When my father became ill near the end of his life, he fought death as hard as anyone I knew – just as he had willed himself to overcome every other obstacle in his life. He often told us about his mother who would set chairs across the kitchen to hold her upright when she could no longer stand. She had drilled into him, “When nothing but your will says go.” As his physical condition deteriorated, my father’s will to beat death only grew stronger. His enormous spirit to persevere that had served him well for so long was not open to – or capable of – allowing him to…

It has become a tradition for us to publish a poem for the Christmas blog. So much Christmas poetry has either romanticized the day or, especially in modern poetry, found only despair and resignation. What I admire about this poem of Wendell Berry’s is his expectancy in the ordinary. It’s unfortunate that the word “mundane” has come to mean dull and lacking interest or describing something unremarkable because so much of Wendell Berry’s writing is about the mundane. It is about this world. The daily rounds of chores and long relationships. The routines and tasks that are uneventful – at least on the surface.  But that is both the setting…

Last week I wrote about the importance and also the difficulty of letting go. There comes a time when the founder or entrepreneur must turn loose of the tight grip on the venture or it will not survive. It will have the life choked out. But what happens when the time comes to step aside for good many years later? I’ve thought far more in the last several years about succession and the transition of leadership than I ever thought about starting organizations. In so many ways starting was easy. The ideas and the opportunities came and it was just a matter of acting on them. Knowing how to release…

For me, as someone having founded and co-founded several organizations, few things are more satisfying than spending time with men and women starting a company or non-profit. While most of the conversation is about start-up, I try to get around to the topic of what happens when it grows. One of the most useful tools for understanding the lifecycle of an organization is that developed by Dr. Ichak Adizes, the founder of the Adizes Institute. We all begin at the same place: an idea born in response to an opportunity. The new idea becomes an infant dependent on the resources of the founder and that stage may last months or…

He sat down, paused before he spoke and then said, “It’s too much for me to give thanks. I cannot be thankful for this. I will never be thankful for this.” He and his wife had lost their son and someone with the best of intentions had quoted Paul’s instructions to the church in Thessalonika, “Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.” Then was not the time to say, “Paul did not say be thankful for everything – but thankful in everything.”  Yet, that is what I thought about for days afterwards. Paul says, literally, eucharisteo, in everything and in…

One of our daughters spent a semester at The University of Florence in Italy years ago so Carol and I took the opportunity to visit her. One morning, they encouraged me to visit the Basilica of Santa Croce while they were shopping. It was early and the stone interior was still cold but the morning light filtered through the windows and the absence of any other visitors made it my private chapel for a time. Centuries of Florentine families were buried in the floor and the walls. Every square inch was given over to providing tombs for the wealthy, powerful and respected families of the Renaissance. I glanced over to…

For years I have been a fan of those able to take concepts from different periods of history, various disciplines, and skills to help people translate all of that into ideas that can be applied to their own circumstances. Too often we think information needs to be taught in the specific dialect of the audience. Lawyers only learn from lawyers; educators from professors, ministers from theologians. A relative few have mastered the art of learning from everyone because they have an internal translator that makes virtually everything they read and hear applicable to their situation. They learn from everyone. I forget how rare that is and was reminded this week…

What the heck was Jonah’s problem with Nineveh? The same problem as the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. The same problem as Job and Jeremiah and David. In fact, the same problem all of us have. How can God be inconsistent? How can he be soft toward the rebellious and so strict with those of us who try so hard to do what is right? We need Psalm 37 to be true. We need to know that in the end the wicked will get their due and we will get ours. We need to know God does not have a double standard and that he is…

Rebellions do not happen overnight. After years, there is always a tipping point in either an event or a moment that precipitates them. We talk about the beginnings of the American Revolution and we know it was not simply the Boston Tea Party or the Boston Massacre, but the years of resentment over the taxes Britain imposed to maintain their troops after the French-Indian War and to increase revenue for a Parliament strapped for cash by an exploding national debt. There was a twelve-year buildup to the American Revolution. It is true for David’s son, Absalom’s rebellion as well. Look at the numbers: After the rape of his sister Tamar…

In that same interview mentioned in the blog last week the question was asked, “What is the state of what some of us call Big Philanthropy in America.” Big is usually relative, isn’t it? Not only that but bigness always faces challenges that are new. For generations in this country there were relatively few big churches. Even now, the average church size is around 100 attending. When we began Leadership Network in 1985 to focus on the growing phenomenon of large churches we could find only about 300 churches with a weekly attendance of 1,000 or more and today there are likely over 3,000 megachurches. While the issues of the…