Select Page

Being Constrained Doesn’t Mean Having to be Stuck

My post on the Center for Healthy Churches websiteOne of the most significant “leadership” books I’ve read in the last couple of years is A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages and Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Wiley, 2016). ...

The Heart of Being

A wise woman of the Spirit, Evelyn Underhill, claimed that most of us spend our lives “conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, we are kept in perpetual unrest.”To want. Sometimes we can name our desires: friendship,...

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

Like many cities, Asheville has a “Before I Die . . .” wall–a large chalkboard with multiple spaces for people to write some of their hopes for the future.  Since the wall is on the path I take for most of my downtown walks, I read them several days each...

Meeting on the Common Ground of our Vulnerability

To say the obvious: We live in a time of upheaval and confusion. In response, many people want the church to insulate them from ambiguity and shelter them from anxiety; they want it to be a place where hard questions don’t intrude and disagreements don’t disturb....

Creation Groans and So Do We

Over the last few months, I’ve often traveled north on I-26/US 23 into the broken heart of Eastern Kentucky’s coal country.The land looks weary. There are gashes in the hillsides which huge machines have stripped bare not only of coal but of topsoil; peaks blasted...

Servant-Leadership

Servant-leadership has overarching purpose: to help people to become who they most truly are and to do what they are most deeply called to do. In 1919, D. J. DePree was named president of the company which soon became the Herman Miller Corporation (Miller was DePree’s...