Contents

• Which Type of Leader Are You? A Look at 6 Distinct Leadership Styles [Infographic]
• Man charged after filming teens in crashed car and not helping
• What Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain Actually Means
• A New Metric (by Jonathan Storment)
• The “Deeply Flawed Father” Meme (And Why We Need to Counter It)
• a faith crisis in the Bible (and don’t let some 60s hippies tell you otherwise)

Which Type of Leader Are You? A Look at 6 Distinct Leadership Styles [Infographic]

It can be a lot of pressure knowing that a team is looking to you to lead the way. When the burden of leadership starts to feel heavy, leaders can sometimes backslide into bad habits instead of consciously living the attitudes they’d like employees to emulate. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Simply becoming aware of what employees look for in a leader can help managers maintain a positive outlook and demonstrate the traits that foster a healthy and productive team.

Man charged after filming teens in crashed car and not helping

What would you do if you witnessed a crashed car? Would you try to help the victims? Or would you merely take out your phone, enter the crashed car, film the injured and then put the video on Facebook?

(NB. Im sure we have all sinned in a similar way before.)

What Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain Actually Means

Growing up in church, I was always taught not to “take the Lord’s name in vain.” When I was younger, this translated to not saying things like “oh my god!” But the older I’ve gotten, the sillier that seems. I’ve heard people invoke God to justify saying all sorts of hurtful things, so just avoiding those few phrases seems like a shallow view of that commandment. I was reading back over the Ten Commandments recently and came across that phrase again, so I was wondering: What does it actually mean to “take the Lord’s name in vain?”

A New Metric (by Jonathan Storment)

For the longest time, I have heard that we must stop measuring the ABC’s of church (Attendance, Buildings, and Contribution), but I have never really heard many alternatives to what we should be measuring instead. Every now and then, people like a Leonard Sweet will suggest that we need to measure the amount of cigarette butts in the parking lots, (an idea I like) but for the most part we deconstruct what we measure without any healthy alternative. But any human community wants to have some way of measuring health, and the ABC’s aren’t bad measurements, they are just woefully incomplete ones.

The “Deeply Flawed Father” Meme (And Why We Need to Counter It)

I am old enough to remember a time—the 1950s—when popular culture by-and-large celebrated fatherhood. Our family did not watch a lot of television; when we had a working television is was mostly off. But one weekly situation comedy was a family ritual—mostly because my stepmother loved it: “Father Knows Best.” Feminists later made it into an anti-women and even anti-children symbol, but, as I recall the father in the series, he was often wrong and had to change his mind in response to his wife and children. I think the creators of the show meant the title to be ironic. Although he was a good father (strong, supportive, intelligent, involved), he did not always know best. And one thing that made him a good father was that he was willing to admit his mistakes. He was far from the image of a domineering patriarch. There were many other positive images of fatherhood in popular culture in the 1950s.
I can’t pinpoint when the meme changed, but I suspect it had to do with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s that really began to have their effect in popular culture in the 1970s. Suddenly (so it seems) fatherhood was being portrayed different, mostly negatively (with some notable exceptions) in the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly (so it seems looking back) the concept of “fatherhood” was surrounded by images and thoughts of abuse, absence, neglect, betrayal, stupidity and even insanity (“The Shining” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”).

a faith crisis in the Bible (and don’t let some 60s hippies tell you otherwise)

Qohelet gives here his blunt, even unsettling, observations on what he thinks God is doing. Some might question why a book like this is in the Bible, but I’m glad it is. In it we hear our voices of sadness, depression, frustration, and doubt echoing back from 2500 years ago.
The book gives no quick remedy. It tells us, though, that life is not always grand–and that we are not alone in saying so.