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Showing posts with the label organizational turnaround

The Way of the Towel: Greatness, Redefined by Jesus

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by Bart Denny Central text: John 13:12–17 (NIV) Over the years, in church settings, I’ve done a lot of dishes. I’ve raked a lot of leaves. I’ve painted plenty of church walls. I’ve plunged more than a few clogged toilets. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. But if I’m honest, at this age, with this many years in church, there’s a part of me that wants to say, “I’ve done my time.” I don’t usually say it out loud. I dress it up. I call it wisdom. Focus. Stewarding my time well. But the feeling sneaks up on me. It shows up when another need pops up. When the same few people carry the same load. When I feel tired. It shows up when I think, “Shouldn’t somebody else take a turn now?” And I’ll confess something else: I don’t mind serving. I just want to choose the terms. And if I’m not careful, I start thinking and acting like the low places belong to somebody else. Now let me be even more honest: I don’t struggle with getting my hands dirty. I struggle to keep my ego in check....
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A Rust-Bucket Ship and a Struggling Church: The Leadership Development Imperative in Two "Turn-around" Stories

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 The Ugly Baby made pretty: a sea story. by Bart L. Denny, Ph.D., Th.M. As I stared into an aft storage locker crammed full of apparently useless detritus and surveyed a ship’s fantail cluttered with more junk—a rusted-out barbeque grill, alleged spare parts that didn’t seem to belong to any of the ship’s installed equipment, and big sealed metal cans of who-knows-what. Rust covered the deck and all the deck fittings and equipment I surveyed. In the background, I could hear Miguel Rivera, our crew’s boatswain’s mate first class petty officer, whistling the theme song of “Sanford and Son,” a 1970s television show where Red Fox played the owner of a junkyard. Pretty appropriate. How could a commissioned U.S. Navy ship have gotten like this? Just two days before, Petty Officer Rivera and I, along with the rest of our California-based crew, had been assigned to a slick, fast, and well-maintained coastal patrol ship. For the past year, I had been proud to be the captain of that ship...
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