Let’s face it, finding or keeping one’s balance has never been the easiest thing in the month of December. Calendars crowd us with events. Cultural expectations for comfort and joy abound, keeping everyone too busy to have much of either. All the markers of the...
Just as most pastors and church board members were easing into a few Thanksgiving days of leisure and the anticipation of a “more normal Advent,” news of Omicron filled our feeds. The groans and exclamations—"Not again!”—could be heard everywhere. Certainly, it was the most common...
Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! - Isaiah 58:1 About the last thing most pastors feel like right now – along with their church boards – is a trumpet. Worn down by months of uncertainty, discord over masks and more,...
For many congregations, the counting season has begun. Boards and committees are trying to determine the dollar amount of incoming pledges, gifts, and commitments for 2022. This has never been an exact or scientific process, and the past two pandemic years have stirred in huge...
Nearly fifty years ago, Studs Terkel published his landmark oral history Working, in which he observed: “Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.” Jobs are not big enough for...
During a conversation with a cohort of working pastors this week, we posed the following question: What makes it hard for you to go deeper with your leadership circle? What stands in the way of ‘digging a deeper well’ with these crucial leaders? What we heard in...
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...