Bill Stagg and I started badly. I heard about Bill before I met him – but just seconds before. It was 1978 and I was a 31 year old novice Dean of Students at Charlotte Christian School. I was confident, inexperienced and a danger to myself and others.  But worse than that – far worse than that – I had just busted one of Bill’s beloved and three other boys. For me, it was cut and dried, simple justice and only a matter of notifying the parents with a short and courteous reminder of the rules and a clear explanation of the punishment. One day after the mail arrived at…

Brook Hill School Dedication June 4, 1995 I think we are all familiar with the Scriptural practice of dedication. It was a common custom and still is to dedicate children, houses and places of worship to the Lord. We are going to do that this afternoon in a few minutes but I wanted us to look very briefly at three ways of thinking about dedication – and I want to call them three rules of thumb since they are all built around your thumb. The first meaning of the word dedication is derived from the practice of a nurse putting very soft food on her thumb and pressing it on…

  April 12, 2025 In my last conversation with Vicki, there was a pause — a quiet moment when I could tell she had something important to say. Then she said it, simply and clearly: “All I ever wanted to be was a wife and a Mom.” How many people do we know who can sum up their life’s dream in one sentence? It sounds so simple — but in that moment, she might as well have said, “All I ever wanted to do was climb Mount Everest. All I ever wanted to do was run a three-minute mile. All I ever wanted to do was find a cure for…

Eulogy for Gerry Dunlap June 12, 2024 The Apostle Paul says in Philippians: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” Many years ago I taught junior high school. One day a student asked me, “Mr. Smith, what is a eulogy?” I told him it was a time when we say…

I was asked to respond to some questions about the changing role of technology, artificial intelligence and social media for a panel. How do you think AI as a whole could transform our lives and how we solve social problems together? There will always be the benefits of new technology – the hammer, the wheel, the printing press, telephone, computer, and now artificial intelligence. For the moment I prefer to call AI accumulated information as it does not meet the standard definition of intelligence. Intelligence is about understanding and making judgements based on reason. AI cannot do that. It can connect dots of information it has scraped from millions of…

I was invited to make some remarks to a group of ministers to senior adults. I organized it around five questions for them.   I am almost 78 years old and five years ago stepped aside as the leader of my third non-profit organization. People ask me how I spend my time now and it feels like what they are really asking is how do you fill up all the vacancy and empty space in your life? How do you use your time between getting up and going back to sleep now that the productive part of your life is done and you are coasting to the finish? In that…

In 2015, I wrote a blog titled, “This Is War” and the position I wanted to refute was Christian advisors, community foundations and organizations promoting the perspective that leaving wealth to children was not in the best interests of the parents or the children. This was a common quote: “Leaving children with wealth is like leaving them a case of psychological cancer.” You could not trust your children or you loved them too much to make them wealthy so it would be better to leave the money to an organization that could be trusted or establish a firm sunset for the foundation. Anyone but your children.   No one ever…

Like most of us here tonight, I have read for years the story of Moses at the burning bush and his reluctance to return to Egypt and bring the people of Israel out of slavery and into the Promised Land.  “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?” Then the Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” “A staff,” he replied. The Lord said, “Throw it on the ground.” Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it.  Then the Lord said to him, “Reach out your hand…

In 1977,  it was not common to hear a young man in his 30’s considering giving away a fortune.  But, there we were, all three of us in our thirties having dinner at Nieman Marcus in downtown Dallas, the flagship store, talking about just that. Seven years passed before we had dinner again but this time it was more than musing.  That same young man, Bob Buford, had decided to act on his intentions and invited me to join him in the adventure.  Who in their right mind would say no to that?  Well, here is a snapshot of me at my desk after six months.  No one mentioned what…

What is now The Gathering began in 1985 with five of us who had an interest in Christian philanthropy. For the first several meetings of our small retreats at The Cedars in Arlington we had a strict rule.  There would be no presentations from non-profits.  In fact, no non-profit leaders would be invited to attend. No fund-raisers.  No one sitting in on the fringes.  Like any boys club, we took a blood oath almost as literal as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did: “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer swears they will keep mum about this and they wish they may Drop down dead in their tracks if they ever Tell…