The Evolution of Compelling Preaching
After three decades of preaching, I can tell you I don’t preach the same way I did when I started. As the practice changes, so too must the way we teach and learn it.
Listening and Learning: The Role of Evaluation in Future Church Pilots
My role in the project is to give some leadership to our evaluation work. Sometimes “evaluation” can sound as if we intend to put our partners under the microscope or through some kind of test. But the model of evaluation we have adopted for this project is really about better understanding the complexity at play.
What’s with the name “Future Church Pilots?”
What’s with the pilots part of this project’s name? Are we taking flying lessons?
What are New Missional Communities?
Future Church Pilots emerged from St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, a fifteen-year-old NMC in Brooklyn that has grown from a new church plant to a partner congregation in the life of the ELCA.
Lilly Compelling Preaching Initiative—what’s it all about?
In the early 2020s, Lilly Endowment, Inc., fondly and somewhat cheekily known as the Church’s One Foundation, invited a select group to apply for grants in a new initiative they called Compelling Preaching. One of the largest foundations in the United States, Lilly Endowment gives millions in support of “efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities.” This new initiative grew out of the acknowledgement that we are living through a time of significant change for Christianity in North America.