Learning to Lead…by Leading!

Note: Each month I write a short piece for our e-letter, P.S. Portions. While I won’t  normally republish that here, I think the story I try to share in that space this month – that the best way to learn how to lead is by being given the chance to lead now – is worth repeating. More than that, I think the video below about some of the leadership roles our students are playing is really, really cool. So even if you want to skip the column (I get it, you’re busy!), at least watch the video. 🙂   Hold this question with me for a moment: What is the best way to educate leaders for the future church? I promise...

The Power of Trusting Our Colleagues

Of the various subjects I’m asked to teach or present on at various gatherings and conferences, the one that is most frequently requested is about the massive amount of cultural change we have experienced in recent decades and the implications of that for our lives in the Church. Given the significant decline in so many of our congregations and overall attendance in worship, I can understand why folks, myself included, are working hard to better understand the nature of the culture in which we live so that we may respond faithfully to the challenges and opportunities it presents. At some point in these gatherings, I always say two things....

Teaching as Lighting Fires

It’s summer. Which means, among other things, that school is out. Summer means different things to different people, of course. For some it’s about family vacation, for others it’s time at the beach or lake, for others – especially in the Northern Hemisphere – it means warm weather and longer days. But given that I have spent the overwhelming bulk of my life as a student, teacher, and/or parent of school-aged kids, summer has almost always been defined primarily as the time between the end of one school year and the beginning of another. This summer – prompted in part, I’m sure, by my impending transition – rather than take a...

MOOCS & The Future of Education

I found the following TED Talk fascinating because it deals with one of the most important topics in the world: education. How do we, that is, prepare an emerging generation to face the challenges that lie ahead, noting that the challenges we know about – global warming, scarce resources, overpopulation – are gargantuan and that there are tons more we can’t even imagine. But it’s not just the emerging generation. How do we educate ourselves? How do we keep learning in an economy where people are likely to change trades – not just particular jobs but trades and professions – six or seven times in a lifetime? Anant Agarwal is a...

Introducing TED-Ed

From nearly the beginning of this blog, I’ve been featuring TED Talks most Wednesdays. I discovered TED Talks the way most others have: someone told me about them. 🙂 And I remember having such a hard time believing that all these incredible talks were being made available for free and...

Escaping Education’s Death Valley

There are few people I enjoy listening to more than Ken Robinson. An educator and expert on creativity, he is the author of the excellent book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, and his TED Talk on schools and creativity has been watched by more people than any other Talk. In this presentation, he offers both a candid description of why our current education is failing us as well as clear suggestions for making it better. The reason education is such an important topic, of course, is that it doesn’t just affect children and their parents, but all of us. Education shapes the emerging generation, the generation we will...