Out of my work at the Center for Healthy Churches, I have discovered four core leadership principles for pastors of congregations that are facing decline and longing for turnaround.
From her mouth to God’s ear? Women’s voices, homiletical testosterone and radical redemption
Across the years, women in my family, in my classes and in the church have taught me this: Christ’s gospel isn’t measured by biology or hierarchy, but by radical redemption. God hears any voice that preaches Jesus.
Noah’s lawsuit: Is God trying to say something?
Noah’s ark is not a children’s story, a funny story or even a story concerned with history. This story is true even if it never happened. If you get past the strangeness, it sounds like recent events.
Jesus said the ‘gates of hell may not prevail against the Church.’ But ignorance might
The depth of ignorance of science displayed by many religious people today is tragic, and the reach of an anti-intellectual, anti-education mindset threatens our future as a Church and a nation.
Will we transcend our sectarian divides or continue to dismember the Body of Christ?
It is a grace to receive from the global community, especially as the Christian footprint is re-centering toward the global South and East. Those of us in the West and North should be in a listening posture.
Like it or not, we are like sheep – including our vulnerability to ‘thieves and wolves’
Today, political, commercial and religious ‘thieves and wolves’ are threatening humanity and the creation. But the Good Shepherd has not left us defenseless. We are vulnerable, but not abandoned; weak, but not without protection. We go astray, but God is always determined to find and restore us.
Listening to Christians with whom we disagree: maybe they see through other windows because they live in other rooms
Maybe God doesn’t expect people of faith to agree on everything. Maybe God wants us to feel cross-pressured, uncertain and confused. If we are to grow in love we must listen to people who see through other windows because they live in other rooms.
Listening to depression as a spiritual and political practice
The bad news that our world isn’t fine, that life is profoundly unfair, misaligned and wobbly and violently broken should tell us all something important about depression – namely, that depression isn’t wrong to declare life on earth uninhabitable; it’s just terribly misguided about what causes our maladies and exactly what solutions provide their remedy.
Do we love children enough to put our guns aside?
Could the Constitutional right to own guns be in direct conflict with the Christian responsibility to love one’s neighbor, protect human life and prioritize the vulnerable?
Apocalypse soon? Faith communities and preparing for the environmental end times
The creeping things got here first, Genesis tells us. Human beings came later. That was then; this is now: it appears that millennia later humanity is working diligently to reverse creation and be alone again.
Female jet pilot or astronaut? Sure. Preacher? No. So where can I buy a dragon?
Southern Baptists seem to have no problem with women serving on the Supreme Court or flying fighter jets or traveling into space. Heck, they would have been happy to put Sarah Palin in the White House. But a woman in the pulpit? No way.
I’m awaiting a kidney transplant. I care about our nation’s health care crisis. But churches should too
Like the majority of American Christians, for most of my adult life I had only a passing interest in this country’s health care crisis. Now, as I await a kidney transplant, personal experience has led me to care deeply about this issue. But I believe faith communities should care too.