Download the #PandemicPastoring Report today! The #PandemicPastoring Study Guide is available NOW! We are living in a new era of ministry. We need to talk about it and explore how to live into the new season with creativity, grace, and…
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3MMM | Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2021
Lift Every Voice…. Embodying the Vision of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmonies of Liberty** On this historic Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2021,…
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3MMM | Episode 66: Teaching Practice
Teaching. What is important to you about teaching? How has your teaching practice changed over time? How has your pedagogy (designs and plans for teaching) changed in this pandemic season? This week’s episode of 3MMM is especially for everyone who…
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Press Release: Three Minute Ministry Mentor
Nashville, TN – A new 52-week video series, “Three Minute Ministry Mentor” (3MMM), is launching online this Advent. Each video, just three minutes in length, is designed to help ministers by easing the burden of isolation, inspiring attention to learning,…
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State of Clergywomen in the U.S. | 2018 is Available!
You are invited to download the brand new State of Clergywomen report! To get your free copy, sign up today! State of Clergywomen in the U.S. Report | 2018 from Eileen Campbell-Reed on Vimeo. I am deeply grateful for assistance…
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A Blessing for the Preachers
Festival of Young Women Preachers April 7, 2016 | Eden Seminary | St. Louis, Missouri A Blessing for the Preachers Bless these hands as they handle sacred Scripture, and sacred stories, and sacred moments of the preaching and pastoral life.…
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Ordinary Time – Praying for Faith Leaders
For everyone who needs to preach and pray publicly this weekend – from any faith perspective – and especially Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, I’m praying with and for you and the tensions you hold as you … … speak…
Read MoreOrdinary Time XV
A Turn to Lived Experience
The study, practice, and knowledge of big ideas in psychology and religion are shifting and changing in the twenty-first century. One of the most substantial changes is that deep thinking about big ideas demands an engagement with the lived experience of real people and situations.
Ordinary Time XIV
The number of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship churches currently pastored by women?
Five Percent.
Eighteen hundred churches. Ninety women.
You do the math.
This is good news. But somehow laying out the starkness of that figure . . . well, it doesn’t exactly add up to great news.
Ordinary Time XVIII
A pastor I watched and learned from . . . In my kind of work you can’t really help but know a lot of pastors. And I feel gratitude, love and respect for most all the ones I know. They…
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Read MoreEpiphany III
Storytelling . . .
In 2001, as I was working my way through doctoral courses in Religion, Psychology and Culture at Vanderbilt, I read pastoral theologian, Andy Lester’s book, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that book he articulates several important ideas including the notion of “future stories.” The stories we tell ourselves about the future can have as much impact on us in the present as do all the stories we tell about our pasts.
For instance right now I’m carrying around a host of future stories about everything from what time I’ll turn out the lights tonight to what movie I might see this weekend, to where I’ll be teaching and what I will be researching 20 years from now. The power of future stories seems obvious when you try it on. But it is a significant challenge to the psychological traditions which mostly focus on the past as the main or only key to understanding personal identity or behavior in the present.
Read MoreChristmas II
Pastors don’t pray much it seems. They are busy. But they are not filling their time with prayer, meditation or personal devotion. At least a study that came out this week says this is the case. Seems to me that more than families are likely hurting if pastoral leaders are spending so little time attending to their own spiritual lives. But lest I sound too judgmental, I remember well the struggle to care for my own spiritual well-being while also attending to the spiritual well-being of those I served in the years when I was full-time on a church staff. Even when I was doing what I knew to do to care for my own soul, it was not always the most effective or spiritually nourishing thing I could be doing.
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