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Sunday Best: leadership, racism, Wendell Berry and how to spot the future

Sunday Best: leadership, racism, Wendell Berry and how to spot the future

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If you didn’t have time to keep up with your daily blogs and online newspapers this week, you’re in luck. We did the work for you! This is the start of a new weekly series, Sunday Best. Every week our staff will pick our favorite links from around the web and share them right here. Let’s get right to it…

A major plight of the Church is the constant need for volunteers, right? Mike Breen says, “ALL WRONG.” He says we’re looking at it the wrong way; leaders and volunteers are not the same thing. Find out why the leadership movement is leaving your church leaderless.”

The millennial generation may be looking for a voice, but in doing so, are they creating a dangerous platform? Matthew Lee Anderson makes some interesting observations in his post Who speaks for millennial evangelicals? This sentence was enough to make me read the whole article: “The paradox of speaking for a generation of evangelicals is that it exacerbates one of evangelicalism’s ongoing problems: a monolithic understanding of itself that allows for caricatures to take root within the media, and the marginalization of those who don’t fit the generalizations.”

In the spirit of John Naisbitt’s famed book, Megatrends, Thomas Goetz, of Wired Magazine, shapes seven lenses through which to analyze the future and how it might unfold in this article, “How to Spot the Future.”

If you think racism is a dead issue, then you need to read this next article. Award winning author and Asbury Seminary Professor, Craig Keener wrote learning the reality of racism for the Huffington Post. Keener discusses several compelling, personal experiences. After moving into an African-American neighborhood, he heard friends and neighbors talk about a world that was entirely unfamiliar to him. Find out what Keener says is the key to working towards justice in the future.

Ministry leaders and business people often live in very different worlds during the work-week. Writing for the excellent and thought provoking website, Faith and Leadership, Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary reflects on what lay people, particularly professionals, wish their pastors knew about the complexities of their work-day world in “congregants long for pastors to understand their work lives.”

Last month, Wendell Berry delivered the esteemed 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In his address, It all turns on affection,” Berry, a Kentucky farmer and poet, draws a sharp contrast between the famed industrialist and philanthropist, James B. Duke (Duke University), with his own grandfather’s lifelong struggle to farm. Labeling Duke as representative of a “Boomer” and his grandfather as the embodiment of a “Sticker,” Berry laments the high cost of philanthropy and the tragic loss of the variety of farmer on which America was built.

Finally, here’s a NY Times op-ed from Thomas Friedman on the coming revolution in higher education. From iTunes to Kahn Academy and way beyond, vast innovative possibilities are exploding on the horizon posing tremendous disruption and promising possibilities. Seedbed may have a bit of this up their sleeve in the season to come.

Feel free to submit your favorite links throughout the week to seedbed@asburyseminary.edu with the subject line, Sunday Best. We might just feature them next week. Please note, while we consider these links of potential interest, they do not necessarily reflect the theology of Seedbed or the views of Asbury Theological Seminary. 

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