The Morning After
When it feels like everything is over maybe you’re standing in front of the part you can’t see past right now. There’s another chapter on the other side of that door.
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Good Shepherds Smell Like Sheep
If we don’t smell like sheep, the sheep will never trust us or follow us. Leaders need to be where their people are.
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When the Dream Dies
A dying dream doesn’t mean the end of the story. Sometimes a closed door is the launch of a new chapter.
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Two Kinds of Hunger
Two parallel lines that never cross cannot make each other more bold. What would happen if these paths could cross?
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The Canoe Got Us Here. It Won’t Get Us There.
What do you do when what got you here, can’t get you there? Just finished “Canoeing the Mountains” by Tod Bolsinger, and I can’t stop thinking about the image at the center of it. A canoe, strapped to exhausted men’s backs, being carried over a mountain range because the river ran out.
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Twenty Miles Doesn’t Change What We Lost
A correction to my last post: the nearest LCMS congregations to the two Iowa churches that closed are about 20 miles away, not 30-60 like I originally wrote.
I’m glad to fix that in the open. But it doesn’t change what I think this closure actually cost because the people I was really writing about were never going to close that distance, whether it was 20 miles or 60.
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Ashes on the Prairie: What We Just Let Die in Iowa
Two altars in rural Iowa have gone cold. The hymnals, the memorial gifts, the building fund…all of it scattered now, like ashes to a prairie wind. It didn’t have to happen. A young man was ready to be trained and called. He wasn’t 40 yet.
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Too Many Referees and Not Enough Players
We have become experts at identifying what’s wrong with everyone else’s ministry while neglecting the mission God actually gave us.
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Governance Isn’t Glamorous, But The Wrong Type Can Slow You Down
Nobody joins a church board dreaming about bylaws. But I’ve become convinced governance isn’t the boring prerequisite to mission it’s the thing that either frees your church to move or quietly strangles its ability to.
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The Volunteer Pipeline Nobody Builds Until They’re Desperate
Every organization builds its leadership pipeline the same way: in a panic, three weeks before it’s needed.
Here’s the shift that actually fixes it — stop asking “who can fill this?” and start asking “who am I developing right now, whether I need them yet or not?”
