As a woman, when I hear the expression “double-minded,” I chuckle. I wish I had only two things on my mind. When I switch off the alarm in the morning, my brain flashes at least a dozen to-dos. Two would be a piece of cake.

For the past few months I have been spending time in the book of James. I like James; I always have. I like that James is plainspoken ...

For several years now, I’ve participated in a private Facebook group for women in theology and biblical studies. The group started with some of my friends from graduate school and now has more than 450 members—professors, grad students, seminarians, and pastors. We ask pedagogical questions like “What readings should I assign in my intro theology class?” ...

My husband, Brad, was a pastor for 27 years when he resigned his pastorate to train pastors in third-world countries who would otherwise receive little or no training. He mostly goes to areas of Africa that are away from the major cities. In these small villages, a church often is started when someone has a conversion experience and realizes his or her village needs a church. ...

As a ministry speaker and part of our church’s teaching team, I still fight nerves every time I’m preparing a presentation. So I am constantly on the lookout for public speaking tips. There’s fantastic advice for the speech itself—start with a bang, use your lower register, make eye contact, use a visual aid, end with an application—but in ...

Sometimes when my family should be Norman Rockwell-ing it with old-fashioned bonding time over a board game, we are instead hovered around an Apple TV episode of “Dance Moms: Season Two.”

It is a car-crash-esque pileup of five moms watching their seven daughters cower before one dance teacher named Abby Lee Miller, who yells sporadically at everyone.

The ...

“What you are doing is not good.”

Jethro said it to Moses in Exodus 18. God said it to me at a time when I was experiencing major leadership overload. “You’re going to wear yourself out—and the people, too. This job is too heavy a burden for you to handle all by yourself” (Exodus 18:18).

Moses had lived for decades on the back side ...

When the assistant pastor called the church’s key leaders to his house for an urgent meeting, my husband and I both suspected something serious had happened. We could not have guessed just how serious. Once all 20 of us had packed into the living room, our senior pastor came in and simply said, “I have something to tell you.”

His subsequent admission ...

For the past century, and arguably longer, generations have self-identified with their own answer to this question. Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Where were you when news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, when the World Trade Center collapsed? Sadly, recent events have set up our younger generations with ...

The words mistreatment and church leader shouldn't be in the same sentence, but unfortunately sometimes they are. The fact is, many people on staff, as well as members of the church, are mistreated by their leaders.

My husband and I were mistreated by our pastor, and we witnessed his mistreatment of others. In a leadership meeting one evening the senior pastor embarrassingly ...