leadership

The problem isn’t just that it exists. It’s that so many ministers fall for it.

New books in practical theology

We may feel compassion in our guts, but we learn it by practicing empathic solidarity.

A conversation between Parker Palmer, Stephen Lewis, Matthew Wesley Williams, and Dori Baker about the book Another Way

How American Muslim women are transcending barriers to leadership.

Helping people think differently in changing times

What does ethical leadership look like?

Peer-led discussions among young Muslims, Christian experiments in communal living, and pop-up Shabbat meals embody common yearnings.

Ken Evers-Hood applies behavioral economic theories to Jesus—and the people who follow him.

You knew about weakness before you were ordained. Yet something made you get out of the boat and try to walk.

"Narcissists can be inspiring. Whether they are creative or destructive depends on their philosophy."

What goes on in the mind of a leader who tires of building consensus and just strives to get things done?

Many times we are working with church structures of a different time. I have seen churches with 50 people attending on Sunday morning, and they maintain 12 committees. There may have been a lot of retirees in the church, so we have committees who meet in the day. Or there might have been a lot of people without children, so everyone meets at night—on a different night, to ensure that the pastor is at every meeting.

For mainline pastors, the Driscoll saga—the conflict at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church leading to the resignation of superstar pastor Mark Driscoll—can seem like a number of things: an entertaining but irrelevant sideshow, a distraction from the real work of God’s kingdom, or the long-overdue fall of someone whose theological views and ideology are so different from ours. We feel so distant from Driscoll and what he stands for that we can almost watch with bemused smiles.

And it’s just this sense of distance that might keep us for seeing this situation the way we should: as a cautionary tale.

This temptation will always remain when we are willing to blindly benefit from and represent a system that is working well for us, without the concrete concern for others that are silenced or stigmatized by that very same system. In the name of making a difference, we can actually begin to help the system be sophisticated in its ability to point to its “change makers” (even though they are merely exceptions to the rule) as evidence of its commitment to anti-oppression.

There’s something very refreshing about being able to laugh. It disarms the situation and takes away the power from the critic. It reminds me not to take myself so seriously. It gives me perspective on the situation. It helps me not to hate myself, because otherwise I’d be crying or drinking. Or, I’d be stuffing it down into my gut, until the toxicity becomes ulcer-sized.

When I began in ministry, men took the time to advise and counsel me. There were few women, and the ones who were there were far away from the rural swamp where I served. They were in more urban areas, miles from the lectionary group where we sipped chicory coffee. It took me years to sort out that I needed to consider the source. I was dealing with different issues than the pastors surrounding me.

Right now, there are a lot of pastors who ought to be looking in the mirror and chanting, “It’s not all about me.”