In The Handbook of Large Group Methods, Billie and her colleague Barbara Bunker identified fifteen Large Group Methods that had emerged in the previous ten years. They categorized the methods under three headings: those that engage people in creating the future…

The well-known story of the elephant and the blind men has several versions. One version goes like this: a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one, though, touches a different part of…

Okay, listen up. I’m working on a big problem with simple living, and I need to think big.  The problem: Simple living is an overarching idea that could save the world, but it’s not getting enough play in our culture….

The future is in God’s hands, not yours…. Try only to make use of each day; each day brings its own good and evil, and sometimes what seems evil becomes good if we leave it to God…  —François Fenelon (seventeenth-century…

A story is a spoken or written account of connected events. These connected events create a plot—a thread of unfolding happen­ings starting with an intention to head somewhere, followed by a phase of uncertainty, unpredictability, or crisis, and, finally, ending…

Humans have been choice makers since the days when hunter-gatherers had to decide when to hunt and what to gather. Choice making has been a part of the Christian faith ever since Jesus extended an invitation to four fishermen to…

We vote a lot in congregations. Sometimes we do it with our hands—and sometimes with our feet. By “voting with our hands,” I am referring to the politics of congregational decision-making: conversation, group discernment, and consensus-seeking, in which voting may…