By: Jonita Fair-Payton on January 30, 2024
I watched Matthew Petrusek’s entire 10- part Video Seminar before I cracked the spine of the book. After I completed the viewing over the course of a couple of days, I found it fairly easy to determine which chapter and topic that I would write about. Chapter 8, The God of my Tribe: Progressivism…
By: Kim Sanford on January 29, 2024
I’ve prayed the Lord’s prayer since childhood. Along with “Now I lay me down to sleep” it was probably one of the only prayers I had learned by heart. Simple and theologically rich at the same time, it deserves to be prayed again and again across denominational boundaries. It even bridges the Catholic-Protestant divide…although let…
By: Esther Edwards on January 29, 2024
“Evangelizing always requires going to where the people are, and where many people are today is stuck in a morass of increasingly aggressive political ideologies, each one seducing its adherents down varied paths to the same dead end: moral, spiritual, and yes, political futility.”[1] This is the societal landscape that we, as Christ followers,…
By: Tim Clark on January 29, 2024
In his recent book Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture Matthew Petrusek uses the foundation of Catholic Social Thought to offer keys for arguing against dominant political ideologies that are at work in our culture. During an interview about the book, he admits he wrote it after spending ten…
By: Jennifer Vernam on January 29, 2024
This week, I started reading Russell Moore’s new book Losing Our Religion[1].In the first chapter, he reflects on a crisis that he had earlier in life when he recognized the failings of his faith community. He states that this crisis surfaced “a deep dread… that Christianity might just be [a] southern culture of politics, with…
By: John Fehlen on January 29, 2024
At the height of the collective (and largely warranted) backlash following the murder of George Floyd, I asked my team to compile a resource list that could be made available on our church website. The resources were intended to express our value for people of color, a strong rejection of racism, and ways we could…
By: Travis Vaughn on January 29, 2024
In Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond To The Political Culture[1] Matthew Petrusek wants to equip “evangelists” to be able to engage the political realm as he believes “the evangelist’s work includes evangelizing the political culture.”[2] He wants his readers to have the right methodological tools[3] to address what he calls “secular political…
By: Kally Elliott on January 29, 2024
“If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Corinthians 13:1) I couldn’t help but think of this verse when reading Matthew Petrusek’s book, Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture. In his…
By: Jana Dluehosh on January 27, 2024
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic, Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in On the mind like an endless, increasing weight. The light in the mind becomes dim. Things you could take in your stride before Now become laborsome events of will. Weariness invades your…
By: Mathieu Yuill on January 25, 2024
For a while, I hosted a podcast which featured several interviews with people from all walks of life. Some authors, others business leaders, nonprofit executives and more. One of my favourites was author, Joseph Michelli[1]. He had written a book, The Starbucks Experience, that really changed the way I looked at customer service and fuelled…
By: Esther Edwards on January 25, 2024
I will never forget the day the world shut down. The closing on our 65-year-old church building was just a week away and we were 80% of the way moved out with just a few more things to donate and sell. The storage units were filled. We had already started meeting at a movie theatre…
By: Todd E Henley on January 25, 2024
Drawing from nearly two decades of conversations with Fortune 500 executives, Susan Scott offers fresh and surprising alternatives to the “best practices” wreaking havoc on today’s businesses. In her book, Fierce Leadership, she states, “Our careers, our companies, our personal relationships, and our very lives succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly-one conversation at a time.”1…
By: Jenny Dooley on January 25, 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic happened to all of us. It is our common lived experience. Though not as globally impactful I experienced regional viral epidemics and the ensuing public health interventions while living in Vietnam. The first in 2003 when SARS was diagnosed in Hanoi, quickly followed in 2004 by H5N1 better known as the Avian…
By: Adam Harris on January 25, 2024
Before moving into my current position as an associate Pastor, I had a bizarre, but incredibly powerful dream. According to Daniel Lieberman, and several stories in Jewish-Christian history, dreams can be an effective vehicle for the subconscious or God to get our attention. [i] This dream may have been the Spirit speaking through my subconscious or…
By: Russell Chun on January 25, 2024
מלחמות ושמועות מלחמות (pronounced: melchamot veshemuot melchamot) – Aramaic for Wars and rumors of wars. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: What lessons I took from Annabel Part 3: Impact on GoodSports Ukraine Selah Introduction: Matthew 24:6-7 (New King James Version): “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not…
By: Dinka Utomo on January 25, 2024
Leaders make a difference. They move people to new places – physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually – that they could not have achieved alone. They provide inspiration, courage, conviction, hope, and comfort. -Annabel Beerel- About a week ago, I saw a news ticker on one of our national television networks. The news ticker contains news…
By: Scott Dickie on January 24, 2024
Like all of you, I had to decide on what part of Beerel’s book, Rethinking Leadership (1), I was going to interact with and blog on. This is the kind of book where I might prefer to take one chapter a week over this next semester and deepen my leadership learning on each inter-connected topic…
By: Jonita Fair-Payton on January 24, 2024
Defining Culture I read a book about 20 years ago for one of my Graduate Programs. The book, Culture Matters, is a collection of essays written by social scientists, scholars, journalists, and practitioners. I read it from cover to cover, long before inspectional reading was introduced to me. It is worth mentioning that it was…
By: Cathy Glei on January 24, 2024
“Leaders need to have complex cognitive structures so that they can adapt to, accommodate, and transcend challenging circumstances. On the one hand, they need strong egos to tolerate the tension of standing alone and not being easily overwhelmed. On the other, they need to be sensitive to their inner drives and ego defenses and be…
By: Pam Lau on January 23, 2024
Praxis leaders[1] Dave Blanchard and Andy Crouch presented a webinar in the Summer of 2020 called, “Leading Without a Forecast: What to Do When You Really Don’t Know What’s Coming,”[2] on the heels of their timely article, “Leading Beyond the Blizzard: Why Every Organization is Now a Startup.”[3] In their introduction, Andy tells the story of the…
