Excerpt from Reverse Mentoring
My new book is called, Reverse Mentoring: How Young Leaders Can Transform the Church and Why We Should Let Them. It was published by Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network and is available on Amazon in both hardcopy and Kindle editions. Some amazing people have endorsed the book, including: John Ortberg: “This book will help satisfy a deep hunger for wisdom and guidance.” Reggie McNeal: “The richness of life sharing that is established in reverse mentoring is a largely unexplored, but promising green edge to the Christian movement. Let Earl show you how to get in on this development.” As a way of saying “thanks” for subscribing to my newsletter, I’m providing the excerpt below from the Introduction to Reverse Mentoring: ............................................... Aaron sprinted out of the darkness like…
ContinueDances with Volvos
Jan and I continue to travel travel the West raising support for our university church plant in Berkeley. We basically live in our old Volvo and stop in at home in Springfield to do the laundry and pay bills a few days a month. Today we are in Utah with Trinity Jordan at Elevation Church, having come here from visiting with Brad and Julie Riley at the Origins Community in Boulder, CO. Along the way we visited with some family who were meeting in Wyoming, giving us the chance to drive through Yellowstone and Grand Teton (and about five other) national parks. Yellowstone was a surprise in that most of the forest looks to be in recovery from a pretty…
ContinueMusical Reverse Mentoring
A 5-year old drummer from Poland illustrates the Reverse Mentoring concept of the young showing the old how it’s done.
The House
Last weekend Janet and I visited our friends Randy and Heidi Jumper at First Assembly of God in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Randy heads up The House, First Assembly’s young adult ministry. On some Friday nights the ministry holds a prayer meeting they call Sanctuary. Jan and I attended an hour-long session that dealt with Peace and Love as fruit of the Holy Spirit. We did Scripture meditation and some small group discussion in one room and then moved into a second space for another exercise. Randy encouraged us all to express love to the people in the “Contacts” list of our cell phones by calling or texting them to let them know what they mean to us. (Non-tech folks could receive…
ContinueCode Pink
On a recent trip to Berkeley Jan and I had a chance to meet some members of an anti-war group called Code Pink as two of them protested outside the US Marine Corps office. We talked with them for a while and watched them protest by singing what I would call anti-military parody songs karaoke-style as one of them swung a large hoola hoop around her waist. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show recently featured this video report on the Code Pink initiative in Berkeley. We found the Code Pink women to be sincere and personable, but alone. Their exercise of free speech was protected by two Berkeley police officers (one for each protester, I guess) but with no…
ContinuePost-Elliptical
Visiting the East Bay (Berkeley/Oakland) area in April Jan and I connected with a young woman who lives there. With her enthusiastic help, we toured some of the region and started learning a few of the million things we need to know to live there. Our new friend is heavily involved in fitness activities (especially biking) and so began to explain the Bay attitude toward things physical. In southern Cal, she opined, fitness is about vanity. One works out in that region to see and be seen, making exercise something like a self-inflicted form of cosmetic surgery (without that funny, my-face-is-about-to-explode look). In northern Cal, exercise is more about health, and is the natural concomitant to eating tofu, avoiding red meat,…
ContinueBerkeley Video Premiere
On Sunday morning June 22nd, Jan and I will premiere a new video called “Earl and Jan Go to Berkeley” at Central Assembly of God in Springfield, Missouri. This Joel Triska production chronicles our April 2008 visit to our new home and what will be the site of our university church plant. The piece sets a new standard in visual economy, coming in at just over two minutes, a length sure to appeal to those with an eroding attention span. What’s not so obvious is that Joel had only 6 minutes of raw footage to work with (plus a bunch of stills) because I forgot to recharge the video camera batteries before our shoot. Somehow, he took these fragments and produced another masterpiece.…
ContinueI'm Back
The automatic counter on my website indicates that I have not blogged in 211 days. Let’s see now…what was going on just seven months ago. Barak and Hillary were still slugging it out in a marathon campaign. Tim Russert was still alive. Gas was, well, cheaper. And Janet and I were newcomers to the church planting life. So where have I been for the last 211 days? Here’s an overview of what’s been going on in our life/ministry (and a few reasons why blogging went on “hold” for a while): 1. We have been transitioning from our old life of owning a home, having a job with an office, and working with a team to the path of the itinerating church…
ContinueMy Critics
Some people find me and/or my views offensive, dangerous, or unwise. I will post their critiques on this page to give my friends a look at the “other” side of my life, and in hopes of remaining accountable to the larger Christian and non-Christian communities. Also, the “Comments” section of this page will give anyone who takes issue with me a public space in which to note their objections. After all, people usually listen to my talks without a comfortable way to offer negative feedback (which I may deserve), so it only seems fair to make a public venue available for critique. In general, those who find me subversive tend to suspect that my friendship with the Emerging Church means that…
ContinueLeadership, Followership, and Mission
Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big personality” so often identified with leadership. He described himself as “leading from the middle,” that is, bringing people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that produced results but not heroes. Talking about this issue brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus. We began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different approaches to…
Continue |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Earl Creps—a popular speaker and leader—is director of the Doctor of Ministry program and associate professor at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary (AGTS) in Springfield, Missouri. He has been a pastor, ministries consultant, and university professor. Along the way, Creps earned a Ph.D. in communication at Northwestern University and a doctor of ministry degree in leadership at AGTS.
What is Earl doing? View or subscribe to Earl Creps' Google calendar. Or learn how to contact him directly.
