By: Denise Johnson on October 13, 2022
People who are transformational leaders willingly embrace a process of personal change which equips them to extract hope from a mountain of despair.[1] Tod Bolsinger’s Tempered Resilience: How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change [2] is a realistic look at the character-building process of becoming a leader who is transformational. His use of…
By: Elmarie Parker on October 13, 2022
How is a leader formed? More specifically, how is the characteristic and practice of resilience formed in a leader? This is the question taken up by Tod Bolsinger in “Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change.”[1] In an introduction, eight chapters, epilogue, and notes, Bolsinger establishes his primary metaphor and then…
By: Troy Rappold on October 13, 2022
Todd Bolsinger’s 2020 book, Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change, falls in the category of Christian Spirituality and Leadership. The book defines tempering a leader as, “The process of reflection, relationships, and practices during the act of leading that form resilience to continue leading when the resistance is highest” (p.5).…
By: Roy Gruber on October 13, 2022
As I reflect on my preparation for ministry as a pastor, I am thankful for what I received. I learned from many teachers who sought to instill a process for learning how to learn rather than just content retention. I learned sound principles of study, communication, and counseling. I gained an understanding of specific pastoral…
By: Andy Hale on October 13, 2022
Atychiphobia is the fear of failure. Heresyphobia is the fear of challenges. And tropophobia is the fear of change. Do leaders have the emotional intelligence to recognize their proclivity towards these phobias? If not, can they step back to measure if they avoid activities, opportunities, and people that might create an unsuccessful outcome or their…
By: Henry Gwani on October 12, 2022
What time is it? Paul and others would argue that these are the last days, characterized by great change as seen in the decline in Christian convictions and practice, globalization, commodification, pandemics, bias, hybrid work and education, technological innovations. One popular word used to describe these days is disruptive! Yet it is not all bleak.…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on October 12, 2022
Endurance. To suffer patiently. While it is a theme throughout this weeks’ reading, it also happens to be the word I chose for this year towards the end of 2021. Being just over halfway through a doctoral program, having a 1.5-year-old that weeks’ prior was in the PICU for respiratory failure, being pregnant with a…
By: Eric Basye on October 12, 2022
Tod Bolsinger is a professor of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary with a focus on congregational and leadership formation. Relying heavily on the teachings of Friedman and Heifetz, Tempered Resilience is a leadership book that primarily targets Christian leaders undergoing organizational change. He writes, They had become so focused on the aches and pains in…
By: Michael Simmons on October 11, 2022
I love the openness of Bolsinger’s leadership definition: “[…] the transformation and growth of a people — starting with the leader — is to develop the resilience and adaptive capacity to wisely cut through resistance and accomplish the mission of the group.”[1] Though mission is a laden term, I do find transformation and growth to…
By: Denise Johnson on October 9, 2022
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic voice from May 1983 both depicts the very vivid situation of the USSR of the day and bluntly challenges today’s Christian to evaluate their role in society.[1] His clear and honest description of where humankind has lost sight of personal morality and the effect on the overall decay of society. I am…
By: Nicole Richardson on October 7, 2022
Jason challenged us at the beginning of the Advance, to be open to the strange and stranger; to lean into that which is out of our control or comfort zone. I do not know about anyone else, but my mind is still grappling with the experience in Cape Town. So much to unpack, but I…
By: Jonathan Lee on October 6, 2022
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist who received the Templeton prize in 1983. He is known for his criticism of communism and for raising global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union. When he received the Templeton prize and gave his speech in 1983, I was five years old. Although I heard about the…
By: Elmarie Parker on October 6, 2022
When I share the story of how I’ve experienced God at work in the Middle East with local congregations or other interested groups in the USA, I often receive this question: “What unbiased source can we read in order to better understand what is happening in the Middle East?” What I have learned from my…
By: Henry Gwani on October 6, 2022
In The Upheaval, Lyons paints a landscape of the unprecedented change that is sweeping across the world. He notes that the key players include China, driving geopolitical change; America, influencing global culture and ideas; and the rest of the world managing technological innovations at a rate that is previously unheard of. The revolutions Lyons describes…
By: Troy Rappold on October 6, 2022
In his blog entitled, “The Upheaval,” N.S. Lyons makes the case in his essay Introducing the Revolutions Upending Our World that we are living in era of human history that has never before experienced so much change, so rapidly. “We are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting . . . from one era of…
By: Roy Gruber on October 6, 2022
I believe that the entirety of the Bible is valuable for life and faith. If I’m honest, however, I admit that the prophets are not my favorite place to read and ponder. Amidst the promises of God, bad news rules. Ultimately, God wins but the current state of things often receives strong words of correction.…
By: Michael Simmons on October 5, 2022
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest thinkers in modern history, will always be remembered simply for this statement: “God is dead.” The current geopolitical nationalistic fundamentalism, or “New Faith” could be seen as a response to the statement. In the United States far-right politicians are Christianizing their platforms and deifying their agenda. Regardless of motive,…
By: Andy Hale on October 5, 2022
Is it possible to be an unbiased news source in our era of relative truth? N.S. Lyons’ The Upheaval seeks to rise above the noise of political and social ideologies to examine what is happening in our times and how it is changing our world. In his post, “Introducing the Revolutions Upending Our World,” Lyons examines the…
By: Eric Basye on October 5, 2022
Reading Lyons article, “The Upheaval,” and Solzhenitsyn’s “Men Have Forgotten God” speech, I am challenged to consider, what value does a geopolitical framework provide Christians in engaging the world? Lyons argues that we are living in a time of “epochal change” in which at least three revolutions have impacted the world. One is a geopolitical…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on October 4, 2022
In reading Lyons and Solzhenitsyn this week, my mind took me in several directions, most of which ended up at a place of feeling ‘I can’t help but think that we’ve been here before.’ Perhaps it was in the Garden of Eden when we chose to listen to a voice other than the Creator. Or…
