Serving as a board member of Planned Parenthood in Reading, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s, I was surrounded by caring, concerned people. We all really wanted to make a difference by helping those who were less fortunate. My recollection is that none of us talked about abortion as if it were a goo...

As we counsel teens and young women at Genesis, we find ourselves in a conversation about their relationship with their boyfriend. We often ask, "What is your relationship like with your boyfriend? What is love and how does one express it?" The answers we receive from such questions are often quite...

We have all done it — we come to a genealogy list in the Bible and skip right over that section. We think to ourselves, Just get to the good stuff — the story. Why did God have the writer put a list of "who was the father of whom" in the Scripture anyway? Because there is an important me...

The job of the board of directors is to make decisions on behalf of the organization. Some decisions will be simple or routine; others — such as initiating new programs, cutting programs or staff, changing a name, and so forth — will have a lasting impact. How should a board make those d...

Tired? Depressed? Worried? Burdened? Recently I had the privilege of conducting a brief affinity exercise with Christian ministry workers in a mid-western city. While I was not surprised that they voiced the fact that their ministries had fewer paid staff as the recession grinds on, the most surpris...

Have you ever been surprised to discover that a situation was very different when you saw it from a different perspective? I heard a story of two mothers talking about their children one day. As they talked, one mom said to her friend, "My life has been transformed." "What happened?" "I took your ad...