Posts Tagged ‘Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership’
Invitation to Advent: Leaders in Liminal Space
This week, we release our Advent podcast season of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast! If you’ve already signed up for our mailing list, you’ll get a notification for each episode. You can also watch for the episodes to be uploaded on our podcast page here: https://transformingcenter.org/strengthening-the-soul-of-your-leadership-podcast/. “Waiting is the hidden preparation through which…
Read MoreSpiritual Direction (Part 1): A Vital Practice for Discerning Leaders
“A spiritual director is one who helps another to recognize and to follow the inspirations of grace in his life, in order to arrive at the end to which God is leading him.” —Thomas Merton It was over 20 years ago now when, as a young leader, I crept into a spiritual director’s office desperate…
Read MoreThe Loneliness of Leadership
Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me…If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here.” Exodus 33:12, 14 Any leader who cannot endure profound levels of loneliness will not last…
Read MoreAn Act of Discipleship: Walking with Christ through Holy Week
Guidance on using the lectionary. “It is not the act of a good disciple to flee from the cross in order to enjoy an easy piety.” St. John of the Cross Several years ago during this season, my family gathered to bury my grandmother. She was 92 years old and greatly loved by many. On Saturday…
Read MoreObserving Lent: Seeing What We’re Missing
Lectionary readings for Fourth Sunday of Lent Cycle A: 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41 Guidance on using the lectionary. “Spiritual masters often refer to a kind of “dread,” the nagging sense that we have missed something important and have been somehow untrue—to ourselves, to others, to God. Lent is a good…
Read MoreMartin Luther King, Jr. and the Soul of Leadership
We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you… One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be…
Read MoreSweet Hours of Prayer: How Fixed-Hour Prayer Nourishes the Soul
“At last I believe life itself is a prayer, and the prayers we say shape the lives we live, just as the lives we live shape the prayers we say.” –Ted Loder The first time I participated in fixed-hour prayer, I felt like I had come home to a place I had never been…
Read MoreYou Say You Don’t Have Time for Retreat? Think Again!
When there is no time to do it, that’s when you most need to unclutter the calendar and go apart to pray. When the gridlock in your schedule relentlessly forbids it is the time you most need retreat. That is when your heart beats against the prison walls of your enslavement and says, “Yes, Lord,…
Read MoreSpiritual Direction with Pastoral and Corporate Leaders
“A spiritual director is one who helps another to recognize and to follow the inspirations of grace in his life, in order to arrive at the end to which God is leading him.” —Thomas Merton It was almost twenty years ago now when, as a young leader, I crept into a spiritual director’s office…
Read MoreHow the Spiritual Formation of the Pastor Affects Spiritual Formation in the Congregation
“It you attempt to act and do for others or for the world without deepening your own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, you will not have anything to give others. You will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of your own obsessions, your aggressivity, your ambitions, your delusions and ends and means…”…
Read MorePracticing Lent: True Confessions
“The things we cannot accept in ourselves we project upon others. If I do not admit my shadow side, I will unconsciously find another who will carry my shadow for me. Once this projection is made, then I need not be upset with myself. My problems are now outside and I can fight them “out…
Read MorePracticing Lent: Cleaning Our Messy House
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” Psalm 51: 10 In her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris tells the story of working as an artist-in- residence at a parochial school, teaching children how to write poetry using the psalms as a model. One little boy…
Read MoreAdvent 2: Necessary Preparations
“The word of God came to John in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” ~from Luke 3:1-6 Recently I started writing a new book which…
Read MoreAdvent: The Courage to Wait
“God comes to us like the sun in the morning…when it is time. We must assume an attitude of waiting, accepting the fact that we are creatures and not the creator. We must do this because it is not our right to do anything else. The initiative is God’s, not ours. We are able to…
Read MoreSweet Hours of Prayer: How Fixed Hour Prayer Nurtures Community
Part II “We are formed together as we learn to pray together. Ancient Jews and Christians uttered sacred prayers together. They did this every day—together. These prayers established sacred rhythms to their days and lives as a community. And they can do the same today. For us. As the Church. As a community of faith.”…
Read MoreInvitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence
“Without solitude it is impossible to have a spiritual life.” –Henri Nouwen It is a wonderful thing to be invited. Not coerced or manipulated but truly invited. To the home of someone you have looked forward to getting to know…to a party with fun people…on a date with someone who is intriguing. There is something…
Read MoreAvailable to God on Behalf of Others
“On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.” Psalm 138:3 This week I went to a funeral with my daughter, Haley. It was the funeral for one of her friends who died in a complicated way from causes that were not entirely clear. An Eagle Scout, a disciplined athlete,…
Read MoreHoly Week: An Invitation to Walk with Christ
“Stay together, friends, don’t scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake.” Rumi In her book Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris comments that in a monastery, Holy Week is “a total surrender to worship.” This surrender allows for a greater focus on the events leading up to and moving us through Resurrection Sunday—Jesus’ gathering…
Read MoreLent: An Invitation to Return to God
“Yet even now, says the Lord, repent and return to me with all your heart.” Joel 2:13 Today is Ash Wednesday—the beginning of the Church’s observance of the Lenten season. It is a space in time in which we are called to stop whatever we are doing, no matter how important it might be, and…
Read MoreMake a Joyful Silence
“On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.” Psalm 138:3 Long ago, a wise spiritual director said to me, “Ruth, you are like a jar of river water all shaken up. What you need is to sit still long enough so that the sediment can settle and the water…
Read MoreDiscernment: Finding God in All Things
“Discernment in its fullness takes a practiced heart, fine-tuned to hear the word of God and the single-mindedness to follow that word in love. It is truly a gift from God, but not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge.” –Ernest…
Read MoreBeyond Teamwork: Spiritual Community at the Leadership Level
“Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ and in fact, it already exists in Christ. It is not an ideal which we must realize, it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together It is much easier to talk about community—and even try to…
Read MoreThe Conundrum of Calling
“Calls are essentially questions. They aren’t questions you necessarily need to answer outright; they are questions to which you need to respond, expose yourself, and kneel before. You don’t want an answer you can put in a box and set on a shelf. You want a question that will become a chariot to carry you…
Read MoreWhen Leaders Lose Their Souls
“For what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” Matthew 16:26 (NLT) I want to talk to you about the soul—your soul, my soul, and the soul of our leadership. When I refer to the soul, I am not talking about…
Read MoreEpiphany: A Time for Seeking and Finding
“When the wise men saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage.” –Matthew 2:10, 11 Today is the day when Christians celebrate Epiphany—the journey of the wise men to find the Christ…
Read MoreAdvent: Training in Waiting
“Waiting is the hidden preparation through which God puts his ministers. We neglect it to our own peril.” –Richard Foster The seasons of the church year are meant to teach us something about the spiritual life that we need to learn. Beyond mere information about the spiritual life, they offer us the opportunity to “live…
Read MoreSpiritual Leadership And the Practice of Paying Attention
“Spiritual leadership springs forth in grace from our very desire for God’s presence. This does not take effort or striving. It takes courage, a kind of showing up, attentiveness.” –Gerald May It was a very humbling moment in my life as a person in ministry. I was on staff in a church where, like most…
Read MoreA Leader’s Lifeline in the Crucible of Ministry
“I didn’t want to be the leader because the leader always gets voted off the island.” Gary Hogeboom Survivor Guatemala A couple of years ago, our family watched a season of the reality T.V. show Survivor because we were acquainted with one of the participants—former NFL quarterback, Gary Hogeboom. He emerged early on as a…
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