(Listen to this audio podcast by clicking the play button above.)

This week we present a favorite presentation from one of our past National Conferences. Steve Estes is a pastor, author, and board member of CCEF. In this talk, he deals with a sensitive and all-too-often ignored issue of church life.

Many church leaders lack the experience or maturity to handle church politics. This can lead to frustration and eventually anger, anger that could result in unwise and harmful decisions and reactions. God's wisdom can help even stressed and harried leaders keep their heads in all situations.

The 2009 CCEF National Conference is November 13-15. Click here for more information and to register..

If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with others. The button below will provide you with handy links to automatically share this message with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other Internet sharing sites. Thanks for telling others about CCEF and the Help and Hope Podcast!

A Journal of Biblical Counseling reader recently raised a question about something he'd read from articles on anger that I wrote in 1995-1997 (JBC Volumes 14:1, 14:2, 16:1). He writes: “In one of your articles on anger you say, ‘Anger is not morally neutral.… It is not something that happens to us or a substance inside of us.' Here's my question: Is the emotion of anger itself morally conditioned or is it the wrong beliefs, idolatrous desires, self-pity/self-righteousness that are morally conditioned? Your article seems to say that anger itself is morally conditioned, but if that is true then do we sin by the very impulse of anger?”

Dear Reader,

When I say that anger is "morally conditioned," I mean that every actual impulse/expression of anger is either good or bad or mixed, not that anger is automatically sinful. It's a "whole person response," tilted or colored one way or the other (or mixed). Here are the exemplars.