Are you a pastor or church leader looking for a bit of inspiration to start off your Monday? The Online Pulpit is a semi-regular column that shares thoughts from working pastors, covering a wide range of topics relevant to church leaders.

The most recent column is about a serious topic, but one that pastors are called to address frequently in the course of their ministry: death and mortality. Gerry Koning uses an unusual metaphor to paint the human journey through life and death in a new light, casting the process of life not just as a morbid approach to death, but as a unique journey back toward our true spiritual home with God. If you’re a pastor who deals with this issue often, it might help you to comfort people grieving the loss of a loved one, or facing death themselves.

If that’s too heavy a topic for a Monday morning, there are plenty more columns to explore in the Online Pulpit archives, which go all the way back to 1995. For starters, you might take a look at The iPodization of Our Culture, about our increasing tendency to focus inward on ourselves; Ministry or Management?, which addresses the delicate balance between “running a church” and shepherding a congregation; or The Church in Exile, about how to address the church’s slide into cultural and intellectual exile from the world.

By: Andy. This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Leadership, The Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.