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The Best Part of Your Week

February 14, 2013 in blogs with 0 Comments

“Getting the Saturday newsletter is a great way to start my weekend!”

 

Those were the words I heard this past Saturday night from a subscriber to The Palmer Perspective. If you’re not a subscriber, you should know that each Saturday I send an Exclusive Subscriber Only Newsletter. I don’t sell anything. I’m not a spammer. It’s just my way of connecting with my most important readers.

The Saturday Newsletter is uplifting encouragement to help us all become the people we want to be. I enjoy writing the weekly newsletter more than I enjoy writing anything else. It’s a joy!

And I want to share it with you!

If you’re not a subscriber (shame, shame), I encourage you to join our tribe. I truly believe it will bless your life on another level. The Palmer Perspective typically updates twice a week – Tuesdays and Thursdays. Subscribers have posts automatically delivered to their inbox. Those two posts, plus the Saturday Newsletter is all I’ll usually send. That’s it!

Don’t worry. Your e-mail is safe.  It will never be given away or sold to any person or company. Promise!

What else do subscribers get?Slide1

  • Automatic access to essays and e-books like “Scandalous: Lessons in Redemption From Unlikely Women” that I release and present to audiences.
  • Free Access to Slideshows, Audio, and Printed Materials I produce for speeches, lectures, and conferences.
  • Automatic entrance into book, music, and other product giveaways.
  • Freedom to e-mail me anytime with a comment, question, or concern and a guarantee that I will respond within 48-hours.
  • More coming soon: (Like  Subscriber Only Google+ Hangout Discussing Spiritual Formation and Other Important Issues)
  • You’ll be the first to know about upcoming events through The Palmer Perspetive (there’s so much coming I’m excited about).

That’s a pretty great deal for an e-mail address! Plus, I know you’ll be blessed by the content.

“How do I subscribe?” you’re asking. Good question. It’s easy. Just enter your e-mail in the “SUBSCRIBE VIA E-MAIL” box in the upper right-hand corner.

For the curious, here’s this past week’s Subscriber Newsletter.

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Getting Past Disappointment

Don’t you hate feeling disappointed? I do.

This week I received news about my participation in a ministry that has meant a great deal to me over the past 13 years. They didn’t want me to do it anymore.

Truthfully, I saw it coming. It’s the same decision I would have made and counseled them to make if I’d been asked. Ultimately, the decision wasn’t about me…I think. Nevertheless, I was disappointed.

My disappointment was increased because I had a similar occurrence last week. Thanks, but no thanks, Sean. We’re going in a different direction.

Yet, both this week and last week, as doors were closing, bigger doors were opening. I was asked to participate in projects that had been long held dreams; goals I’d been working toward for years. As disappointed as I was, I had to face the reality that time and circumstance dictated that I could no longer do what I used to do and have time for new opportunities.

 

I had to embrace God’s redirection in my life.

Redirection is not always easy, but it is necessary. When staring in the face of disappointment, there are three questions that allow me to embrace God’s redirection.

  1. What Does This Make Possible?: If we’re no longer participating or providing a service in old ways, what can we do with our talent, time, and treasure? Something is now possible that wasn’t possible before.
  2. Which Dream Is Next?: Our bucket-lists should be long, but life is seasonal and we can’t do everything at once. When one season passes, it’s time to move on to the next season. Like a checklist, when one item is marked off, it’s time to move on to the next.
  3. Who Can I Bless?: In all things we are simply stewards. For a short amount of time, God has made us caretakers. None of us will live forever and someone else will ultimately fill our role. As we transition from one season of life to another, let’s bless the next person, group, orgeneration.

Life delivers disappointments. You don’t have to be told that. But many times, our disappointments overshadow what is actually happening: God is redirecting our lives in order to point us to something far more meaningful. Embrace it!

I hope you have a blessed weekend.

Sean Palmer

Could you do me a favor? Please Subscribe Now. 

Maximize Who You Are. Create A Powerful Personal & Professional Brand

July 3, 2012 in blogs, church, leadership, life with 4 Comments

People don’t like the idea of branding. Not only do we not like the idea of branding, but if you mention marketing, market-testing, and market research, some guys get downright angry, especially when it comes to church life. I was once in a meeting when someone mentioned that a particular church had discerned the people they were marketing to and were creating a brand to reach them. One guy in the room almost vomited! It just didn’t seem right to him that churches, of all things, would calibrate their music, tone of messages, building, dress, and look to a certain group. Truth is, something about that idea turns my stomach too, but I do understand it as a simple reality.

Everyone Has A Brand

Continue Reading…

Streaming at Rochester

March 14, 2011 in Bible, Blogroll, blogs, books, church, homiletics, Islam, leadership, ministry, Missional Church, preaching, race relations, reading, reconciliation, theology with 2 Comments

I’m very stoked, pumped, excited, and animated to be heading to Rochester College this May 16-18 for “Streaming: Biblical Conversations From the Missional Frontier”. Streaming is an in-depth exploration about the adventure of ministry. It  will focus on the book of James and will offer ministers and church leaders biblical resources to help them lead God’s people in a missional era. Mark Love – the churches of Christ missional yoda and peculiarly dedicated Bob Dylan fan, has put together, along with JoPa Productions, an awesome line-up of missional thinkers.

The featured speakers will be Scot McKnight and Miroslav Volf! Wow!!

Many of you already know Scot McKnight. He’s a Christian blogosphere rockstar (if there can be such a thing), has written a first rate book on how to read scripture and is not afraid to call John Piper’s questions of whether or not “Jesus preached Paul’s gospel” stupid, well “irritating!” His newest book is One.Life.

Perhaps less people know Miroslav Volf, but you should. Volf is as first-rate as first-rate gets when it comes to theology, and his book Exclusion and Embrace is a modern-day classic when it comes to race, identity and reconciliation. His newest release, Allah: A Christian Response is supposed to be excellent as well.

Just those two guys make Streaming worth the mere $189 for the registration. Plus, other incredible folks you’ll want to be around will be there. People like me, Jack Reese, Tony Jones, and Doug Pagitt.

I hope you’ll join me this May in Michigan.

Communication Killers

October 18, 2010 in blogs, church, homiletics, leadership, preaching, speaking, speech acts with 0 Comments

If both your mission and the communication around your mission aren’t clear and easy, you’re frustrating both yourself and your constituents. I’ve been saying this for some time now, but amazingly, I get more push back than you’d expect.

In the last few weeks I’ve had multiple conversations with new bloggers and non-profit organizations about fine-tuning both their mission and communication streams. My axiom has been: Be generous, Be helpful. Initially, everyone agrees, but when I move on to highlight that constituents want things easy, simple and clear, my audiences have appeared shocked. But my instincts are nevertheless true. Whether you’re a CEO, teacher, pastor, writer, therapist…whatever, your constituent’s lives are intensely busy, their concerns are monumentally large, and their time is magnificently short. If you want to lead them, you have to wrap your arms around your phenomenal mission and contract it into bite-sized chunks for your constituents.

Yet in so many industries (especially the church), the professionals make accessing the pertinent information hard for the populace. We don’t mean to, we just do. And I think I know 3 reasons why. See if you make these 3 mistakes while formulating your communication:

1.  You’re A Intellectual Snob – You like demonstrating that you’re smarter than most everyone else so you use every big word you know and you employ the jargon of your scholastic guild. Whenever you can you turn your staff meeting, sermons, blog posts, etc…into your greatest hits from graduate school, you do. If that’s you, here’s a tip: The people you’re communicating with aren’t stupid, they’re just outside your field. They don’t know your field and don’t care about the intricacies of it. And, by the way, the sign of a truly smart person is the ability to explain complex things simple.

2. You Had To Learn It – Speaking to a physician years ago, I asked why resident doctors had to keep such long, insufferable hours which made them more likely to make medical mistakes. His response, “I had to do it.”  This notion is at play in a great deal of communicators. Since they had to learn Greek & Hebrew (or whatever they had to learn in school to do a job) they come to think no one can be a good Christian if they don’t know. In reaction, they make sure that their audience is forced to know the ins and outs concerning the peculiarities of their field.

3. You Don’t Want To Communicate – Know one says this, but it’s true. I’ve been apart of organizations that thoroughly believed they were elite. In order to keep this ruse alive the organization must remain small. Therefore, the more esoteric and ethereal the communication the better. And guess what, when you don’t want the masses, they know it.

Each of these are killers. Over the next week, review your most recent communications and see if these communication killers are at play in your world. I know, they are too often working in mine.

Let’s Reconnect

July 26, 2010 in blogs, leadership, preaching, race relations with 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking for a while about what to do with this space. I took an extended break because blogging had changed so much in the past 6 years, since I began. When I started there was no Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare or other means of social networking. Blogging itself was in it’s infancy and a blog like mine covered subject matter from theology to my daughter’s ballet classes. Blogs don’t do that anymore. They’re much more narrow.

So what am I to do?

Honestly, I still don’t know. But I am going to return to writing more often. Randy and Donny at Marketing Twins have offered some good suggestions, and I may follow.

At any rate, my intent is to narrow my focus to three areas: preaching, leadership, and the ministry of reconciliation — with an occasional book review. These are areas in which I am learning a great deal very rapidly and want to test new ideas, processes and theories and/or areas where I feel I have a unique lens. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful, add it to your Google Reader or drop by to read and comment a few times a week.

I want to reconnect with those readers and friends who were so faithful to The Palmer Perspective in our heyday.

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