I don’t want to break confidences when I use personal correspondence for these blogs but these questions and concerns from Gathering participants are the best sources of thought for me. “One objection to the growing number of support and mentoring programs for young ministry entrepreneurs is that too much is made of the person/personality rather than the organization or movement that’s required to produce significant systemic impact.  We’re trying to figure out the proper balance between celebrating and supporting the entrepreneur who creates the organization and ensuring the organization is strong and deep enough to outlast and outperform a charismatic individual.”  I’m especially interested in this one because it’s a…

The Gathering is a safe place.  That’s what all the surveys tell us.  In fact we’ve used the phrase ourselves for so long to describe The Gathering that we’ve stopped considering what it means.  That’s dangerous – not safe.  Last year we commissioned Dave Goetz and CZ Strategy (www.czstrategy.com) to do interviews and research to find out (among other things) what our participants meant by safe.  Four things rose to the top of the list.  (1)   We are cause agnostic.  We are not pushing an agenda for giving. (2)    People sense they are with peers.  It’s okay to be open with peers. (3)    We are nonsectarian.  There is no “right”…

I attended my first Q conference this year in Portland.  While it is hard to compare Q to The Gathering I did have one especially vivid and riveting experience.  No it wasn’t the tattoos and dredlocks or the testimonies about growing up in a Baptist church and then coming to faith.   It was something even more challenging for someone like me who hosts a conference.  Normally we try to round up participants out of the halls and the classrooms and meals to make sure everyone gets to the general session on time.  We even ring bells and send staff out to remind everyone that the session is starting. We crank…

Several times in the Gospels the disciples ask Jesus about who will be great in the Kingdom.  It’s not a bad question.  In fact it’s a question I encourage younger people to ask themselves.  How you define greatness makes a difference…and you cannot know unless you ask.  It’s the question we should be asking when we are young and should keep asking all our lives.  Yet one time in particular the disciples ask Jesus what it means to be considered great or more literally to have the appearance of greatness.  It’s a totally different question isn’t it?  It’s one thing to have a genuine interest in the qualities of greatness…

I had heard about the app YouVersion (www.youversion.com) and the story behind it a few months ago.  Last month I ran into Bobby Gruenewald the innovation leader at Lifechurch.tv in Edmund Oklahoma and the developer of YouVersion.  What began as a service to the congregation has now been downloaded by 20 million people around the world – and I am one of them.  I use it for a daily Bible reading plan and sometimes in church.  My family doesn’t like me using it in church as it looks like I am checking mail.  People have spent over 7.5 billion minutes on the site – mostly on Sunday mornings.  It looks…

We came to Tyler 25 years ago.  Not long after we arrived I had the privilege to meet and know men and women who had carried public and charitable responsibility in this community for a long time and did so until they died.  I don’t know if all of them would have described it this way but to me they had a call to this community.  They had wealth and they had an ingrained sense of caring for others. They had allowed this community to have a claim on their lives. Allowing others to have a claim on your life is what money is supposed to free us from, isn’t…

Carol and I recently had dinner with David and Mary Ann Bishop. We met them when they were a young couple. David was managing his family business and Mary Ann was teaching Bible Study Fellowship in Myrtle Beach. When David sold the various businesses ten years ago he and Mary Ann had the freedom to explore an idea that had been in their minds for years.  They never had a call to be traditional missionaries but because of their business travel in the Far East they had developed a heart for missions. While they have always been supportive of traditional missions they wanted to find something that would use David’s…

Several years ago I read an article that used research to show how the brain reacts to gain and loss. It seems the amount of pleasure we receive from a gain of say $1000 is not equal to the amount of sadness we feel about a loss of the same amount.  Our capacity for regret seems to outpace our capacity for happiness. The article went on to show the applications for investing. Some people will hang on to a losing investment out of “loss aversion” and hope it will somehow come back to the level at which they bought it. It’s easy to think the stock remembers your purchase price…

A few days ago Thom Shultz at Group Publishing posted an article on the dangers of celebrity worship – both for the celebrity and for those who follow them based on their being famous. It was not a blanket indictment of great talent or legitimate accomplishment but a warning about the temptation to be caught up in fame and pursue it for its own sake.  Reading it reminded me of a note I received from Eugene Peterson asking me to help him understand something about the participants of our upcoming Gathering conference. In my work I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with many talented speakers and communicators and have never received…

Last week I attended the Nexus: Global Youth Summit on Innovative Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship. Hosted by Jonah Wittkamper and Search for Common Ground it was one of the most international conferences I have attended in years.  While a good portion of the participants currently live in the States as they have settled here after attending US colleges, their homes and families are all over the world. It is an international culture but still a subculture of people who have similar values and have been socialized by their family wealth, political persuasions, educations (private schools leading to Ivy League) and decisions to “make a difference” by both funding and creating…