Dr. David Lose weighs in on the future of seminaries, and theological education, with this provocative statement:
I'd argue the single most significant cause of decline is far simpler: most seminaries are training leaders for a church and world that no longer exists.
Lose references Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk's book, The Missional Leader, and the three zones that organizations and their leaders dwell in: the emergent, the performative and the reactive.
Ironically, it is our well-founded confidence …
Dee Pederson talks about building cross-cultural relationships in Saint Cloud, Minn., forming the connective tissue between members who don't share the same culture or language.
Dee Pederson: Many Cultures and Languages from Discerning Mission on Vimeo.
Listen as Laurie Skow-Anderson talks about the challenges of moving from a uniracial congregation to a more multiracial one:
Laurie Skow-Anderson: "Pentecost on the Prairie" from Discerning Mission on Vimeo.
by Christie Hallenbeck
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” The late Steve Jobs’s foreshadowing thoughts now permeate mainstream conversations of death.
So let’s enter the conversation.
In light of public shock over the death of this modern symbol of immortality, it is a missional conversation. With one of the top 10 movies in the United States following a twenty-something …
By Gary Simpson
In his August 5, 2011, letter to the rostered lay leaders and pastors of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson highlighted the calling "to discern together" what the ELCA's 2011 LIFT Report (Living Into the Future Together) confesses is our "missionary God." It's no accident that the Holy Spirit's renewed call to apostolic mission meets congregations and leaders straining to get a handle on discernment.
The turn to discernment lies in a newly emerging …