to gain the kingdom of heaven is like …

"To gain the kingdom of heaven is to hear what is not said, to see what cannot be seen, and to know the unknowable."

Gaze Heuristics for ministry priorities!

Starting the new year out right asks us to reconsider how we prioritize! In the worlds of sociology and psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules proposed to explain how people make decisions and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. The field of study explains how we make use of “satisficing” – […]

Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know…

It was G. K. Chesterton who kept alive the spirit of Kierkegaard and naive Christianity in modern thought, as when he showed with such style that the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness. There is no one more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. […]

Except you become as a little child … but in a new light!

“The adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom. When the Tao Te Ching and other wise books say things like, ‘Return to the beginning; become a child again,’ that’s what they’re referring to. Why […]

Sermon sketches for the ELCA Mission Developer Training, 2014A

Text: John 21:1-19 Who am I? I have been called the Episcopal Church’s expert on new ministries. “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.” (Physicist Niels Bohr) “I live to serve the Spirit in all of creation by being a loving, compassionate, […]

Questions and Responses regarding the grant application for Mission Enterprise Zones & New Church Starts

This is an accumulated list of questions and responses from ministry leaders across the Episcopal Church. We will update this list with fresh questions and discerned responses, as they come to us.   1.) After reading the application, my question is, must this be a new ministry?  We have a ministry in place that needs […]

New Video

Molting as spiritual practice for all of us

It was right in the middle of the busy-ness of the Episcopal Church’s 77th General Convention that Robbin Brent Whittington came to me and asked for an interview. (Robbin is the Curator at the Center for Spiritual Resources, hosted from Asheville NC.) She asked me, “What are you observing here at the world’s second largest legislative gathering, […]

First Monday after Easter report!

Quick Update on 1st Mark work around New Church Starts and Missional Initiatives: In the course of conducting a church-wide survey of new ministries (less than ten years old), I have spoken personally with 90 of our Bishops and hope to have completed conversations with the remaining and their suffragans this month. In each of […]

A prayer for my friend

THE OPENING OF EYES(After R. S. Thomas) That day I saw beneath dark clouds,the passing light over the waterand I heard the voice of the world speak out,I knew then, as I had before,life is no passing memory of what has beennor the remaining pages in a great bookwaiting to be read. It is the […]