Criticism is one of the most difficult things to respond to. Someone might be criticizing something that you’ve done or created, or they might be criticising something a lot closer to you like your leadership style or personality. In either case, it’s always a difficult thing to take in. The question is: How does one respond to it? What do you do in that millisecond when you hear the words that you interpret as a criticism piercing that soft spot in your armor and landing a blow?

I recently had a fascinating experience with a company who I felt like provided the perfect case study for responding to criticism. A few weeks ago I wrote this post: Why Book Summary Services Like Get Abstract Might Not Be Worth Your Time Or Money. As you can tell by the title, I didn’t come away with the best impression of the service. Sure, it seemed interesting, but I ended up feeling like it wasn’t going to be worth it. What I found to be interesting was that they actually commented on my post with a great response here on Modern Ekklesia. Let me post their response and then I’ll make a few comments on the other side:

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I’m a tech geek. It is what it is. I love technology and follow technology blogs, and this blog itself seeks to touch upon the intersection of church, leadership, and technology. But there’s one area in which I don’t allow technology to get too close: my devotional time with God. It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, I’ve experimented with following a Bible reading plan from my iPhone, or reading the Bible from my computer, and even memorizing Scripture from my iPhone, but I’ve left those behind. Why? Because I’ve noticed that the temptation is too great to do other stuff during that time.

If I pick up my iPhone to read the Bible it’s too easy to read some emails or check out some tweets. And it just takes one really-important-sounding email to derail me and get me sucked into “work mode.” So, I decided I’m not going to do it. I prepare myself a cup of soy milk with Roma (don’t knock it till you try it!), I grab my Bible with real pages, and I sit.

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There’s something quite satisfying about reading a short book chapter. It’s not because I don’t like to read. If I had the money I would probably buy one every few days. There’s so much to read about! Here’s the reason why I like short chapters, though: they’re usually clear in their focus and aim.

If there’s something that frustrates me above anything else in the realm of communication, it’s lack of clarity.

-What are you writing about?

-What are you speaking about?

What are you teaching about?

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If you’re a pastor, one of the most important things you can do in your congregation is to be intentional about your preaching. You’ll never have more time to influence your people than when you stand before them every week at the pulpit. Part of this, is learning to plan and develop a preaching calendar. Imagine having sermons planned out for months (or a whole year) at a time. Imagine how much less stress you’d have and the blessing that your church leaders would receive by being able to intentionally plan the service around the series that’s coming up.

A few months ago I wrote an article for Ministry Magazine called “Planning a Preaching Calendar for a Multi-Church District.” In that article I share the entire process I went through to develop a preaching calendar. If you have one, or many churches, you can use the same process to help you. Out of everything that you could do as a pastor, I believe that learning to plan a preaching calendar is in the top three in terms of importance.

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Here’s a video review of the GoGoStand. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. Below are my thoughts:

What do you think? What do you use for a stand?

I recently ran out of ideas to write about. I have some measures in place like this calendar app that helps me to catalog what I want to write about, but I recently found myself at the bottom of the barrel. It’s not that ideas hadn’t been coming to me. The problem is that I hadn’t been writing them down.

So here’s what I did: I wrote them down. Genius, huh?

I pulled out my trusted Moleskine Notebook, created a tab towards the end, and took 15 minutes to write down every single idea that I could think of. During that time period I came up with about 10 solid ideas, including the title to this post.

Here’s two lesson I learned from this:

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This past Sunday I used my Kindle 3 to have my notes for a wedding I was officiating in. How did it perform? Quite well, but there was one major flaw. Here’s the lowdown:

1. Getting documents on the device. This part is easy. If you have a Word document, you can simply email it to the email address you get when you receive your Kindle. Mine, for example, is rodlie.ortiz@kindle.com. A few minutes after emailing it the document appears on your home screen, and you’re good to go.

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