I live near Seattle, one of the first places in the US that COVID-19 hit hard. The first time I went to the grocery store after we all started to get a sense of the magnitude of this crisis, I took pictures of empty shelves where rice, flour, and chicken had been, as if I
When I was in college, a speaker at a conference showed a clip from the movie Instinct as an illustration for her talk. The visceral impact of that scene has stayed with me across the years and keeps coming to mind whenever I feel a lack of control in the midst of pandemic. In the
We are early in the new year, both in the calendar and liturgically. With Epiphany, we conclude the Christmas season in which we celebrated the birth of Jesus, the arrival of Emmanuel, the Incarnation of God. The divine force that creates, includes, and transcends all of creation, all of the universe, became human, with all
In the shared staff workspace of Resilient Leaders Project, on the fourth floor of The Seattle School’s red brick building, there’s an entire wall devoted to a calendar. Each page is a calendar month, stuck up with blue painter’s tape, and covered with post-it notes that represent the due dates of the team’s major projects.
In the months prior to the launch of Resilient Leaders Project, the team (at that point Dr. Derek McNeil, Andrea Sielaff, and myself) spent time sifting through research on resilience, trying to come up with a cohesive way to understand what leads to thriving, especially after suffering. Eventually, we expanded and consolidated categories into three
If you’ve been following Resilient Leaders Project for long, you’ve likely heard mention of the three streams of resilience: people, practice, and purpose. Each are a necessary component of resilience; no one is sufficient on its own. I always talk about ‘people’ first because it’s the most vital. Although people, practice, and purpose are important,
It may go without saying that purpose is complex. It’s layered in its living, it’s full of mysticism in its call, and most of us experience it with so much uncertainty in our daily walk. Even if we cognitively “know better,” it’s easy to fall into the traps of how we think purpose should work,
Mentoring pastors and Christian leaders is a bit different than mentoring in other professional contexts. While ministry does require competence in many skills, it is perhaps even more about becoming a certain kind of person. Mentors for pastors need a dual focus of developing the ministry skills and the ministry character of their mentee. That