Kaleb Consultants

03/17/2024

God is never left without a witness. Just as I have become increasingly discouraged by the knee jerk antagonism, bigotry, exclusion, paranoia, onability to nuance and really hear the compassionate grace to all offered by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—God has brought a lone voice of encouragement.

Thanks to my loving, wonderful brother, Gregory Douglass Guest, who gifted this book to me three weeks ago, to his wife Marcia Riley-Guest who has brought out the best in him, emotionally, mentally, physical and spiritually and for our God who is never without a witness.

I invite you to read this 21st Century prophet and “public evangelist” of our time. Tim is not a pastor, just one of God’s faithful disciples.

10/13/2021

“Total Educational Program”

Years ago as a student at the Moody Bible Institute, my focus was on adult education in the church. One of the Christian Education teachers I studied under, insisted that approaching adult education required us to examine and begin a revitalization process.

That process concerned itself with what the church was and was not doing in the area of children and youth. He referred to this as the need to develop a TCP or “Total Church Program.”

He challenged us to begin with what is taught from the pulpit. For many this was problematic, since most of the students were from churches where fiery sermons were preached, laden with lofty theological themes. For me this was not such a challenge, because our pastor, Dr. Harvey E. Walden, Sr., had a small spiral book containing all of the sermons that he would ever “preach” at Grant Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church. They were “teaching sermons” rather than the traditional “preaching.”

Later when I attended McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Dr. John Westerhoff, a guest lecturer, insisted that no sermon was worth preaching or hearing that a child could not understand. Furthermore he insisted that bi-weekly staff meetings should include pastors, Sunday School superintendents and teachers, youth leaders, scout leaders, parents of students, and the musical director and musicians, rather than have a teachers’ meeting, pastor’s meeting, and so forth.

He saw it as the role of the Director of Christian Education (DCE) or Sunday School superintendent to confer with the pastor regularly regarding sermon content and to follow the lectionary, which at that time followed and used the same content as the International Sunday School Lessons of the National Council of Churches.

At Moody we were required to implement our TCP in the “Practical Christian Work” assignments each student was required to complete each year. The church that I was assigned to that year was a Presbyterian church with no Sunday School, few members, and a worship experience that better resembled a “funeral for Jesus” rather than a time of spiritual inspiration and renewal.

We met with the few leaders available and decided that each worship service would begin with a devotion from what was then a “one-room school house” Sunday School class.

For the Sundays from January through June, different students shared their thoughts on what they had learned in their class instruction and led us in opening prayer. I have never given up on this training model.

Probably the most successful was as pastor of the Gammon Memorial United Methodist Church of Chicago (1990-1994), where we developed a worship team for the planning and ex*****on of worship, inclusive of the music and the themes of sermons.

Kaleb Consultants is committed to developing total educational programs in our churches. It works. Jesus was being clear when he said,

Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little
children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew 18:3 New International Version)

Please contact Kaleb Consultants, and let’s talk about working on the full development of a “Total Educational Program” for your church, in-person or online.

If you would like a proposal from us, please contact us in writing at the address above or call us at the above number to set up an appointment for an analysis of your context. We will be more than happy to contract with you to explore the possibilities for your church’s future.

DFG

09/27/2021

Many organizations consider mission statements to be either facile attempts at marketing or an archaic management technique for motivating and socializing employees. However an extraordinary new study conducted in Germany tells a different story.

This is not surprising since Christian Schwarz of Germany developed a mission statement focus for reorganization in the 1990s, based on the operating principals of 1,000 successful churches in 32 countries.

Researchers have investigated the impact of mission statements on how employees treat one another and resolve conflicts on the job. What they looked at specifically were differences in the integrative complexity of mission statements, or the degree to which these messages presented more and less complex ideas about the work of the organization.

Therefore before we can jump to some superficial formula for conflict resolution, or plan with a view that conflict is undesirable, stakeholders in an organization need to achieve clarity as well as deconstruct methodologies and theories employed to ascertain the primary focus.

The researchers searched the web and identified and analyzed the mission statements of 20 different organizations in terms of their levels of integrative complexity. They then surveyed the employees of each organization and asked them about conflict at work.

What they found was that the higher the level of integrative complexity of the statements, the more employees viewed conflict at work as constructive and relations as fair and respectful.

That’s right. The more complex and nuanced the mission statements, which therefore reflected organizations of a more constructive and fair nature, the more such statements helped to establish a culture of fairness and win-win conflict resolution, or both!

A significant outcome of this research: Managers and CEOs would do well to attend to both the complexity and clarity of their organizational goals and missions.

Kugler, K (2012). How organizational culture relates to conflict management and organizational justice perspectives. PhD Dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich Germany.

08/06/2021

Experience the Foundation

The Foundation of Kaleb Consultants is based on “effective experience.” Many people want to speak of “successful experiences.” After all, why would you contract with KC if we don’t guarantee success?

The word success literally means “come close.” From that, it infers the “outcome” of an action or series of events. The popular use of the word denotes a “good outcome.”

However, at KC, we prefer to speak of effective experiences, because they function in any community culture as relational “synapses” that create a functional entity.

After working for many years as a community organizer, denominational staff, supervisor, and pastor, you should know that many of the experiences with neighborhoods, churches, nonprofits, groups, and other professionals were not always “successful.”

KC’s, goal is not a specific outcome, but rather to serve your church or organization as a guide to look at your experiences, seek to assign meaning to them, and develop effective experiences toward the desired outcome.

You will be encouraged to work collectively with your group(s) or organization to better appreciate its past, present, and future possibilities for effectiveness.

My experience is that so many institutions are satisfied with the “success” of whatever was attempted or planned, without understanding as a collective and a team the “experiential effectiveness” of that success.

Kaleb Consultants will encourage you to use a peer approach, beginning with the collective experiences of your church, group, staff, or team, assisted by tools such as personality inventories and analysis of your organization's culture and values, to grow effective strategies.

You are invited to contract with KC and in the words of Prince Rogers Nelson, “See the future as it will be.”

Contact Kaleb Consultants by emailing [email protected] or call: (916) 970-8006

07/24/2021

As many parish churches go through the cautious process of re-opening as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, we need to be concerned about not losing the cyber-contacts we have drawn from unchurched persons, those who from time-to-time have been listening to our online offerings with no religious affiliation.

A few weeks ago I visited a beautiful sanctuary, and in the very front, prominently displayed was a wall-length, stained-glass image of Jesus Christ. What was so special was that it was a Black African American image of Jesus.

If you read through the pages of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you do not have to go far to hear and see young Black African Americans’ disdain for Christianity as a systemically racist, white man’s religion.

Western Christendom’s interpretations, from translations of the Bible, to hymns and songs, to basic Sunday School material and religious imagery, reinforce the negative connotations associated with Blackness and the positive connotations associated with Whiteness found in our dictionaries.

This negative depiction of the Black skin-color and all things Black goes back to the development of white supremacy as a false theory developed among the European nations, yet we find that the Book of Genesis begins with a description of reality as “darkness,” God meets Moses in a “dark cloud” and it is during his 40 day experience of this Black darkness that he received the Commandments of God. The birth narratives of Jesus come to us in "the darkness of night," and the Book of Revelation speaks of God as “wholly hidden in darkness” as God’s abode. The glorified Christ is depicted as one “with hair like lambs wool, who skin is like burnished bronze.”

Kaleb Consultants would like to offer your church leadership its peer-discovery method to revolutionize your worship and Christian expression, away from the ideology of white supremacy and make it one that affirms rather than decimates the psyche of Black and Brown people.

If you would like to know more, query us on this page. We would be happy to offer you our consultation services to address this and other cultural conflicts in our churches that impair and de-legitimize our ministries. Services are contracted at a reasonable rate.

03/25/2021

We work with organizations in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento County.

03/25/2021

The character “Caleb” mentioned in the Bible within Numbers 13:27-30, was originally spelled Kaleb. Kaleb the Kenizzitte of Kadesh, was an Israelite leader known for following God fearlessly and whole-heartedly. He was one of the 12 spies sent on a reconnaissance mission to the Promised Land. Of the twelve spies, only Caleb and Joshua believed God would give them victory if they entered the Promised Land.

Caleb stepped up and "quieted the people before Moses and said, 'Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it'" (Numbers 13:30).

At Kaleb Consultants we take that verse to heart. We believe with the right guidance and tools our clients are able to overcome every problem, challenge, and obstacle.

"No matter the obstacle, there’s always a way to get the job done." ~ Dr. Donald F. Guest

03/24/2021

Make sure to connect with me on LinkedIN as well.

View Donald F Guest’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Donald F has 7 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Donald F’S connections and jobs at similar companies.

03/24/2021

Thank you everyone for liking our page. You can now tell your friends about us by simply asking them to search for and the page will pop right up!

03/23/2021

Kaleb Consultants is an independent consulting agency working within the greater Sacramento Metro, and San Francisco Bay Area. Our agency partners with leaders of churches, nonprofits and the community to help them think strategically in creating and implementing programs and initiatives that affect concrete, lasting and positive change. Kaleb Consulting offers special expertise in urban and under-served communities -- our mission is to dismantle perceptions, practices and policies that have historically, negatively affected under-served peoples.