Resilient Leaders Project

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Purpose Reconsidered: An Alumni Story

My journey with purpose has been fraught with fits and starts and loads of apparently meaningless lulls in between. I was born and raised in Texas and my worldview was highly influenced by the predominantly white southern Baptist church that taught me about Jesus and who He expected me to be. It became my understanding

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The Betwixt and Between: Finding Resilience in Liminality

My all-time favorite movie line comes from the Western Five Card Stud. Dean Martin is out demonstrating his six-gun prowess to Inga Stevens, shooting bottles off the corral rails, when up rides Bob Mitchum as “The Preacher.” Mitchum asks to give it a try, so Dean hands him the pistol and Big Bob proceeds to

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The Resilience Report

The Resilience Report is a 25-page document intended to outline what resilience actually is and what it might look like in practice, and to begin a discussion on its theological and practical implications for Christian leaders. Download: The Resilience Report The report is presented by Kate Davis, Director of Resilient Leaders Project, Dr. J. Derek

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Chronic Stress as Trauma: Resilience in the Time of COVID-19

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

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Dear Clergy, Take Care of Yourselves

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

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Resilience from a Place of Crisis

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.

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Streams of Resilience: People

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

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Streams of Resilience: Practices

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,