Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• 20 Quotes from the Most Insightful Book on Calling and Vocation: Gustaf Wingren’s ‘Luther on Vocation’. Ivan Mesa shares these 20 quotes from Luther on Vocation by Gustaf Wingren.
• The Powerful Witness of Long, Ordinary Obedience. Callie Walchenbach writes “Evangelism doesn’t always look like revival nights or youth group invitations or mission trips. Most of the time, it’s the steady witness of a long obedience in the same direction.”
• On Following Mediocre Leaders. Tim Challies writes “We human beings have a strange relationship with leadership. We love it, but hate it. We crave it, but resent it. We long to be led, but contend with those who lead us.”

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• Faith and Work Book Review ~ The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership that Matters by Albert Mohler
• Quotes from the book Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman.

• Vocational Calling & Our Identity in Christ. Hugh Whelchel writes “Vocational calling is the call to God and to his service in the vocational sphere of life based on giftedness, desires, affirmations, and human need.”
• How Church Leaders Can Be a Nonanxious Presence. Joe Carter writes “As Christian leaders, our calling is to both steer the ship andcalm the waters around us, instilling a sense of faith and peace amid life’s storms. By being a nonanxious presence, we show those we lead what it looks like to rely without wavering on God’s sovereignty, guiding them not just through challenges but toward a deeper understanding and experience of his grace and love.”
• IFWE’s Top Ten Blog Articles of 2023. Here are the top ten articles from IFWE for 2023, which includes articles from authors Russ Gehrlein and John Pletcher.
• Let the Adventure Begin: Discovering Your Specific Vocation. Luke Bobo writes “Recall that a specific calling or vocation is what you were created and gifted to be, a role that speaks to our unique identity. Discovering one’s vocation in life is not a linear process—it is often a journey of ups and downs that is frustrating and fun. It is not a one-size-fits-all experience.”
• New Habits for a New Year. Joshua Nangle writes “The new year is always a great time to assess current habits and implement new ones. As we reflect on the previous year, we can evaluate what worked and what did not work.”
• Clarifying Your Purpose in the Third Third of Life, Part 10. Mark D. Roberts writes “By attending to what gives you joy and the things for which you are particularly grateful, you will be able to see more clearly your third third purpose.”
• The Heart of Leadership. On this episode of the Maxwell Leadership Podcast, John Maxwell teaches about the heart of leadership––serving people.

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Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week

• The Lord is pleased with faithful work in every calling. Dan Doriani
• All labor is honorable. No one ever needs to be ashamed of an honest calling. Whether a potter or a gardener, or whatever else one’s occupation may be, the workman need never blush at the craft or toil by which he earns his honest wage. Charles Spurgeon
• Work is not burdensome when you do what you love, for people you love. Dan Doriani
• If you don’t want to serve, you cannot be a great leader. Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller
• No sacrifice is more pleasing to God, than when every man applies diligently to his own calling. John Calvin
• Who we really are when no one is looking – our character – is far more significant than our job titles. Russ Gehrlein
• Work is the expenditure of energy (manual or mental or both) in the service of others, which brings fulfillment to the worker, benefit to the community, and glory to God. John Stott
• Work should be the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God. Dorothy Sayers
• When you have a leadership position, focus not on the power that comes with the position but on the people you have an opportunity to serve. Ken Blanchard

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FAITH AND WORK BOOK REVIEW:

The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership that Matters by Albert Mohler. Bethany House Publishers. 240 pages. 2023
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This is a partially revised and updated edition (new introduction and conclusion, as well as a rewritten chapter “The Digital Leader) of Albert Mohler’s 2012 book about being a convictional leader. The book includes twenty-five short chapters about various aspects of leadership such as worldview, thinking, teaching, character, communication, reading, power, speaking, stewardship, decision making, time, and more.

Mohler has been the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for thirty years. He writes that his main goal over the next few years is to pass his roles of leadership on to others. He tells us that his goal for this book is to change the way you think about leadership.

Although I would have preferred a more thoroughly revised and updated edition, as well as questions for discussion included at the end of each chapter, I still highly recommend this book for all leaders.

Here are twenty of my favorite quotes from the book:

• The convictional leader figures out how to guide and inspire an organization in the midst of rapid change. Otherwise, everything falls apart.
• A cynical leader is a failure about to happen.
• Leadership is costly precisely because the stakes are so high.
• Our job is not done until we replace and multiply ourselves with convictional leaders. The leadership that really matters is all about conviction. The leader is rightly concerned with everything from strategy and vision to team-building, motivation, and delegation, but at the center of the true leader’s heart and mind you will find convictions that drive and determine everything else.
• Without convictions you might be able to manage, but you cannot really lead.
• Leaders without convictional intelligence will fail to lead faithfully, and that is a disaster for Christian leaders.
• The excellent leader knows how to lead out of the power of the narrative that frames the identity and mission of the people he will lead, and the leader knows how to put his own story into service for the sake of the larger story.
• Leaders want to lead organizations and movements that make a difference—that fill a need and solve real problems. That story frames the mission and identity of the organization, and explains why you give your life to it.
• Far too often leaders aim at the surface level and stop there. Real leadership doesn’t happen until worldviews are changed and realigned.
• Leadership is the consummate human art. It requires nothing less than that leaders shape the way their followers see the world.
• The great aim of leadership is to lead followers continually into a deeper and more comprehensive love for what is most real, most true, most right, and most important. The thrill of leadership is in seeing this happen, and long-term success depends on it.
• Leaders need to possess and develop many qualities, but the one element that drives them to the front is passion. Without it, nothing important happens.
• Passionate leaders attract and motivate passionate followers. Together, they build passionate movements. When this happens, anything is possible.
• The Christian leader leans into truth, knowing that the truth always matters and that nothing less than the truth will do.
• Every great leader is a great teacher, and the greatest leaders seize every opportunity to teach well.
• As Christian leaders we know that we will face nothing less than a divine judgment on our leadership.
• Character is indispensable to credibility, and credibility is essential to leadership.
• Leaders of character produce organizations of character because character, like conviction, is infectious. Followers are drawn to those whose character attracts them as something they want for themselves.
• True credibility rests in the ability of others to trust what the leader can do.
• No leader is competent in all circumstances and contexts, nor do you need to be. You must be competent in the skills and abilities of the leadership role to which you have been called.

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Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?

We are reading Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman. Sherman is also the author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, a book I first read in my “Calling, Vocation and Work” class at Covenant Seminary.

Every corner, every square inch of society can flourish as God intends, and Christians of any vocation can become agents of that flourishing. In this book, Sherman offers a multifaceted, biblically grounded framework for enacting God’s call to seek the shalom of our communities in six arenas of civilizational life (The Good, The True, The Beautiful, The Just, The Prosperous, and The Sustainable). This week we look at Chapter 12: A Strategy for Cultivating the Prosperous. Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

• Biznistries, Proudfit explains, see profit as a means to other ends. They seek to faithfully serve four main stakeholders: customers, employees, the disadvantaged, and the community.
• The vision is that Biznistries will provide a valuable product or service with excellence.
• Wherever possible these ventures will seek to address a social need in the locality, such as job creation for people needing a second chance.
• Biznistries will become living laboratories where Christian entrepreneurs can “work out their faith” by designing and managing the enterprises in ways that honor and build on such kingdom virtues as honesty, service, generosity, community, and sabbath rest.
• Entrepreneurs must embrace the truth that their companies are not their own but God’s—and that they exist to advance God’s purposes.