Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Not Taken is often mistitled, The Road Less Traveled - such is the power of its final claim, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” For many,...
TMC Staff Mark Ramsey and Jennifer Watley Maxell speak with the Rev. Dr. Reggie Blount (Oikos Institute for Social Impact, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary) about the spiritual yearnings of young people, the importance of knowing them personally, and our unhelpful tendency to "pastor adults and...
In June of 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, for using a restaurant restroom while Black. State troopers forced two Black prisoners, under threat, to beat her with a blackjack while she lay face down on a jail cell bed. A policeman...
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...
Executive Director Mark Ramsey speaks with Drs. Allison Norton and Scott Thumma (Hartford Institute for Religion Research) about the latest results from their five-year study into congregational life from the pandemic and beyond, including what the data says - and doesn't - about rising church...
The mounting daily fatigue so many of us live with is not merely a consequence of busyness or complex work-life balance, but the pervasive and unrelenting false promise that there is always one more way to perfectly optimize your life. The message is that if you...
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...
TMC Program Staff Adam Mixon and Adam Borneman continue their conversation with the Rev. Sherrad Hayes (Union Baptist Church, West Point, GA) about the disruption of the Gospel, learning not to see efficiency as the goal, and the importance of fostering genuine encounters with the...
An occupational hazard of vocational ministry is that everything - Scripture, worship, conversations … life - is seen and experienced with an eye to using it in a sermon, bible study, class … or blog post! Clergy and ministry leaders are often so focused on...