If you read biographies, you notice a pattern that is frequent in the lives of many great leaders. Early success and then years of obscurity and hardship – even rejection and exile. Two good examples are Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Child stars and prodigies often experience the same. Writers and artists may show promise and then languish for decades before creating anything again. One-hit wonders are common in music, as are novelists who cannot produce a second best-seller. Sometimes circumstances change beyond their control. Silent movie star Rudolph Valentino’s voice was not suitable for movies with sound. Yasha Heifitz was brilliant as an untaught prodigy but being taught how to read music…

For his Easter column, “President Carter, Am I a Christian?”, The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. In the column Nick asked, “With Easter approaching, let me push you on the Resurrection. If you heard a report today from the Middle East of a man brought back to life after an execution, I doubt you’d believe it even if there were eyewitnesses. So why believe ancient accounts written years after the events?” While Jimmy Carter’s response was he did, in fact, believe in the physical Resurrection as well as the virgin birth, it was the question that puzzled me. Not because Nick asked it or because it implied that he does not believe in the Resurrection. (Actually, if he did not believe in…

It’s interesting how one slip of the tongue can fuel an outsized reaction. Because many people are reading the appointments of the Trump administration to mean leadership is being selected with the implicit agreement that their role will be to either downsize or even eliminate the work of those departments (like Betsy DeVos in Education and Rick Perry in Energy), it was no surprise that Mick Mulvaney’s slip that funding for Meals on Wheels through the Community Development Block Program may not be justified sent tremors through the nonprofit world.  It did not matter that he confused things by not making it clear that most of the funding for the 5,000 Meals on Wheels organizations around the country does not come through…

Many ministries and nonprofits have a section on their website for interviews and articles about them in the media. As you can guess, all are positive and speak in glowing terms about the work and impact of the ministry. You might wonder why The Gathering doesn’t have a tab like that. Honestly, it is because most of our press is not what you like to have said, and until now I’ve been reluctant to share any of that. From the start, we have been labeled as shadowy and secretive. Conservative evangelical magazines have questioned our being fully Christian, while left-leaning publications have skewered us for being intent on eradicating every belief but…

On a hill above the lake of Galilee there is a chapel that sits on the site from which Jesus delivered the Beatitudes. As a boy, I had to memorize the whole passage from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, so I can still recite most of them. As I sat there going over each one again, I thought how idealistic they are compared to much of the common-sense exhortation we hear today about leadership and how to be a winner. Frederick Buechner put it best for me: Jesus saved for last the ones who side with heaven even when any fool can see it’s the…

As some of you know, I enjoy taking pictures – and then finding something to say.

One of my professors in seminary was Dr. James Fowler, the author of Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. I thought of his teachings again this week while remembering a trip with donors to visit ministries in the Dominican Republic. I realized that in much the same way we mature in faith, we tend to grow as givers. We all start at the beginning, and each stage is important and necessary. In fact, we won’t develop fully if we skip a stage. I’ve learned over the years that giving is more of a team sport than an individual pursuit, so I wanted to offer my perspective…

The earliest foundations in America were established by men who had made fortunes by recognizing and capitalizing on social demographic industrial and financial changes in our country. Most were self-made and still young when accomplishing their discoveries or leveraging the new technology into enormous wealth and economic power. They were convinced they could use the same disciplines and mindsets to dispense what they had accumulated. Calling it “scientific philanthropy,” they focused their energies on solutions,  systems and large-scale issues. In “Charity Philanthropy and Civility in American History,” Judith Sealander writes, “They studied society closely, understood the dangers posed by the industrial revolution that had created their fortunes and worried publicly about the dangers. They and…

Growing up in church as a scrawny kid I was captured by stories of David slaying Goliath, Gideon defeating the Midianites, and especially Samson taking out 1,000 Philistines practically bare handed. While I loved the daring of those figures, I was also taught to be careful about the temptations of great champions: David’s moral failure and desperate attempts to cover it up, Gideon’s late-in-life slip into creating an idol and snare for his family, and the far more dramatic and colorful life of Samson and his sensational self-destruction. All of these stories served as lessons to us that great strength demands responsibility, and there is danger of misusing those gifts. The…

Walking Around Money Speaking to a group of hundreds of conservative Christian faith leaders who met with him last June, Trump made his opposition to the Johnson Amendment a key point of his well-received speech: “I think maybe that will be my greatest contribution to Christianity — and other religions — is to allow you, when you talk religious liberty, to go and speak openly, and if you like somebody or want somebody to represent you, you should have the right to do it,” he said. “You don’t have any religious freedom, if you think about it.” By now, most of you know a little about the history of the Johnson Amendment. It was proposed…