Maybe We Just Don’t Get It! … or teaching old dogs new tricks by Graham Standish “Dad,… you just don’t get it!” How many times have I heard that refrain from one of my daughters? “Okay,… help me get it,” I reply. They just roll their eyes and mutter, “Never mind.” Not getting it is the… Read more »
June 29, 2018
Hopeful Church
Maybe We Just Don’t Get It! … or teaching old dogs new tricks by Graham Standish “Dad,… you just don’t get it!” How many times have I heard that refrain from one of my daughters? “Okay,… help me get it,” I reply. They just roll their eyes and mutter, “Never mind.” Not getting it is the… Read more »
Summer Projects Use the summer to make improvements by Richard Hong We are almost at summer. Time to exhale, right? Relax – a little. But September is coming, and now is when we should start making the changes we want to have in place for the new program year. I don’t know where I… 
What Good Is a Vision without a Path? You can’t tell a congregation where to go if you don’t tell then how to get there by Graham Standish In the King James Version of the Bible, there’s a lovely phrase that’s been quoted often by those teaching church leadership: “Where there is no vision, the… 
Not Yet Do you have a ‘growth mindset’? by Richard Hong I’m seeing a lot of decisions made at all levels of the denomination, as we struggle with negative overall trends. What distresses me about the decisions are that so many of them seem to presume that continued decline is inevitable. I don’t… 
Lessons from Starbucks What the church can learn by Samuel Son I am in Philadelphia in the research room of Presbyterian Historical Society, surrounded by shelves holding General Assembly minutes from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) going back to 1707. I am reading the following lines from a report titled, “The General Assembly Faces the… 
It’s SOCIAL Media… not an electronic bulletin board by Richard Hong You’ve felt the pressure. The church needs a Facebook page. Should we be on Instagram? But while many churches are trying to have a presence on social media, most are being ineffective. And the primary reason they are failing is they are forgetting… 
Snail mail still works Thinking through technology’s uses by Richard Hong My first job was in software development, creating the first-generation of programs that replaced laboratory notebooks with computer systems. Our clients expected that computerization would solve their problems. But we had a saying: “The computer doesn’t do it better, it just does… 
And the Walls Came a Tumblin’ Down What ‘walls’ do we need God to tear down in our lives? by Rebecca Lister And the walls came a tumblin’ down. These words came to me the other morning as I was listening to an interview by the author of a book entitled The Line Becomes a… 
Finding God in the Junk Drawer A much-needed reminder to ‘watch for God’ by Donna Frischknecht Jackson God spoke to me the other day. I wasn’t standing on some mountaintop. Nor was I lying prostrate on the floor. I wasn’t even kneeling in the quiet of the old sanctuary of the little rural church… 
Mystery Box Outsiders wonder what’s inside church by Richard Hong I used to live near a business that had an innocuous name – I forget what it was. There would usually be just a few cars parked outside. The windows had blinds covering them. I never figured out what it was. Was it a…