Is this your sign-up sheet before—or after—it has been circulated? If you quickly shouted “Both!” you are not alone. Churches live on sign-up sheets. We have sign-up sheets for ushering, for assisting in the nursery, for providing sanctuary flowers, for helping prepare communion, for helping serve communion,...
Peter Drucker, the pioneering twentieth-century management consultant, famously told organizations and their leaders to “face reality.” Close on the heels of that, he would say, in effect, “what got us to today will not necessarily get us to tomorrow.” And, perhaps less famously, he would...
If we feed people spiritually, all the true institutional needs of a congregation will be taken care of. Three years ago this month, this sentence opened the first post of what would become Digging a Deeper Well, a blog dedicated to helping church boards think and...
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kbTbg00AJU[/embed] A happy discovery for congregations of all shapes and sizes in the first year of the pandemic was that new people sought them out for online worship, book discussions, and other activities. These people joined in for any number of online offerings, yet they remain...
If you have been stranded on a desert island since March of 2020, this headline might be jarring. But for the rest of us who have been marinating in pandemic stress, uncertainty, and anxiety, the fact that a major airline had to remind its crews...
New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells recently posted an article titled “What People Missed Most About Restaurants. (It Wasn’t the Food.).” The article’s subtitle serves up his main point: “it’s clear that the magic ingredient was the random thrill of seeing other people.” As...
Big goals… to change things… working together. After 60+ weeks of lockdowns, quarantines, and uncertainties, things are re-opening at a speed few of us would have guessed even a month ago. Church boards can be forgiven for being caught both exhausted and unprepared. We are already hearing from...
She was a French philosopher, a mystic, and a political activist. As her life progressed, she moved deeper into philosophy and became more religious. When Simone Weil died at age 34 in the midst of World War II, Albert Camus described her as “the only...
Most of us probably haven’t given much thought to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town since, maybe, it was the spring play during our high school years. That is, until Tom Long’s review of Howard Sherman’s new book, Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the...