I wrote these words before I learned of the mass shootings that occurred over this weekend. My first inclination was to scrap them but then I read them again and they remain true to me… Pardon me if they seem a bit preachy but here goes… At...
It was a casual aside by Seth Godin, during a recent interview with Debbie Millman. Talking about leadership that is resilient and bold, Godin pointed to the actor Gene Kelly in his iconic performance in Singing in the Rain. He noted that Kelly closes the...
Content Curator Adam Mixon speaks with the Rev. Kristy Farber (Mercer Island Presbyterian Church, WA) and the Rev. Dr. Amy Wiles (Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa) about good places to go and cry, the difference between loneliness and being alone, and the importance of being...
Over the next several weeks we'll be reflecting on how congregations and other ministry contexts serve as spaces of trust-building, mending social fabric, and faith formation that joins people in hope across difference. Here, I want to consider for a moment what an expression of prophetic...
We had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours recently with a gifted group of church board leaders. Among the several questions we discussed with this group, one seemed to register most deeply, judging by people’s widespread sighs, forward leans, and nods of assent. How...
The Ministry Collaborative program staff (Jennifer Watley Maxell, Mark Ramsey, Adam Borneman, and Adam Mixon) talk about the prioritizing humility and compromise, examining a community's personality, and the trap of sorting ourselves. Click here to read Adam Borneman's blog post, "The Front Porch, the Living Room,...
A couple years ago when I started the Digital Hospitality Retreats as an experiment, the driving need I imagined was people needed space to connect with God in the midst of the unknown. We were just entering the widespread pandemic of COVID-19, shelter-in-place, school at...
The history of exploration is punctuated by accounts of those who sought to forge a new path, only to find that what they thought was the endpoint turned out to be just a stop along the way. Scaling one of the world’s highest peaks for...
Program Curator Jennifer Watley Maxell talks with the Rev. Dr. Carol Lynn Patterson (First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, NJ) about committing ourselves to things that give us joy, and finding faith formation within community, and the importance of Sabbath rest....