Roman Leadership Quotes

We sainted St. Tammany (King Tamanend III) because he embodied moral perfection and every divine qualification that a deity could possess. I hold him in higher esteem than the saints of the Roman Catholic Church. He'll forever be the patron saint of America.

Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. ... They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent.

Never base motivation or fear, entirely.

Servitude of any sort is distasteful to all men, but especially objectionable is subjection to others in the case of those who ought to rule.

But being overborne with numbers, and nobody daring to face about, stretching out his hands to heaven, [Romulus] prayed to Jupiter to stop the army, and not to neglect but maintain the Roman cause, now in extreme danger. The prayer was no sooner made, than shame and respect for their king checked many; the fears of the fugitives changed suddenly into confidence.

Despite their inglorious end, the legions remain to this day, thousands of years after their creation, the most pre-eminent example of how detailed organization, tight discipline, and inspiring leadership can take a group of individuals and turn them into a winning team.

The most important thing for morale was to maintain a united front among the officers.

As Plutarch later wrote, “It is a most agreeable spectacle for a Roman soldier when he sees a general eating common bread in public, or sleeping on a simple pallet, or taking a hand in the construction of some trench or palisade. For they have not so much admiration for those leaders who share honor and riches with them as for those who take part in their toils and dangers.” Marius personified this type of leadership.

The Roman empire lasted 450 years by granting citizenship and leadership opportunities to people of all customs and religions. The Ottoman empire lasted 500 years, and tolerated local customs and religions. The Third Reich lasted 8 years.

... those who were intrusted with the command of the troops of the Republic in battle, were wont to resume the shepherd's staff when they laid down the truncheon, and, like the Roman dictators, to retire to complete equality with their fellow-citizens, from the eminence of military command to which their talents, and the call of their country, had raised them.

[A] people needs to understand what freedom is. We Americans are fortunate that the Founders and their generation possessed that understanding. They knew that freedom, per se, is not enough. They knew that freedom must be limited to be preserved. This paradox is difficult for many students to grasp. Young people generally think freedom means authority figures leaving them alone so they can "do their own thing." That's part of what it means to be free, but true freedom involves much, much more. As understood by our Founders and by the best minds of the young republic, true freedom is always conditioned by morality. John Adams wrote, "I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by." In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, "No free communities ever existed without morals." The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved. What kinds of limits are we talking about? * The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage. * Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward. * Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British. * Legal limits of the natural and common law, which we also owe to our Western heritage. * Certain social limits, which are extremely important to the survival of freedom. These are the habits of our hearts--good manners, kindness, decency, and willingness to put others first, among other things--which are learned in our homes and places of worship, at school and in team sports, and in other social settings. All these limits complement each other and make a good society possible. But they cannot be taken for granted. It takes intellectual and moral leadership to make the case that such limits are important. Our Founders did that. To an exceptional degree, their words tutored succeeding generations in the ways of liberty. It is to America's everlasting credit that our Founders got freedom right.

The reasons why institutions fail and societies change are complex, and simplistic explanations should evoke automatic suspicion. Sometimes external causes - droughts, plagues or foreign invasions - can unsettle a nation, or its leadership may prove inadequate because of personal factors. In every case, a society faces problems, and is solutions or lack of response set a course for the future.

We know he [Timothy] never converted to Judaism, since in Acts we learn that young Timothy needed to be circumcised. So I have no idea what led Timothy to follow Paul int the great unknown, other than his deep faith in Jesus and the movement of the Holy Spirit. Paul's faith and leadership must have been contagious for a young man who had all the freedoms of the Greco-Roman culture to trade it in for a painful procedure and life of risk with Paul.

It is especially important for Christian leaders to consider how they can lead in such a way that nonbelievers feel compelled to consider Jesus. “So far as it depends on you,” Scripture says, “live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). Instead of using our platforms and influence to persuade other people of faith to take a moral stand against secular ethics, what if we focused on embodying Jesus’s Spirit-filled, life-giving ethics beautifully and compellingly?

I am sure that the Roman emperors didn’t have prayer to God in their schools. But then, the early Christians didn’t seem to care what Caligula or Claudius or Nero did. How could any emperor stop God? How, in fact, could the demons of hell make headway when God’s people prayed and called upon his name? Impossible! In the New Testament we don’t see Peter or John wringing their hands and saying, “Oh, what are we going to do? Caligula’s bisexual … he wants to appoint his horse to the Roman Senate … what a terrible model of leadership! How are we going to respond to this outrage?” Let’s not play games with ourselves. Let’s not divert attention away from the weak prayer life of our own churches. In Acts 4, when the apostles were unjustly arrested, imprisoned, and threatened, they didn’t call for a protest; they didn’t reach for some political leverage. Instead, they headed to a prayer meeting. Soon the place was vibrating with the power of the Holy Spirit (vv. 23–31).

The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

All great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of a negative feeling, but always by a local victory. And this is true from the very beginning. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice and so on. Because they always have that, it’s their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place a small group of slaves finds new means finally to create a victory—a small victory, a local victory. And after that, as the effect of enthusiasm, of affirmation, of the possibility of something new, we have the possibility of the creation of a new subjectivity at the general level.

I’ll list for you the things I think the US has in common with the Roman Empire. Our nation, much like early Rome, rejected its early monarchy for a republican form of government. Like Rome, our republic has gradually ceded the power of the people to its leadership. If our current course continues, we, like Rome, will someday grant our leader absolute power. Like Rome, we believe in the superiority of our ideas and our form of government. We use whatever means possible—political, militaristic, economic to . . .

The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability.

Justin Martyr, one of the leaders of the early church, also serves as a portrait of convictional leadership. Leading members of his own congregation to their mutual execution at the hands of the Roman authorities, Justin encouraged his people with these words, written to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius: “You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.

Thus, John presents a time line of the end times, in chronological order: a.) God proclaims that judgment time has arrived (not the final Great White Throne Judgment in heaven, but judgment on the earth of earth’s inhabitants); b.) Babylon, as a part of that judgment, is destroyed; c.) the Antichrist follows the fall of Babylon, as his allied forces take over Europe (Revived Roman Empire nations) under the threat of doing to them what was done to Babylon if they don’t agree to his leadership over their nations; d.) the final battle of Armageddon commences; and e.) Jesus returns to earth, to reign. Therefore, even though John was given the Book of the Revelation to write in a manner that was not chronological from chapter 1 through 22, the above section of prophecy contained within chapter 14 is helpful in unlocking the clues and solving the mystery of the identity of the Daughter of Babylon/Babylon the Great. (See Attachment C for a listing of end times events.)

Romans 8:14 also carries this idea: “Following the leadership of the Holy Spirit is one of the privileges of being a son of God, although it may be agonizing to learn how to defer to Him and to really let Him be your Leader.

Pope Demotes U.S. Cardinal Critical of His Reform Agenda By JIM YARDLEY ROME — Pope Francis on Saturday sidelined a powerful American cardinal who has emerged as an unabashed conservative critic of the reform agenda and the leadership style that the Argentine pontiff has brought to the Roman Catholic Church. In an expected move, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke was officially removed as head of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. He was demoted to the ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.

Romans understood that: winning a war sometimes means accepting losses where it hurts in order to win where it matters. That is a fundamental - and crucial - rule of war.

Romans understood that winning a war sometimes means accepting losses where it hurts in order to win where it matters. That is a fundamental, and crucial, rule of war.

Roman leadership seemed willing to sacrifice the few for the many

leadership of the Roman Empire would have to be hammered out between Constantine’s three surviving sons

Finally, what the history of this period proves is that, during a time of general apostacy, Christians who remain faithful to their traditional faith may have to worship outside the official churches, the churches of priests in communion with their lawfully appointed diocesan bishop, in order not to compromise that traditional Faith; and that such Christians may have to look for truly Catholic teaching, leadership, and inspiration not to their diocesan bishop, not to the bishops of their country as a body, not to the bishops of the world, not even to the Roman Pontiff, but to one heroic confessor when the other bishops and the Roman Pontiff might have repudiated or even excommunicated. And how would they recognize that this solitary confessor was right and the Roman Pontiff and body of the episcopate (not teaching infallibly) were wrong? The answer is that they would recognize in the teaching of the confessor what the faithful of the fourth century recognized in the teaching of Athanasius: the one true Faith into which they had been baptized, in which they had been catechized, and which their Confirmation gave them the obligation of upholding. In no sense whatsoever can such fidelity to tradition be compared to the Protestant practice of private judgment. The fourth century Catholic traditionalists upheld Athanasius in his defense of the Faith that had been handed down, the Protestant uses his private judgment to justify a breach with the traditional Faith.

Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles. He was a farmer. Powerful guy. He went and took on the challenge, took over Rome, took over the army, and won the war. After they won the war, he felt he’d done his mission and was asked to go and be the emperor, and he gave the ring back and went back to farming. He didn’t only do this once. He did it twice. When they tried to overthrow the empire from within, they asked him back and he came back. He cleaned up the mess through great, great leadership. He had tremendous leadership quality in bringing people together. And again, he gave the ring back and went back to farming.

Since virtually all human societies organized themselves tribally at one point, many people are tempted to believe that this is somehow a natural state of affairs or biologically driven. It is not obvious, however, why you should want to cooperate with a cousin four times removed rather than a familiar nonrelative just because you share one sixty-fourth of your genes with your cousin. No animal species behaves in this manner, nor do human beings in band-level societies. The reason that this form of social organization took hold across human societies was due to religious belief, that is, the worship of dead ancestors. Worship of dead ancestors begins in band-level societies; within each small group there may be shamans or religious specialists whose job it is to communicate with those ancestors. With the development of lineages, however, religion becomes more complex and institutionalized, which in turn affects other institutions like leadership and property. It is belief in the power of dead ancestors over the living and not some mysterious biological instinct that causes tribal societies to cohere. One of the most famous descriptions of ancestor worship was provided by the nineteenth-century French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. His book The Ancient City, first published in 1864, came as a revelation to generations of Europeans brought up to associate Greek and Roman religion with the Olympian gods. Fustel de Coulanges pointed to a much older religious tradition that was shared by other Indo-European groups including

When 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 is read as a quotation representing a Corinthian practice (which D. W. Odell-Scott argued for in 1983, Charles Talbert argued for in 1987, and Peppiatt has argued for again more recently51), Paul’s purpose seems clear: to distinguish what the Corinthians were doing (“women be silent”) and to clarify that Christians should not be following the Corinthian practice (“What!”). While I cannot guarantee this is what Paul was doing, it makes a lot of (historical) sense. First Corinthians includes several non-Pauline quotations already, and the wording of verses 34–35 is remarkably close to Roman sources. As Marg Mowczko observes, “The view that 14:34–35 is a non-Pauline quotation is one of the few that offers a plausible explanation for the jarring change of tone which verses 34–35 bring into the text, as well as the subsequent abrupt change of topic, tone, and gender in verse 36.”52 If Paul is indeed quoting the Roman worldview to counter it with the Christian worldview, then his meaning is the exact opposite of what evangelical women have been taught. Could it be that, instead of telling women to be silent like the Roman world did, Paul was actually telling men that, in the world of Jesus, women were allowed to speak? Could we have missed Paul’s point (again)? Instead of heeding his rebuke and freeing women to speak, are we continuing the very patriarchal practices that Paul was condemning? As a historian, I find it hard to ignore how similar Paul’s words are to the Greco-Roman world in which he lives. Yet, even if I am wrong and Paul is only drawing on Roman sources instead of intentionally quoting them for the purpose of refutation, I would still argue that the directives Paul gave to Corinthian women are limited to their historical context.53 Why? Because consistency is an interpretative virtue. Paul is not making a blanket decree for women to be silent; he allows women to speak throughout his letters (1 Corinthians 11:1–6 is a case in point). Paul is not limiting women’s leadership; he tells us with his own hand that women lead in the early church and that he supports their ministries (I will discuss Romans 16 in the next section). Maintaining a rigid gender hierarchy just isn’t Paul’s point. As Beverly Roberts Gaventa reminds us from earlier in 1 Corinthians (12:1–7), Paul’s “calling to service is not restricted along gender lines so that arguments about complementarity find no grounding here.”54 By insisting that Paul told women to be silent, evangelicals have capitulated to

The reward for climbing one moral mountain is to be given a steeper one next time. Those in Christian leadership particularly need to be clear on that.

He rejects leadership that is based on Greco-Roman concepts of wisdom, power, and status (1 Cor. 1:18–31). His teachings are the polar opposite of Plato’s argument that the weak should be ruled by the strong, the ignoble by the noble, and the ignorant by the wise. When Paul rejects the status markers of his heritage, privileges, and attainments in Judaism, he rejects the biological essentialism and the social pyramid of the Greco-Roman system as well (Phil. 3:1–11). He therefore rejects all the values on which status and authority in the culture were based.

But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)

What if evangelicals remembered women like Christine de Pizan and Dorothy L. Sayers? What if we remembered that women have always been leaders, teachers, and preachers, even in evangelical history? What if our seminaries used textbooks that included women? What if our Sunday school and Bible study curriculum correctly reflected Junia as an apostle, Priscilla as a coworker, and women like Hildegard of Bingen as preachers? What if we recognized women’s leadership the same way Paul did throughout his letters—even entrusting the Letter to the Romans to the deacon Phoebe? What if we listened to women in our evangelical churches the way Jesus listened to women?

Roman and I didn’t leave much room for discussion about who from our crew would go. Levi, Walker, and Hudson were a bit different. While Levi always tends to take on the leadership role, we found out real quick that there is no one leader in their clan or whatever they call it. Instead, they vote on things like our crew does. Only, this vote didn’t go the way they planned, so they ended up playing “rock paper scissors” to decide who would come today.

As far as men are concerned, their participation in the exclusion of women from leadership circles, church positions, and places of influence, and the rationale behind it, should be a matter of deep concern if we are to honor Romans 12:3–6. James Dunn suggests, “The emphatic warning against inflated thinking (v. 3) recalls the similar warning against Gentile presumption in 11:7–24 (particularly 11:20), but also the similar theme of the earlier diatribes against Jewish presumption (chaps. 2–4): the ‘us’ over ‘them’ attitude which Paul saw as the heart of Jewish failure and as a potential danger for Gentile Christians must not be allowed to characterize the eschatological people of God.

The leadership of the Blues or Greens in one city could be swapped out,

Romans 12:1 issues this imperative to leaders: “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.” The Greek aorist tense of the verb “offer” (which signifies a onetime act that is finished and done) is followed by thirty-six present-tense verbs (continuous action) that specify what should happen once we obey and offer. Two of those results are especially noteworthy here. First, “exert yourself to lead” (Romans 12:8 NEB). Barclay translates this phrase, “If called upon to supply leadership, do it with zeal.” Here is the summons to dive wholeheartedly into leadership, to serve with energy, to leave no room for sloth. Are we doing it?

Voters have soaked up a noggin full of negativity over the last twenty years, with an economy we had to bring back from collapse, plus terrorist attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabor these points, but your listeners know what I’m talking about. I think the antidote is to appreciate what we have, enjoy where we live, and make a positive contribution to our communities. My Cracker Pride campaign is balanced by the spirit of Cincinnatus. He was a farmer and Roman general who was twice made dictator. And he had the forbearance to resign as dictator as soon as he had vanquished Rome’s enemies. He became a civic ideal for good leadership. That’s the spirit I want in my district and in my campaign. - Veda Rabadel, The Tea & Crackers Campaign.

The Roman Church has grown and grown, fueled by immigration but also renewed by two pontiffs who have seemed to understand what Tocqueville knew: People want guidance for their souls once they are convinced they have them.

The Catholic Church’s policy of blaming women and sex for the ills of the world came to full fruition in the late Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. At minimum, hundreds of thousands of innocent women and men were hunted down, tortured horribly, reduced to physical, social, and economic wreckage, or burnt at the stake for being “witches”. The Catholic Church, so obsessed with it’s paranoid, irrational, illogical, and superstitious fantasies, deliberately tortured and executed human beings for a period of three hundred years. All this carnage, due to the Church's fear of learning, kept Europe in the throws of abysmal ignorance for a thousand years. What has been lacking in the world since the fall of the ancient world is a logical view of the godhead. To the Greek and Roman mind the gods were utilitarian; that is they offered convenient place to appreciate human archetypes. Sin and redemption from sin had nothing to do with the gods. The classic Greek and Roman gods did not offer recompense in life nor a heavenly afterlife as reward. Rather morality was determined by your service to humanity whether it was in the form of philosophy, science, art, architecture, engineering, leadership, or conquest. In this way humanity could live up to great potential instead of wasting their energy on worship, and false promises For almost a thousand years after the fall of Rome the Catholic Church’s control of society and law guaranteed that woman’s position was degraded to that of a second class citizen, far below the ancient Roman standard. Every literary reference depicts women as inferior, unworthy of inheritance, foolish, lustful and sinful. The Church ordained wife beating and encouraged total obedience to fathers and husbands. Women generally could not own land, join a guild, nor earn money like a man. Despite all this, a series of events unfolded; the crusades, rebirth of classical ideas, the printing press, the Reformation, and the Renaissance, all of which began to move womankind forward. VALENTINES DAY CARDS The Lupercalia festival of the New Year became an orgiastic carnival. A lottery ceremony ensued where men chose their sexual partners by choosing small bits of paper naming each woman present. Later the Christians, trying to incorporate and tame this sexual festival substituted the mythical saint Valentine; and ‘the cards of lust’ evolved into the valentine cards we exchange today.

Think carefully about your larger objectives before you mix cultures up. If your goal is innovation or creativity, the more cultural diversity the better, as long as the process is managed carefully. But if your goal is simple speed and efficiency, then monocultural is probably better than multicultural. Sometimes, it is simply better to leave Rome to the Romans.

If it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully. ROMANS 12:8

If Jesus put Simon the Zealot (an insurrectionist who hated the Roman occupiers) on the same team as Matthew the tax collector (a collaborator with the Romans) and then made them room together, I’m not sure why we can’t have some strong differences on the hot-button issues of our day and still march together under the banner of unity.

Our kind hence remains the kind of the soldier. Our essence: manly virtues. Our love, our obedience for all time belongs to our Führer. Our goal always remains Germany. The highest increase of our life content comes as a natural consequence of this. Not like the Roman gladiators who marched from their small world into a senseless fight in the arena with the shout: „Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you!” We seek instead to be worthy to step in front of the German nation when the Führer commands, to raise our arm and call out: „Those who are ready to die for the fatherland greet you, Adolf Hitler!

When we learn to embrace trials, anguish, and distress as friends (James 1:2–4; Romans 5:3–5) and as reminders of our own weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7–10), we become more dependent on the power of God and therefore more effective as leaders and witnesses for Him.

The New Testament reading for the day was 2 Corinthians 10:12-17 in which Paul talks about the danger of comparing ourselves to others and measuring ourselves against their accomplishments. His antidote for this all-too-human tendency was to learn to stay within the limits of his own life and calling. He says, “We, however, will not boast beyond limits, but will keep within the field that God has assigned to us, to reach out even as far as you. For we were not overstepping our limits when we reached you. . . . We do not boast beyond limits, that is, in the labors of others; but our hope is that, as your faith increases, our sphere of action among you may be greatly enlarged” (2 Corinthians 10:13-15). Until that very moment I had never realized that Paul used the word limits three times in just a few verses and that he seemed to be very clear about the limits and boundaries of his calling. He knew the field God had given him to work, and he knew better than to go outside it. He knew that there was a sphere of action and influence that had been given to him by God, and he would not go beyond it unless God enlarged his field. Paul seemed to grapple honestly with the reality of limitations in several different ways in his writings, and, in fact, this seemed to be part of his maturing as a leader who was both gifted and called. When he wrote about not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3), he was making a very general statement about limiting our grandiosity and pride by cultivating a realistic sense of our essential nature. He was talking about being willing to live within the limits and the possibilities of who we really are. As he matured, he revealed a very personal understanding that his deep struggle with a thorn in the flesh was a gift that was given to him to limit his own grandiosity and keep him in touch with his humanness. In 2 Corinthians 4 he talked about what it is like to carry the treasure of ministry in fragile, earthen vessels. He wrote poignantly from his experience of his own human limitations and his conviction that it is precisely in our willingness to carry God’s luminous presence in such fragile containers—without pretending to be anything more than what we are—that the power

Sharing Each week, we will take time to share what is happening in our lives. At first this sharing will include some planned “sharing questions.” After the first few weeks, it will become more informal and personal as our group feels safer and more comfortable. Study Each week we’ll study a portion of God’s Word that relates to the previous weekend’s sermon. Our goal is to learn how to apply and live out our Christianity in our day-to-day experiences and relationships. Support Each week, we’ll learn how to take care of one another as Christ commanded (see John 15:9–13). This care will take many forms, such as praying, listening, meeting needs, and encouraging and even challenging one another as needed. Five Marks of a Healthy Group For our group to be healthy, we need to 1. focus on spiritual growth as a top priority (Romans 8:29); 2. accept one another in love just as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7); 3. take care of one another in love without crossing over the line into parenting or taking inappropriate responsibility for solving the problems of others (John 13:34); 4. treat one another with respect in both speech and action (Ephesians 4:25–5:2); 5. keep our commitments to the group—including attending regularly, doing the homework, and keeping confidences whenever requested (Psalm 15:1–2, 4b). Guidelines and Covenant 1. Dates We’ll meet on ____________ nights for ____________ weeks. Our final meeting of the quarter will be on. 2. Time We’ll arrive between ____________ and ____________ and begin the meeting at ____________. We’ll spend approximately ____________ minutes in singing (optional),____________ minutes in study/ discussion, and ____________ minutes in prayer/sharing. 3. Children Group members are responsible to arrange childcare for their children. Nursing newborns are welcome, provided they are not a distraction to the group. 4. Study Each week, we’ll study the same topic(s) covered in the previous weekend’s sermon. 5. Prayer Our group will be praying each week for one another and specific missions requests. 6. Homework and Attendance Joining a growth group requires a commitment to attend each week and to do the homework ahead of time. Obviously, allowances are made for sickness, vacation, work conflicts, and other special events—but not much more! This commitment is the key to a healthy group. Most weeks, the homework will require from twenty to thirty minutes to adequately prepare for the group study and discussion. If we cannot come to a meeting, we will ________________________________ 7. Refreshments 8. Social(s) 9.

The profoundly new leadership of Pope Francis seeks to change the Roman Catholic Church from closed and judging to open and encountering. After his selection, praises for the new pope were soon flowing around the world, commentary on the surprising pontiff was on all the news shows, and even late-night television comedians were paying humorous homage. But only a few of the journalists covering the pope were getting it right: Francis was just doing his job. The pope is meant to be a follower of Christ—the Vicar of Christ. Isn’t it extraordinary how simply following Jesus can attract so much attention when you are the pope? Every day, millions of other faithful followers of Christ do many of the same things. They often don’t attract attention, but they help keep the world together.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We know that God causes all things to work together for good, for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

It is to the Romans, acting as always under the tuition of the Hellenistic mind, that we owe the conception of a history both oecumenical and national, a history in which the hero of the story is the continuing and corporate spirit of a people and in which the plot of the story is the unification of the world under that people’s leadership.

Many of the battles these women fought are still relevant. Almost thirty years ago, Antonia Fraser, in her groundbreaking book Boadicea’s Chariot, traced the line of ‘warrior queens’ from the ancient world to the Iron Lady. She identified several tropes of female leadership-the Chaste Syndrome and the Voracity Syndrome, the role of a woman as Holy (Armed) Figurehead or Peacemaker-and traced them from Celtic mythology and the Roman Empire to the female leaders of her own day: Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi.

King emphasized the need for nonconformism, not just as a feature of leadership, but for everyone, as a basic human attitude. These ideas are expressed most directly in a sermon that interprets the biblical phrase “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Said King: