bible and theology on Groupthink

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat shares about a unique phenomenon that occurs in organizations: Collective Narcissism: Churches are particularly susceptible to a phenomenon...

In his book On Combat, Lieutenant Dave Grossman talks about people being in one of three categories on a bell-shaped curve: wolves, sheep, or sheepdogs. Most people fall into the category of being she...

In his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, former president of the University of Southern California Steven Sample, details a critical element leaders must possess if they wish to make sound ju...

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.

In a team setting, leadership is shared by a community of people, which counters the tendency for pastors to form congregations in their own images.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

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...

We live in a culture today where we are used to evaluating and giving our opinion on everything. Whether it’s the pizza we ate, our Uber driver, the movie we saw, or our friend’s picture on social med...

“All thinking men are atheists.”

80 percent of Americans agree with the statement “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Everybody believes that their reality is the real real reality.

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embeddin...

When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...

As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness.

Truth’ [is] what we think it is at any given moment of time.

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

Context matters. According to the Terman Study, which followed one thousand study participants from childhood until their death, the people we surround ourselves with are who we become. We see those a...

Core beliefs can be hard to change because they’ve generally been with us for a long time, and we assume that they’re true. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing our core beliefs is that they are s...

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. Quoted in

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and th...

Today, the church in America seems to have traded in its mandate to be eccentric and aimed instead at an unconscious conventionality. Rural norms are too quaint, urban norms too dangerous, so the chur...

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

When we are regularly shamed away from thoughts that venture near spirituality and transcendence, we learn to avoid it altogether, even in our thoughts. We develop a resistance to thoughts that would ...