Julius Caesar Johann Sebastian Bach Leo Tolstoy Nelson Mandela Steven Jobs Aristotle Louis Armstrong John Lennon Rudyard Kipling Cyrus the Great William Wordsworth David Bussau What do these people have in common? They were all orphans. Most often when we think of orphans we imagine a helpless child totally dependent on the kindness of strangers. All the typical pictures we see only confirm that. All the mail we receive emphasizes their vulnerability. We rarely imagine orphans as having the normal personality traits and gifts of children born to and raised by their natural families, and we often in our perfectly understandable mindset of charity and compassion fail to think of…

Francis Collins, the author of The Language of God, is a billionaire who gave it all away five years ago.  From 1993 until 2003 Francis worked with researchers in the United States, China, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom in his role as the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.  In those ten years the team successfully mapped and sequenced all of the human DNA and then compiled all of the information stored in what he describes as the instruction book.  If it were a book it would be over one billion words long; with 5000 volumes, each 300 pages long. …

In her book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, Kelly Monroe Kullberg describes the growth of the university campus based movement Veritas: “Veritas isn’t about religion. Its about the art of life and a new way of seeing. Veritas is truth whose nature is love and hospitality… Our approach is generally not debate but exploration… If Jesus is truth and life, we imagine every sane person wants to know.” Those words could describe what Nicky and Pippa Gumbel have demonstrated in the last 18 years through the Alpha Course. In 1986 when Nicky and Pippa came to Holy Trinity Brompton, Nicky was a practicing barrister in the City of London. He was…

I believe it was 1985 at Glen Eyrie in Colorado Springs that I first met Bill Hybels. I was sitting in on a small group of pastors of large churches from around the country for three days and, no surprise to anyone, there were a number of speeches made and even a little bit of posturing. The moderator had his work cut out for him to keep the brothers from talking right over each other. However, his biggest challenge was getting the youngest guy there to say anything. He hadn’t tuned out. He wasn’t rude. He just seemed to know something no one else knew. It turned out he did.…