As I write this I am sitting in the Orlando Airport waiting for my flight back to Long Island.  I foolishly booked the late flight to Islip, and have a little time to kill before the Capitals and Lightening play at seven this evening (I will be able to catch the first period before my 8:25 flight boards).  As I watch people wander through the terminal I have been thinking back over the past few [...]

Ok Matt, you are to blame for this post: I made a quick comment on yesterday’s post that I would  like to explain… and maybe explore the idea of authority for a couple of weeks. What is authority? Where does it come from? Who grants it? These are my questions, but do we have a good idea of answers? I will start with one idea that has been used by others: Constituted Authority. This authority is [...]

We hear about it in sports all the time: a player is labeled a “locker room cancer” or some other inspirational nickname.  By the time it has come to the point of name calling and finger pointing we all know that the end of a team is near.  While we are often incredibly focused on finding out who is to blame for the failure of the team, how often do we look back at the [...]

Last week I wrote about the reading that I was able to do while away on vacation.  The variety of books that I have been reading has made for a pretty interesting conglomeration of thoughts and ideas floating around in my head.  Three books have impacted more than the others, and I wanted to spend some time interacting with those books through a series of posts on the church leadership lessons they have taught me. [...]

This week I will be in Orlando for Exponential… probably the largest gathering of church planters in the country.  I have been going to Exponential for a few years now and I enjoy the opportunity to be around thousands of church planters who are getting ready to head off and change the communities that they will be serving in. I am looking forward to connecting with a great deal of church planters, and planting resources [...]

Christ has risen! Christ has risen indeed!

People think it odd when I tell them one of my favorite days on the calendar of Christendom is Good Friday. There is a power to this day of shadows. There is a joy to this darkest of days. There is a deep richness to this day of mourning. As we embrace Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ’s last day on earth, I pray that we will take in the ugliness, the horror, and the darkness that [...]

In a recent discussion/debate about presidential candidates, two political pundits advocated for total transparency in the vetting of potential nominees. My first response to this was, “That would be a good idea”.  Then I realized that regardless of whether it may or may not be a good idea, it sure seems like a present reality. With the amount of information being stored and disseminated on the internet about us, I wonder if it is possible [...]

Monday evening we learned of the passing of William Donald Schaefer. Some of you are scratching your head right now trying to figure out who this man is.  My Baltimore friends will recognize his name as a legend of Baltimore, and Maryland, politics.  Schaefer devoted his life to serving the City of Baltimore: first as a City Councilman from 1955-1967, as City Council President (1967-1971), as Mayor (1971-1987), as Governor of Maryland (1987-1995), and finally [...]

Last week my wife and spent the week disconnected from the world, on a boat, cruising around the western Caribbean.  In between snorkeling in Honduras and checking out Mayan ruins in Mexico the down time allowed me to catch up on my reading. My initial intent was for my reading to be strictly for fun, but as I finished the latest Tom Clancy and other fun reads, I found myself being drawn into three other books [...]