Part 1. Think Differently Moneyball, in case you haven’t seen it, is about baseball. But it’s also not about baseball. It’s about culture change. About how hard it is to change a culture, and about how it important it is to do just that, when the world around you has already changed. And it’s just that mixture of hardboiled pragmatism about a changed world – in this case the world of baseball – and creative ingenuity to defy tradition in order to change that makes me think that the secret to the church’s future may lie in this very good movie based on an even better book. In brief, here’s the setup: Oakland A’s general...

Ever wonder whether your assumptions about the world are accurate? Swedish statistician Hans Rosling is a wizard with data. Really. He uses stats about ecomonic power, health, child mortality, life expectancy and more to tell a story. Actually, to tell a number of stories about the world – the world and how it has changed over the last fifty years and how it might change in the future. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be surprised at some of the changes in recent decades and the causes of the those changes. At the very least, your picture of the world will be both more complex and more accurate. It’s a 19-minute talk that not only...

Creativity is in as high demand now as perhaps it ever has been. And I don’t just mean in marketing a product better or preaching a more interesting sermon. I mean that we need creative parents to raise healthy children in an increasingly complex world. We need creative political leaders to help move us beyond partisan gridlock to solve serious problems. We need creative business leaders who can run successful businesses while also putting the larger community and society along side of shareholders as persons to whom they are accountable. We need creative religious leaders who can help us imagine how faith speaks to us in a relentlessly...