Leadership And Membership Quotes

If done "as God wants.' then leadership will surely include intercessory prayer. The saintly Bishop Azariah of India once remarked to Bishop Stephen Neill that he found time to pray daily, by name, for every leader in his extensive diocese. Little wonder that during his thirty years of eldering there, the diocese tripled its membership and greatly increase in spiritual effectiveness

Create and communicate absolute clarity of purpose.

Our first post-election call of 2020 was at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6. Following our opening prayer, we moved into leadership reports, where Kevin, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, and I briefed the membership.

In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent. Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs. More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members. From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment. Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater. This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms. When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed. To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.

Last year’s Boeing contract in Washington State saw members of the International Association of Machinists vote down a contract that would transfer their pensions to a 401k plan and increase their healthcare costs with minimal raises over eight years. “Because of the massive takeaways,” Local 751 President Thomas Wroblewski told his members, “the union is adamantly recommending members reject this offer.” After the members voted down the contract by 67 percent, Washington State found $8.5 billion in tax breaks for the company and International President Thomas Buffenbarger stepped in to carry this corporate sweetheart deal through the last mile. With Boeing threatening to move the assembly of the new 777X passenger jet to another state, the International demanded a re-vote and the intimidated membership agreed to the same deal they previously rejected. The collusion of a multinational corporation and the state in transferring billions of dollars of wealth from working-class people into the hands of the rich could hardly have been possible in this case without the assistance of the International leadership. Boeing workers got to keep their jobs—but the fight that they may have been prepared to have with their employer was swiftly shut down.

Three, Christians who practice repentance should be the only ones allowed into church membership and leadership.

Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

Expressive association In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey. However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.

Quoting page 115: The Hispanic civil rights organizations were heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, whose president from the late 1960s through the 1970s was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard alumni veteran of the Kennedy White House and tower of the nation’s eastern liberal establishment. In 1968 Ford had created MALDEF, as a Latino version of the NAACP, with a $2.2 million founding grant. La Raza, given a similar birthing grant of $630,000 by Ford in 1968, received $1,953,700 two years later. Between 1970 and 1999, Ford gave MALDEF $27.9 million and La Raza $21.5 million. In 1981 Ford started funding LULAC, the oldest Hispanic association. Noted since its origins in Texas in 1929 for espousing patriotism, political moderation, self-help ethnic, support for English language mastery, and bourgeois civic boosterism, LULAC in the 1970s adopted the strident tone of Chicano nationalism common to La Raza and MALDEF. In 1983 the Ford Foundation, led by Ford’s first African-American president, Franklin A. Thomas, began funding the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella association modeled on the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, to coordinate lobbying against [immigration] restrictionist organizations such as FAIR. LULAC, although joining the racialized agenda of MALDEF and La Raza in the 1970s, retained its character as a membership-based organization rooted in the Hispanic (mainly Mexican-American) community. But the constituency represented by MALDEF and La Raza was essentially the Ford Foundation and the tightly networking community of Latino political careerists.

the extent to which Mormons wish to continue to dissociate themselves from any of the three major branches of Christianity makes it harder for them to credibly claim to be Christian at the same time. Imagine a young man raised in a not overly devout LDS home today who begins to go around describing a vision he had received in which he saw three identical looking men who identified themselves as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They instructed him to associate with no existing church but to await further revelation. Eventually an angel guides him to dig up silver tiles that are covered with writing he cannot read but looks a little like pictographs on totem poles. Later he announces he has been enabled by God’s Spirit to translate them. They tell the story of a group of Mormons who migrated to the Yukon in the late nineteenth century and who mingled with the Inuit there until they were all killed off except for one who had buried these tiles with their story engraved on them. Later God reveals to this young man extensive instructions for the founding of a new group restoring the original Mormonism of Joseph Smith, which had begun to be corrupted by Brigham Young, lost its moorings considerably in the mid-twentieth century, was reformed and improved by LDS church president Ezra Taft Benson but still needs a full restoration. After all, Joseph Smith died before he could pass on his authority to his divinely ordained successor, so no existing Mormons have true priesthood authority. The Salt Lake City-based Mormons, the rural Utah fundamentalist Mormons, and the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) are all illegitimate, and it is time to restore original Mormonism under the leadership of this upstart young man. Anyone who wants to be in God’s best graces has to be baptized into the new church this man is organizing, which is to be called the Restored Church of our Holy Lord Jesus Christ of Last-day Disciples. Existing Mormon baptisms are not good enough for membership in his church. Indeed, this new Restored Church is the one true church on the entire planet. At the same time, it wants to call itself Mormon and be treated as fully Mormon by the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency in Salt Lake City, by all the renegade fundamentalist Mormons, and by the Community of Christ. What is the likelihood that anyone in these three groups would agree? Yet that is very close to how the rest of Christendom perceives, rightly or wrongly, the desires of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When he wrote the testament in December 1922, his anxious concern on this score was visible in every line of the document. It showed up in his proposal that the Central Committee’s membership be enlarged to fifty or one hundred as a means of containing its inner conflicts and thus of preventing a “schism” that could jeopardize the continued stability of the party and the Soviet system. It was reflected in his comment on the antagonistic relations between Stalin and Trotsky as the prime source of the danger of a split in the Central Committee, and in his consideration of the qualifications of various possible candidates for succession to the supreme leadership.

The main mass-membership advocacy organizations of American Jewry — B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, the National Conference of Jewish Federations, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (a kind of steering group for the major organizations), to mention only a few — are not religious organizations but ethnic ones. It is not necessary to have any Jewish religious affiliation to be a member in good standing in these organizations, and their leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or Jewishly learned Jews. We need not go into foundational texts and statements of purpose on the question of origins, for the answer is simple enough: organizations like B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were created to lobby for particular Jewish interests. … In time, these and most other Jewish organizations became explicitly or implicitly Zionist, and thereafter existed to one degree or another to support, first, a Jewish home in Palestine, and then, after 1948, the security and prosperity of the State of Israel. In other words, all these organizations have depended, and still depend, on the validity of their serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from the broader American interest but not related directly to religion.

radicalism was thriving among all groups except the Catholics. I felt out of it all. There was Catholic membership in all these groups of course, but no Catholic leadership.

Look inward for solutions to your greatest challenges.

You cannot be a modern association without a contemporary board.

Jimmy and Grace returned to Detroit in late August, in time to participate in the final work to relaunch Correspondence. On September 21–22 the organization held a national convention in Detroit attended by the full membership across the country, just as they had done with the initial founding of the paper. During the convention Jimmy and Lyman were elected as the cochairmen of the organization. 77 This reflected a solidification of Jimmy’s leadership of the organization. In title Jimmy and Lyman shared responsibility, but in practice, with Jimmy there in Detroit and Lyman in Los Angeles, “90% of the burden of national leadership rest[ ed] with” Jimmy, as Glaberman described the situation. In a letter to C. L. R., Glaberman reported that Jimmy had been “the key figure in the convention” and “he remains that today. He consciously and vigorously took over the direction of the organization and his leadership was accepted by everyone.” Given the many activities and spaces in which Jimmy had taken responsibility for building the organization—leading editorial committees and reaching out to workers in his neighborhood and at Chrysler—Glaberman expressed concern that Jimmy not overextend himself: “The organization looks to him to give direction on all these things and he is not very cooperative when any attempt is made to slow him down.” 78

The fraternity’s leadership did a membership review, interviewing every member and weeding out any brothers who were deemed unfit to be a part of the house. Evan and Reggie were picked as two bad apples and kicked out of the fraternity. Reggie’s expulsion came as no surprise to anyone who’d been paying attention. He was known principally for getting wasted, breaking things, and leaving a mess in the kitchen. His room, which reeked of weed and tobacco, was filled with cups and plates from the house’s kitchen that he hadn’t bothered to return. He never showed up for house meetings or lent a hand on house cleans or party setups. Although he was very book smart and super friendly to everyone, he was a downright nuisance to live with. Evan’s case was not so clear-cut—ask ten people why he got kicked out and you’ll get ten different answers. Some say he was a willing scapegoat, volunteering to be kicked out because he knew he wouldn’t have the house for his senior year anyway. Others say he was scapegoated because he had angered younger guys by pushing for parties while the house was on probation. Others say Evan deserved to be kicked out because he didn’t want to fight hard enough get the house back, and he had been taking too cavalier an attitude toward the trouble the fraternity faced. No matter the reason, Evan was out. Guys in the fraternity blamed him for their house being taken away. Friends who he thought would have his back didn’t. Bad news came in threes for Evan. He had already lost Future Freshman. He lost the fraternity. Then, his girlfriend Lily told him she’d had enough and dumped him after two-plus years of dating.

The purpose of spiritual leadership is to tap into the fundamental needs of both leader and follower for spiritual well-being through calling and membership; to create vision and value congruence across several levels—the individual, the empowered team, and the organization as a whole; and, ultimately, to foster higher levels of employee well-being, organizational commitment, financial performance, and social responsibility—in short, the Triple Bottom Line.

A group may share interests and values, but a community has connections so that members care for the welfare of one another. Second, you’re simply not recognizing the membership identity. Consider why someone would seek you out and what that person hopes to gain as a member. Consider what that person expects of members and leadership, both formal and informal.

What makes me the proudest about Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., is that she truly lives up to the ideals and principles she stands for. This sisterhood is proactive and is ever progressing, never settling, and always upholding the highest level of expectations of the membership and all that she comes in contact with. At the forefront of any major change you will always see a Delta; the leadership of any progressing organization always had a Delta in the midst. My sisters are dynamic in all their ways and that makes me proud to be a Delta. They are examples of the essence of Fortitude in every sense of the word! —LaKesha Russ, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Wikipedia: Iron law of oligarchy According to [Robert] Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class", rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members. Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.

The FBI nicknamed the program COINTELPRO, as a shorthand for "counterintelligence program." COINTELPRO originated in the 1950s, to prevent socialist movements from developing in the United States, and the program rose to new heights in the Black Power era. Even prior to Stokely Carmichael's first calls for Black Power in 1966, the FBI was organizing to undermine civil rights movement efforts. The Black organizations they labeled as "militant' included not only Stokely's SNCC but also the Rev. Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group that never wavered in its dedication to nonviolent civil disobedience. Between 1963 and 1971, the FBI ran nearly three hundred separate COINTELPRO operations against Black nationalist groups, the majority of which targeted the Black Panther Party. The program's major goals were to: 1. Prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups, as there would be strength in unity. 2. Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify and electrify the movement, such as the Rev. Dr. King or Malcolm X. 3. Prevent violence, ideally by neutralizing movement leaders before they could become violent. 4. Prevent Black nationalist leaders from gaining respectability, ideally by discrediting them in the eyes of white people, Black people, and radicals of all races. 5. Prevent young people from joining the groups and increasing their membership base.

The twentieth century was not the finest epoch in Southern Baptist history with respect to ecclesiological practice. As urban churches increased in numbers of members, stress was placed on church efficiency. In the admission of members, there was less care and greater laxity, while corrective church discipline was abandoned and the use of church covenants became less frequent. Numerous members were inactive and/or nonresident, but their names were kept on church rolls. In larger urban churches, full-time ministers with specialized tasks assisted the pastors so that the “church staff” came to be. Certain other Baptist conventions and unions chose to identify with conciliar ecumenism and its goal of more visible transdenominational union, but the SBC declined to do so—eliciting the unfavorable epithet “problem child of American Protestantism”—and the conciliar movement faded in significance. Later in the century numerous megachurches developed, usually with multiple worship services and multiple sites and with the demise of congregational polity. In the final decades of the century, as Southern Baptists found more affinity with American evangelicals, they found that ecclesiology was a weakness, not a strength of evangelicals. Increasingly moral failure, both in the membership and in the leadership, became common in Southern Baptist churches, with church members having the same percentage of failures as nonmembers.

Your life is connected to other key support structures that you must never neglect, including family, fans, supporters, affiliations, professional associations, religious membership and others. Your membership to such groupings must add value to others whilst you equally get the benefit they are supposed to provide their members.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

Careful thought here will serve the Church for years to come. Churches often find themselves disconnecting their strategic plans from their grievances with church culture. Leaders see a particular problem, but we want to move past repentance right into obedience. Leadership like this only glorifies our own wisdom and righteousness. Appropriate corporate repentance magnifies the Lord of mercy in the church. Not only this, but members of our churches see what we see. When major unbiblical deviations go unaddressed, it only serves to undermine the membership’s view of the care, courage, or competency of the leadership. If we want to see something in culture change, we need to get specific. Exposition. This next stage of managing change will begin a circular process. In this stage, new identified elements of needed cultural change will be added to the existing healthy elements of culture being maintained and reinforced. The leadership team will find itself running around the process circle from exposition to illustration to incorporation to evaluation and a back again to exposition. It may take more laps than a NASCAR race, but culture will change over time. And the process must never end because the culture must be continually cultivated. Exposition is the step in the process that gives Christ-followers a tremendous confidence in the possible future for any church. While formation is always challenging, who better to understand than those the Lord is sanctifying daily? Every single day, we must come to our Bible expecting God to change us, renew us, and cause us to repent. It should be no different for the Church of God. And the means that God uses to shape individuals is the same means He will use to change a church’s culture. The teaching and preaching of God’s Word is our hope and God’s power for change. This step in culture change is so important. The Word of God is powerful to renew hearts and produce fruit among God’s people.

Diana was on a conference call with the chairman of the board of an international professional association. She listened as he listed problem after problem: staff members are critical of each other and of members; there is little collaboration among staff and board members; no one is willing to go the extra mile; everyone complains about the cost of membership; members seldom volunteer to serve on committees or to write articles for the newsletter. The list of problems went on and on. Diana gently interrupted the habitual tirade: Diana: May I share my reflections and ask a question? Peter: Yes. Diana: I hear that you are very frustrated and feeling somewhat overwhelmed with all the problems people bring to you. Peter: Yes. Diana: I wonder what it is that you really want. You have described in detail what you do not want—all the problems. I am curious, what do you want for the association, its members, and the board and the staff? Peter: That is quite easy. I would like more members who are actively engaged. Diana: That is a clear and exciting image for the future. I suggest that you begin an inquiry into “Engaged Membership.” Ask members of the board, the staff, and the association to share stories of when they have been highly engaged as members of the association and/or as members of another organization, team, or community. Ask them who or what led them to be so engaged. What did they do and contribute? How did leadership encourage and support their engagement? How did it feel? What were the benefits to them and to others? What ideas do they have to enhance engaged membership in the association? Peter: That is a very different approach. Diana: Yes, when you flip problems and ask about what you really want, two things happen. One, people learn what it is that you stand for as a leader. They learn what you expect of them. In your case it is “Engaged Membership.” And two, you get more of want you want. When people know what is wanted and expected for success, they do it.