the context of a group of other people who will help support their efforts along the way.

Coverage of Topics

Tue, 25 May 2004 01:43:42 GMT

The six areas that we went through during our 10 month period were these:

Being with the poor
Call
Community
The nature of divine power
Prayer
Scripture

We've discussed the possibility of weaving, for example, prayer and scripture throughout the other four, although we've also noted that there could be an advantage in actually having a session with regard to the nature of scripture and its authority. Something to chew on.

I would propose that we would have a session on the "spiritual practices" in general and possibily use the Foster book. There are probably other books that you would be aware of that would work as well or better.

Do you have thoughts and suggestions on books for the other four areas? I'd say we should get a reading list together and take it from there over the summer.

Getting Started

Tue, 25 May 2004 01:26:03 GMT

Rob and Karen came over last night and we had fajitas. They were awesome, but I was also super-encouraged by the direction of our conversation. We ended up determining that we were going to go ahead and try to pick up SLS again within Levi's Table. A few things that we decided were -

We would try to put together a curriculum over the summer - that is, try to decide on the books we would use and determine what the assignments would look like as best we could.
Once the curriculum was in place, we'd like to talk with several people who can help bring voices from several different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. The idea is to bring several voices to the table for the purpose of the richness of the conversation.
We're going to try to start something in September. Obviously, everything depends on how well we do on point 1 above, but that's pretty exciting...