These posts are adapted from Donald Keough’s excellent book The Ten commandments for Business Failure. This book was such an excellent source of common sense and probable one of the best books I’ve read in some time.
For this is the tragedy of man – circumstances change, but he doesn’t. –Machiavelli
If you want to fail miserably in ministry, make sure you become rigid about what ministry looks like. Do not even entertain the possibility that the world might change. Just keep doing what you’ve always been doing the same way you’ve been doing it.
It doesn’t matter if your community’s population has shifted and now includes immigrants and minorities or that people speak a dozen languages within a couple city blocks of your church. Just hold firm to they way things have always been done. Don’t listen to the voices of those who need the Gospel. What do they know anyway?
No, stay put and you’ll be fine.
Of course, Jesus did say that he had come to give us an overflowing, moving life [John 10:10], and in the Book of Acts, the apostle Paul sure seemed to have adapted his presentation to his situation. But that kind of flexibility was only available to Jesus and the apostles. The Holy Spirit is much older now, and he is not as limber as he once was.
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