arts and culture on Adaptability

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar terr...

[I] try to get into their world a little bit [by listening to hip-hop], because if they’re only adapting to you and you’re not adapting to them in some way, I don’t think you’ve developed a relationsh...

The great San Francisco 49ers football coach Bill Walsh, when asked about legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice said, “Rice was considered too slow for NFL greatness.” But, when you studied the film fr...

All great jazz musicians have at least three things in common: (1) they have gone into the practice room and learned and internalized all the scales, which are simply organized sequences of notes, unt...

One of [Lamin] Sanneh's key arguments is that while the spread of Islam has drawn ever-increasing numbers to the globalizing influence of Arabic, the spread of Christianity binds ever-increasing n...

A couple years ago I got to take a tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The name is a bit misleading because what they are most known for are there amazing gardens. And so we were o...

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Skill in contextualization is one of the keys to effective ministry today. In particular, churches in urban and cultural centers must be exceptionally sensitive to issues of contextualization, because...

People who blame things rarely change things. Blame is an unassailable change-avoidance strategy.

When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...

Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.

Leadership is often a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand.

It takes fresh experiences, surroundings, and inputs for us to see familiar shadows in a new light.

Leaders can hold onto busyness like a weapon of protection.

The advantage that cities and traditional neighborhoods have over sprawling suburbs with respect to interdependence is that they allow people of a greater variety of ages to participate meaningfully i...

At what age do you think it's appropriate to tell a highway it's adopted?

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...

As a language-user, I’m bound to all the audacious capacities and frustrating limits of words. We label, we name, we frame all of our experiences, past, present, and future. We give words to our inner...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

When I was fifteen, I applied for my first job, at Eureka Baking Company, and ran into a complication. The job interview was a few miles from my high school, and I didn’t have a way to get there. I su...

Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . ...

If we do not accept as good, God’s shaping of our person and life in our own culture, we will never be able to accept his work in the lives of others who are culturally different from us.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.