Articles

by Janis Balda and Wesley Balda

We came across some challenging ideas from The Three Tasks of Leadership: Worldly Wisdom for Pastoral Leaders, edited by Eric Jacobsen. The book is built around one of Max De Pree's well-known statements:

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant and a debtor.

As the highly successful CEO of the Herman Miller Company, author of excellent leadership books, and longtime board chair at Fuller Seminary, his legacy is firmly fixed. His life and work have touched many, and his results have been lasting—perhaps because he has had a core purpose, a sense of direction for his life journey.

by Cary Umhau

“I was born in a house with the television always on,” sing David Byrne and the Talking Heads in their song Love for Sale. What could be truer than that for most of us? Yet even with the television blaring (and sometimes because of the television blaring), we manage to hear God’s voice in the culture…because He’s everywhere, and not only in a monastery.

We know that, but we also feel a certain tension. Christians live in a gap between “Be still and know that I am God” and Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” I for one often feel the pinch, wondering how to mind the gap.

by Steve Garber

(This winter the week between Christmas and New Years Eve brought 17,000 students and others to the Urbana Convention. For decades it was held at the University of Illinois campus in Urbana/Champaign, but has now moved to downtown St. Louis. Steve Garber was asked to speak several times, once being "the final charge" for the students in the Business as Mission Track. This is his address.)

Two years ago this week I was in India, visiting two of our children who were working there that year. We didn’t see everything, at all. But we did travel through the south, in Tamil Nadu and Kerala—and of course in our seeing and hearing and smelling, were keenly aware that we were in a very different world.

By Bill Haley

It’s the Christmas season, and each year for me that guarantees at least three things--familiar sounds, longing, and a tradition. The first guarantee of the season is that I release into the airwaves the music that is held for just this one month of December, music that for my soul brings to the heart the beauty and truth and delicate grandeur and gravitas of Advent and the marking of the Incarnation of the Savior of the world. It’s music such as John Michael Talbot’s The Birth of Jesus, and certain selections from Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas, and Loreena McKennitt’s To Drive the Cold Winter Away, and an intensely attentive listening of Handel’s Messiah. Each year, merely from the unwrapping of these treasures once again, assuredly bring the heights of adoration and depths of devotion.   And their hearing guarantees the second thing . . . a longing in the form of a frustrated question:   “Why didn’t I learn to the play the guitar?!”

Given by Steve Garber at the Church of the Epiphany, Herndon, Virginia, July 31, 2009

Perhaps your images of Switzerland are forever formed by “The Sound of Music.” Or maybe you’ve walked through its meadows and across its mountains yourself, astounded by its beauty. A few years ago my wife and I spent a week there, hiking and biking, and had a wonderful time together, drawing in as deeply as we could the vastness of its Alpine glory. What drew us in particular was the importance of visiting our daughter in a little village in the Alps, which for more than 50 years has been the home to a community called L’Abri; she had spent several years there during her 20s, moving from being a student to being a staff member, what they call a worker.

One day I asked about a Wi-Fi connection, and she told me that the little Protestant church in the village was a good place, saying that a nearby chalet might provide me a way into the wider world. So I walked that direction . . .

By Allison Clausen

Wendell Berry’s That Distant Land is a collection of short stories about connectedness. Through the accounts of multiple generations living in the fictitious town of Port William, Berry brings to light the profound significance found in relationships. Whether the relationship between a man and his horse, a woman and her child, or a work team and the land, relationships are the storehouse of meaning in That Distant Land.

By Janis Balda and Wesley Balda

We spotted a bumper sticker while on our campus recently that stated the obvious: "Don't believe everything you think." We tend to believe what we think, probably because we are the ones doing the thinking; however, we are simultaneously capable of infinite self-delusion and being sincerely wrong...