By: Kristy Newport on February 15, 2023
Dr. Clark’s doctoral research centers around Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, and in this blog I hope to share a few ideas on stewardship as a response to Weber’s unanswered question. Dr. Clark cited Sedgwick and Weber, they “lead us, but do not answer the question “how are ascetics ordered…
By: Scott Dickie on February 15, 2023
Unlike some in my cohort, I was looking forward to digging into Leader-Smithing, by Eve Poole . While I have been in Pastoral leadership for the past 27 years, I have not done any significant reading or studying on the topic of leadership. By God’s grace, a decent intuition, and a great community of mentors…
By: Kally Elliott on February 15, 2023
“If you can do something beautifully in miniature, it convinces both you and your masters that you are ready for bigger things.”[1] (85) I’ve been involved in athletics most of my life. In my youth I played soccer and swam on the swim team. In high school and college I ran cross country, began working…
By: Jenny Dooley on February 14, 2023
Reading Leadersmithing, by Eve Poole took me down memory lane and sent me to my basement storage room searching for copies of Aesop’s Fables and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The mere mention of these books brought back delightful memories of reading these stories to my children and sobering moments of clarity about myself and…
By: Pam Lau on February 14, 2023
Annie Dillard, in her beautiful book The Writing Life, says, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”[1] Every time I begin the process of writing this blog I pick up a book and hold it…
By: Tim Clark on February 13, 2023
When I was 15 years old my Grandad and I got into an old manual transmission pickup truck and drove to a very steep hill where, without warning, he pulled the emergency brake, got out of the vehicle, and told me to get into the driver’s seat. He was determined to teach me how to…
By: Jennifer Vernam on February 13, 2023
Poole’s Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership [1] endeavors to provide a resource to leaders in all stages of development. This is a lofty goal, as the topics reviewed were broad and would be difficult to completely cover in 232 pages. I found it helpful to review it as an index and appreciated it…
By: Travis Vaughn on February 12, 2023
“I have a hunch that if we were to repeat our research in ten years’ time, networking would feature more prominently.”[1] Yes! Networking. Better yet, networks. While reading Eve Poole’s Leadersmithing, I was already pondering mental comparisons to Michael Lindsay’s View from the Top,[2] published just a few years before Poole’s work. After all, the…
By: Daron George on February 12, 2023
“The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles” by Steven Pressfield is a book aimed at helping creatives overcome the resistance they experience in pursuing their artistic endeavors. The book says many things about “resistance,” such as “Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be…
By: Russell Chun on February 12, 2023
رهبري د ژوند وخت نیسي – نو یو کومان شئ، نه خر. In Pashtu, رهبری یک عمر طول می کشد – پس یک لاک پشت باشید نه خرگوش. In Dari/Persian. Leadership takes a life time – so be a tortoise, not a hare. (Poole,p.182) [1] As some of you may have noted, my subject titles…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on February 11, 2023
While the contents of this weeks reading were not entirely new, the combination of the components that Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder in Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits of Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead provided me a new lens in which to view leadership and how I choose to steward…
By: Chad McSwain on February 11, 2023
Resistance is a funny thing. It comes in all shapes in sizes as it stands against any effort of true meaning. Like the crushing weight of the Titan moon hurled by the Infinity Gauntlet, is resistance to the one who seeks to put forth enough effort to materialize that which didn’t exist just a moment…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on February 10, 2023
This Could Change my Life… at Least my Writing “How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that for this day, for this session,…
By: Sara Taylor Lattimore on February 10, 2023
There always seems to be one thing that freezes me in place, that is the reason I get stuck, and the reason I fail. The fear of failure in the same thought process of perfectionism paralysis! Comedic irony, isn’t it, that the thing that freezes me in place is a fear of failure and it…
By: Mary Kamau on February 10, 2023
Warner is the president of Deeper Walk International. He is a former pastor and college professor who has authored several books on topics ranging from studying the Bible to spiritual warfare, emotional healing, and leadership. Wilder is a psychologist and theologian. Their book, Rare Leadership, looks at leadership from the right-brain perspective.[1] They use their…
By: Denise Johnson on February 10, 2023
The educator in me has been struggling with church practices that are so focused on the analytical understanding [1] of the word of God. Even though, most of the churches I have been in talk about the importance of relationships, how they interact with the scripture take the form of an expert talking at the…
By: Jana Dluehosh on February 9, 2023
I find myself surrounded by numbers…I try to get away from it, and yet I land smack dab in the middle of numbers. I’m in the business of people and yet I recognize that this book is going to be crucial to my studies and surprisingly is one I am glad I purchased, and I…
By: Henry Gwani on February 9, 2023
Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead is a refreshing book that focuses on emotional intelligence and fast thinking, albeit from a Christian perspective. It moves away from the popular results-driven leadership model, or one that is geared simply towards problem-solving, to one that focuses on…
By: Becca Hald on February 9, 2023
“You need to live your life. At least you do not have cancer.” Those were my sister’s words to me. It was on a day where I was at my parent’s house getting some down time while my kids played. This was a time when both my kids were in elementary school, my husband traveled…
By: Elmarie Parker on February 9, 2023
In “Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead,” Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder demonstrate how the leadership habits they discuss are grounded in brain science.[1] They set out to convince the reader that by practicing the habits of 1) remaining relational, 2) acting out of your…
