Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Personal Accountability

With some Texans fearing that Obama's message to school children of personal accountability will somehow lead them to the evils of socialism, I now perform a slightly clumsy segue...


...personal accountability for the Christian! I am digging around looking for various resources for a research paper I have to write in 2010 in the area of of discipleship (thus the Dave Tomlinson trip yesterday) and today I came across an interesting source thanks to the Shapevine E-zine. David Watson is a church planter and discipler whose blog contained a very stimulating post on the different realms of personal accountability. I immediately decided to roadtest the diagnostic questions in my journaling this week which I repeat here:

1. Relationship to God

•What will I do daily to build/improve this relationship?
•What will I do weekly to build/improve this relationship?
•What special events will I participate in order to improve this relationship?
•How will I involve my family and community in this relationship?

2. Relationship to Family/Family Members

•What will I do daily to build/improve my relationships with each family member?
•What will I do weekly to build/improve these relationships?
• What special events will I participate in order to improve these relationship?
• How will I involve other family members in improving our relationships with one another?

3. Relationship to Church and Community

•What will I do daily to build/improve these relationships?
•What will I do weekly to build/improve these relationships?
•What special events will I participate in order to improve these relationships?
•How will I involve my family in these relationships?

4. Relationship to Call/Ministry

•What will I do daily to fulfill my call from God?
•What will I do weekly to fulfill my call from God?
•What special events will I participate in order to improve my fulfillment of my call from God?
•How will I involve my family in my call?

5. Relationship to Job/Work

•What will I do daily to build/improve my job related relationships (boss and those I lead)?
•What will I do weekly to build/improve these relationships?
•What special events will I participate in order to improve these relationships?
•How will I involve my family in these relationships?

6. Relationship to Self

•What will I do daily/weekly to improve/maintain my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health?
•What will I do daily/weekly to improve my general knowledge?
•What will I do regularly for recreation and down time?
•How will I involve my family in these events

What I really appreciate from the wider article is the holistic nature of this model and you can see in the questions a deliberate attempt to relate each area to the other. You might like to join me in trying these and I'd be interested of any comments if you do. I will take one per day and journal on them.

2 comments:

BJ said...

And while this post was not really about Obama, it was a good speech! http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

John Piper and Jim Wallis agree.

Thursday Cell said...

We promoted #6 to #2 - makes sense, if this stuff isn't right it effects everything else.