Analysis Of Life Together By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From a personal perspective, leadership from a Christian worldview is about transforming your skills, abilities, and knowledge of the vision of life, beliefs, values, and principles. Due to the differing worldviews as a leader from a secular or biblical perspective, the ways of life as a leader divert the values that guide us, beliefs that direct us, and principles that motivate us to act or behave a certain way. Jesus lives in disciples, and we should all be living as his light and world. In Paul’s plea he stated, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1, New International Version). Not everyone is in the public eye, but everyone is in the eye of someone, and there he or she is a leader. I will discuss my growth and development into the leader from a Christian worldview and from course material as support.

pastor. A Sr. pastor is over the whole church and untimely is where most people look when they see problems going on in the church. The Sr. pastor tends to be the face of the church, just as the president is the face for the United States. To be a second chair leader to the pastor you are either an associate minister, or a small specific type of minister, for example youth, children’s, young adults, and so on and so forth. So if you are an associate minister, at least in the United Methodist Church, you may want your Sr. pastors job but you do not really have any say who will get it or not, so most of the time you just do not fight with them. If you are a small specific type of minister you more than likely do not want the Sr. pastor’s job because that is not where your calling is or you would not be doing this job. While that is the basis of the structure it is also important to remember that while the Sr. pastor is over those in the second chair more likely than not the Sr. pastor wants your input on things and wants you to succeed. If your Sr. pastor does not want you to succeed then you need to find a different job. With that in mind the first chair is not some one that you should fight with over things but someone you should listen to and bounce ideas off of. I currently use this information while at my internship. Every week I meet with my Sr. pastor to go over the things that I am doing in

I am a leader when it comes to multiple things. In my choir, I’m the section leader for the baritones. In group projects, I often take charge of planning the project in order to ensure that it gets done in the best way possible. One of the most notable times I took a leadership position was when I volunteered with a group of my NHS peers at the Hot Chocolate Run in downtown Chicago. As more and more people began to finish the race, the lines where we were serving hot chocolate became really hectic and crowded. I decided to take leadership and usher people into different lines, as well as tell everyone to have their tickets ready when they got to the counter, even though I was not told to do that. In doing this, I expedited the process of handing

Within a few months of searching, my church found a pastor who was previously a youth pastor in Washington D.C. I, being the only female leader, went out of my way to try and induct him into our youth group. Early on we had a conversation where I shared what worked in the youth group as what didn’t. For the first few months we had a growing pastor-student relationship. However as he became more comfortable he began to change things to make the youth group more like his inner city youth group. I lead by example and embraced the changes until I realized those changes were hurting the youth group. It was then that me and the male leaders got together to come up with several things we could do ourselves to solve the emerging problems as well as come up with a list of things we would like to address with out new pastor. We sent a representative to our pastor to make compromises so that both parties were working together for the good of our youth group. The situation is beginning to slowly improve because the me and the other leaders were able to problem-solve, compromise, and share with our new

Living in Christian community is a necessity for the everyday life of a Christian. Without community, the Christian has no one else to “sharpen” them, no one else to understand the everyday struggle of living in the world, sharing the Gospel, but not partaking in the sinful ways of the world. In “Life Together”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores Christian community, and presents not only the benefits of Christian community, but also the toxins that can destroy the community. Living in Christian community brings incomparable joy and community in and through Jesus Christ, but can be easily lost due to humanistic ideals, or “dreams”.

For the last year, I was in the position of women’s ministry leader at church which I found to be much harder than I thought. It was not that I felt I could not lead but I found you cannot lead those that do not want to be led. I was led to do activities that would bring a gospel message to the women of the church while having fellowship. I found that day to day activities were much more important to the ladies in our church. The events that were the most successful, unfortunately were the ones that were of fellowship, little worship time and cost each person money to participate. My biggest challenge in this was coming to terms with the fact that the ladies have the choice whether or not they want to deepen their relationship with Christ through fellowship and the gospel. God gave us choices and I have to accept that some do not always choose to

“There is much that can be learned about leadership from Scripture” (Smith, 1992, p. 39). The Bible provides us with what God not only desires His man of God to be, but requires His under shepherd to meet His character traits.

Much time is leadership it requires difficult decisions to be made. Decision that may require you asking for help as King Ahasuerus did. However with King Ahasuerus in my opinion he didn’t allow enough time for him the process what decision needed to be made. A leader today once you decide to move forward with a decision what is required of good leaders is to stand firm in the choses they make. In the Name of Jesus Nouwen refers to contemplative prayers as a way for a leader to be well informed, and intimately connected to Christ as their source of their words, advice and guidance (Nouwen, 1989, p. 45).

Christ is the leader of the Church, Paul in Ephesians 1:22 said “God placed everything under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the Church” however, God entrusted the authority to lead to his servant whom he set them aside to lead the community. Pastor as a public Leadership is to lead community. A person who is called by God to lead public has a responsibility to be in the community, with the community and for the community. One of best questions raised in the class during public leadership discussion was “How we can be a community pastor rather than just a church pastor?” This really a kind of question we are to consider as pastor especially as rural congregation pastor. In most cases when pastor are called to

Effective leadership approaches from a biblical perspective consist of God’s nature in his manifested character. Christian leaders are willing to pay the price to lead in Christ’s affliction. Paul said there is a price to pay in order to lead and Jesus reminded us, “Remember what I told you: 'A servant is not greater than his master. ' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also” (John 15:20, New International Version). Christian leaders need core attributes of God’s styles and approaches, support and linkage from scriptures, and knowledge of his leadership models of truth for effective leadership. However, these perspectives will gave me a better appreciation and insight of who God is and who I can be with his guidance.

I never thought to be a Christian leader. As a matter of fact, I am a person who did not know about God for 26 years. I was the center of my life, and there was no room for God to enter. Even when I was attending church service, I was trying not to be exposed to other church people. In other words, I was the kind of person who was afraid to walk into a life of faith. However, in the past three years, God has changed me in many ways, and showed me so many miraculous things. And, finally here I am. Being a Christian leader seems the most challenging job in the world. I am working as the chairman of a youth ministry, and walking on the path to be a church leader. When God called me to work for the

Nations crumble, churches and business fail, families become dysfunctional, children lose their way, and men stray from God for one disturbing reason; lack of leadership. These failures are often because of the lack of instruction, proper leadership, and confusion over what Christian leadership is and how that leadership is applicable to every facet of business and personal life.

Leaders are appointed to serve here on earth on behalf of Christ since Christ is the good and chief shepherd. Leaders should lead the believers based on how Christ related with the church when he was on earth[5]. Shepherds had to feed the people of God and to protect them from predators[6]. Churches today ought to do things how the New Testament churches did[7].

Far too often, in this emerging new culture, we want to treat God as friend, and not as creator and sustainer. Humans are flawed fleshly beings, therefore whenever in the true presence of God a transformation from old to new should occur. We should feel so convicted about our transgressions until we have an earnest desire to change. The flesh dies and slowly loses control of our lives, leaving the Holy Spirit to freely dwell. Ironically enough the next topic he mentioned was praise. He talked about a song which was sung by the choir “Praise is what we do” and he couldn’t understand the relevance behind these words. Once again, I slowly raised my hand and injected that praise is what we do, worship transcends beyond these parameters as an act of honoring and revering God. Worship is the entire church experience. Before I could elaborate further, he quickly indicated it was time to close out and we didn’t have time for further discussion. This Sunday School experience demonstrated the necessity for us to educate those persons who uphold leadership positions in the Church. If the Sunday school teacher had simply taken the time to research the answers to his questions, he would have been properly equipped to lead the discussion. It saddened me to realize that in essence it was the blind leading the blind. In a situation such as this, it is imperative that

As religious men, we should avoid the peril of becoming so engrossed in our theological studies that we neglect our personal devotion. Warfield’s caveat to us is Christian service or work alone cannot replace the depth of Christian affection to God. Work does not equal prayer it is the combination of work and prayer that will develop as ministers. By maintaining a strong devotion to God we are setting an example of holding fast to the confession of our hope. We must frequently examine ourselves against God’s Word to verify our hearts. It is as Warfield says, we should have our hearts on fire brightly so that in our innermost being we are men of God. The greatness of our calling as ministers should flow from the depth of our understanding of the unsurpassed greatness of God. This understanding should motivate, empower, equip and direct us in our