We are in a one-of-a-kind “in-between time” as we approach Inauguration Day. The citizens of the U.S. know that we have done something new in electing an African American as our 44th president. The world senses it, too, and watches…
Read MoreLeadership Transitions: What the Nonprofit World Can Teach Us
Leadership transition is not a concern for congregations alone. The nonprofit world is also mightily interested in the subject. I had the privilege of joining a dozen nonprofit executives at the New School for Management and Urban Policy for a…
Read MoreWhat Are We Paying You For? Shifting the Way We Ask Lay Leaders to Run the Church
Do you know any lay leaders who are spiritually depleted rather than spiritually enriched as a result of their leadership duties? Have you ever known an elected church leader to worship occasionally with a church across town because it has…
Read MoreAll Are Welcome: Preaching and the Development of Church Identity
Let us build a house where hands will reach beyond the wood and stone, to heal and strengthen, serve and teach and live the Word they’ve known. Here the outcast and the stranger bears the image of God’s face. Let…
Read MoreAnthony C. Pappas, Norm Faramelli, and Ed Pease: The Bivocational Congregation — Tomorrow’s Church?
Any garden-variety atheist, agnostic, or even religiously indifferent materialist knows that if—and we do mean if—the church is to survive well into the future in the northern hemisphere it won’t be through a linear extension of today’s church. (The only…
Read MoreGod Beyond Borders: Interfaith Education and Congregations
One Friday during Lent, Greg Foraker, director of adult formation ministries at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona, entered the Islamic Center, the city’s largest mosque, to participate in worship with its 500 members. To the…
Read MoreUprising: A New Kind of Easter Vigil
A few years ago at an Episcopal Easter vigil I noticed that something was missing. Someone, actually. No teenagers were present and only a few people in their twenties or thirties were in the gathered congregation of about 80—and that…
Read MoreCongregations Magazine, Winter 2009
Join Alban Now God Beyond Borders: Interfaith Education and Congregations Contents IN FOCUS: Uprising (Members Only Article)Carol Bradsen, cofounder of Join the Living, tells the story of the creation of Uprising, an Easter Vigil that brought this ritual…
Read MoreGrants as a Source of Funding for Your Congregation
Pastors and ministry leaders are always asking me whether grants are available to fund the work of their congregations, and this question is arising more during these difficult economic times. Congregations that are having a difficult time meeting budget with…
Read MoreWays to Pray in a Board Meeting
I often hear the term book-end prayers used to refer to the perfunctory way in which prayer can be scheduled and offered at the beginning and close of a church board meeting. It traditionally separates out the spiritual aspects of the…
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