Listen to “All In Good Time.”   It’s a familiar scene made even more so by movies and novels: the reading of the last will and testament. The somber family is seated quietly around the table in the law office. The attorney reaches down into his briefcase and pulls out the file. He puts on his glasses, clears his throat and starts slowly reading the wishes of the deceased. Of course, in the back of every mind is the obvious question, “How much did he leave me?” It’s not unnatural or even greedy. It’s perfectly normal behavior. Everyone has some vague notion or hope, and then the attorney says, “Your…

Listen to “The Great Divide.”   While guaranteed to be controversial, Michael Gerson’s essay The Last Temptation in the April issue of The Atlantic has captured 150 years of evangelical history as well as anyone could. As I read it, I thought about the sidebar of evangelical philanthropy and how it has evolved in the same pattern he outlines. Throughout most of the 19th-century evangelicals were focused on combining evangelism, preaching the Word and social action. During the Second Great Awakening and under the preaching of Charles Finney, the issues of prison reform, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery were not separated from personal salvation. However, in the latter…

Listen to “When the Lights Go Out.”   One of my treasures is a framed picture of Peter Drucker, Bob Buford, Tom Luce and myself outside Peter’s house in Estes Park in the early 1990s. Underneath it Bob wrote, “The Beginning of the Social Entrepreneur Network.” It was an idea we had been working on for several years and one that was close to Peter’s heart as it combined two of his basic concepts – the value of the entrepreneur as a creative force and the social responsibility that entailed. I’ve been thinking about this recently because like the word “philanthropy,” the phrase “social entrepreneur” has morphed over the years.…

Listen to “What Would Billy Do?”   One of the sadly comical and widely reported details of the second 2016 Republican debate was the number of times each candidate quoted Ronald Reagan or tried to present himself as assuming Reagan’s mantle. Mentioned by name 45 times, many viewers were left with the impression that either the candidates had no fresh ideas of their own or were hoping to get a posthumous endorsement. Moderator Jake Tapper said before one of the breaks, “Coming up, Ronald Reagan looming large over this debate.  So how Reaganesque exactly are these Republicans? We will find out next.” Will we experience something of the same following…

Listen to “A Fool’s Errand” In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We…

Listen to “A Fool’s Errand” In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We…

  Listen to “Stuck” Philip Yancey wrote about Dr. Paul Brand, the brilliant surgeon, who worked for many years in obscurity with lepers here in the States and in India. “He knew presidents, kings, and many famous people, but he rarely mentioned them, preferring instead to reminisce about individual leprosy patients. He talked openly about his failures and always tried to deflect credit for his successes to his associates. Every day he rose early to study the Bible and to pray. Humility and gratitude flowed from him naturally, and in our time together I sensed a desperate lack of these qualities in myself. Most speakers and writers I knew were…

In his book, “The Greatest Generation” Tom Brokaw wrote, “At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war;…

In “The Rise of Network Christianity” authors Brad Christerson and Richard Flory describe the members of a growing network of independent congregations aligning themselves under self-appointed apostles. “There’s a suspicion of any kind of accountability structures, because these limit the power of God working through individuals. When you have a church board and an elder board that hires a pastor, then that pastor can’t do the things that God is telling him to do—because he has to go to the board to get everything approved. The real danger, they would say, is when institutions become more powerful than the individuals that God calls.”  That must have been similar to the…

It was not even a major miracle. No one walked on water or fed five thousand. As far as miracles go it was almost incidental. A nameless crippled man healed. But, in that city, it was a sign of something far more remarkable. It was an opportunity to redress an old offense to the gods. Years before, the story went, Zeus and Hermes disguised as poor travelers arrived in town and were made unwelcome. In response, they destroyed the city and all the people with the exception of one humble couple. Now, many years later, the descendants of those who had made that fatal mistake took the miracle to mean…