There has been a slight time change for this week’s BNG webinar with Matt Cook and Bill Wilson of the Center for Healthy Churches. The webinar will begin this Wednesday, Sept. 20, at 1 p.m. Central time.
Also, two more upcoming webinars have been announced, one with the Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist, Emily Smith, and another with “Pastor Amy,” Amy Butler, author of a new autobiography.
Bill Wilson
Matt Cook
During this week’s webinar, BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield will dialogue with Wilson, founder of the Center for Healthy Churches, and Cook, who is his successor as executive director.
They and their team of consultants frequently work with churches in leadership transitions, and now they’ve been through one themselves. The webinar will focus on what they’ve learned from their own experiences about successful leadership transitions for nonprofits and churches.
Register for this free webinar here.
Just added: A change-making conversation with Amy Butler, author of the new book Beautiful and Terrible Things. Butler is a well-known pastor with a Baptist background who landed at the pinnacle of American Protestant pulpits, the Riverside Church in the City of New York, only to be forced out five years later.
That story made national headlines, but it’s just one of many stories of terrible and beautiful things encountered in pastoral life she discusses in the new book.
The book is billed as a reflection on the necessity of community, the inevitability of conflict and the transformative power of radical love. In it she discusses leading a church to publicly affirm its LGBTQ community members, losing a child, and undergoing an unexpected divorce.
The title comes from the writing of theologian Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
Register for this free webinar here.
The next webinar will feature Emily Smith, also known to BNG readers as the Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist. It will be Tuesday, Oct. 17, at 11:30 a.m. Central time.
Smith, who previously taught at Baylor University, now serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine/Surgery at Duke University and at the Duke Global Health Institute. She is a real-life epidemiologist with expertise in global health.
Her new book, The Science of the Good Samaritan: Thinking Bigger about Loving Our Neighbors, grew out of her blogging during the pandemic as she attempted to help people understand what COVID-19 is and how it spreads. Her work was featured in several BNG articles.
She expands the Bible’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” and says “truly being a neighbor goes way beyond simply donating food or money. … It’s also (about) changing our hearts and posture to match those deeds.”
Register for this free webinar here.