In a recent TMC podcast, Allison Norton and Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research highlighted data showing that congregations’ openness to change rose during the pandemic. This makes sense. Every faith community had to try lots of things they had never done...
Fall is that season in which church boards turn their attention toward the deeper, more perennial questions of church life. What should we do next? And how can we reach more people? These well-intentioned discussions often revolve around adding new programs, improving programs already in place,...
An unlikely pair of writers put courage in the foreground of their thinking about how to live a virtuous life. Maya Angelou memorably said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” C.S. Lewis made a...
Annie Dillard died last week. We remembered her with appreciation, and we also learned with some surprise that a very different kind of writer, Eudora Welty, had been chosen by The New York Times to review Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it first appeared...
Last week we sat in silence with John Cage, listening to 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a pianist doing nothing, so the audience could hear everything. That cough two rows back. The radiator ticking. Somebody's stomach growling. Cage wasn't hiding from sound. He was...
American composer John Cage (1912-1992) wrote pieces of music to be played on a variety of objects, including flowerpots, scrapped hoods of old cars, and other pieces of junk. Then he began tinkering with a piano, shoving objects under the strings, including screws, bolts, spoons,...
We weren’t going to write Digging a Deeper Well this week…until a Seth Godin post dropped into our inbox. We’ve been writing about intentionality in ministry of late, and last week we noted the need to intentionally go “one by one by one” in leading...
Less than halfway through Act One of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s wife Linda, seeing him stumble toward oblivion, cries out forcefully to their two distracted sons: I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His...
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Mary Oliver wrote these lines, sometimes titled “Instructions for Living,” when she was approaching her eighth decade of life. Last month, Jonathan Haidt invoked them to frame his NYU commencement address on the importance of “treasuring” one’s attention. We think that...