I am going to upset some people now.  It’s not intentional but I think there is a good deal of misinformation that has been floating around for years about the idea of ministering to donors. I am not arguing with the overall concept of ministering to people – just with a couple of assumptions about what ministry is to donors. First it assumes donors (especially major donors) need a particular kind of ministry due to their circumstances. Those circumstances are described as isolated lonely spiritually dry weighed down with family problems that include shaky marriages troubled kids and misplaced priorities. There are more but these seem to be the most…

  I grew up in a Protestant tradition that had no creeds.  Well we did sing "Just As I Am" and that was pretty close to a creed.  So when I branched out as a young adult and encountered the Apostle's Creed and especially the phrase "I believe in the holy catholic Church" I could not understand how the fellow Protestants were blithely mumbling the words without a hesitation. How could that be?  What had I missed? I grew up thinking Catholics abducted babies and shipped them off to Rome and practiced strange rituals late at night. Everyone reading this who grew up in a similar non-creedal church knows what…

  The real challenge in estate planning is not the technical and financial part.  According to Roy Williams at The Williams Group, only 2 to 3 percent of failed estate transfers were caused by professional incompetence on the part of advisors, accountants, and attorneys.  The major cause of failure is the lack of preparing the heirs for assuming the responsibilities and benefits of wealth. Why is that? The results of interviews with 3,250 families showed the primary cause of failing to prepare heirs is a breakdown of trust and communication within the family.  “Parents were routinely decisive in dealing with business matters or in selecting their professional advisors.  But when…

  This blog is a little out of the ordinary for me, but a good friend sent me an article by Philip Jenkins with a provocative question. “Imagine you wanted to teach a course on Evangelical Christianity, past or present, what novels or similar texts might you use? One problem, of course, is for many years evangelicals had real doubts about the whole world of novels which they associated with frivolity or even immorality and that’s why there is no evangelical Jane Austen. On the other hand, Puritans like John Bunyan have a good claim to have invented the English novel as a genre – Pilgrim’s Progress or The Life and Death…

A friend who has a developed taste for politics but whose soul has not yet been taken over by the partisan body snatchers came by recently and dropped off a book that has helped me avoid the trap of cynicism and despair.  Like all of us who have had small children on road trips we are weary of hearing the kids call each other names, point out minor infractions (“she’s breathing on me again”) and make us turn around countless times and warn them about “one more time and you are going to bed with no dessert tonight.”  Of course, I am not talking about small children.  I am talking…

  Twenty years ago it was likely the missions pastor in a church would have been a retired missionary older pastor or a member of the staff who had worked with seniors in the congregation.  While missions overall was extremely important to the church and denomination ” the decisions about missions and mission giving were fairly simple. Supporting denominational programs or a group of missionaries with strong ties to the church was routine.  There were a relative handful of churches whose mission programs were highly visible compared to the other ministries.  The typical staffing budgets were focused on youth” music ” education and periodic capital campaigns. That has changed dramatically. …

  John Gardner's books and essays on "Self-Renewal" have become classics and I for one hope they discover a whole new market among today's Millennials who are looking for meaning purpose and using their lives for something outside themselves.  Several times he cautions against becoming so good at something that we let other parts of ourselves atrophy and we "go to seed" because we have so focused on one area of our lives.  "Life is an endless unfolding and if we wish it to be an endless process of self-discovery an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities…

  As you walk down the hall to my office and look up to the right you will see a sign that says "Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life."  I put it there for a couple of reasons.  First to remind me how much I love what I do – and how little I like jobs.  Second ” because I seem to have more than a few people drop by and disclose they are not doing what they love. I like to have them get a little foretaste of what I am most likely to say before we are finished. I've probably…