While almost any day seems like a good day to hear from Kid President, Fridays work especially well. And so today it’s Kid President on how to be an inventor. Or, really, Kid President on creativity. Three things that struck me, and then I’ll stop and just ask you to watch and enjoy the four-minute video: 1) You can’t be afraid to make mistakes if you want to invent something awesome. Mistakes come with experimenting. Indeed, you learn the most from your mistakes. As Kid President says, “It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s not okay to give up.” 2) You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, it’s really hard to. The idea of the...

My post the other day comparing the competitive market of U.S. sports and the current situation of the Church drew a number of helpful responses. But also some misunderstanding. My fault, I think, as words like “competition” can be highly charged among church folk. So I thought I would clarify just what I meant a bit and invite a continued conversation. Let me start, though, by saying what I didn’t mean. I don’t mean that congregations should try to compete with sports…or theater or television or whatever. I’m not calling for entertainment evangelism or employing flashy gimmicks of any kind. In fact, I was not inviting...

Occasionally, when I have a hard time deciding between options on a menu, I have joked that while I’m great with big decisions – whether to get married, buy a house, or change jobs – I can get paralyzed by the prospect of choosing between (as I had to do just the other day) General Tso’s Chicken or Pad Thai. That’s not entirely true, of course. I sometimes agonize over big decisions as well! ☺ Which is maybe one of the reasons I find the whole topic of understanding how we make choices so interesting. In this TED Talk, lawyer-turned-philosopher Ruth Chang invites us to think differently about how we make hard decisions. Several...

The Church Lives and Does Ministry in a Competitive Environment Even as I watch the World Cup with 25 million other U.S. soccer enthusiasts, taking delight in what many are describing as one of the most thrilling World Cup’s in years, I continue to wonder why soccer has taken so long to grab a permanent place in the hearts of American sports fans. I mean, around the globe soccer – or, more accurately football – is the world’s favorite sport. But even though soccer has been played here for a century – the U.S. actually finished third in the first World Cup in 1930 – it’s struggled for decades to secure the kind of attention and...