Igniting Imagination

Rev. Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean reminds us in her new book,  Innovating for Love,  that we don’t create new things for the sake of change, for innovation’s sake, but rather so that we can love better. We are always finding new ways to love our neighbors in the ways Jesus calls us to love. Carlos Huerta, the Executive Director of the Center for Community Transformation in Fresno, certainl...

Pastah J, as his friends and parishioners affectionately call him, is a remarkable testament to the notion that innovating is what happens when you love the people you are with. We often make innovation out to be the next, big, creative, tech, cool thing when really it's about figuring out how to love our neighbors better and how to more deeply and faithfully root ourselves in Jesus' call. It's mi...

Our Locke Innovative Leaders offer a powerful picture of what is possible for the church. They don’t just see a need, they see great potential that exists in that need, and they respond with the next faithful step, always gathering others to help create and build. It’s remarkably consistent. Moy Mendez, a pastor in Chicago and the Executive Director of the Hope Center in Blue Island, is a great ex...

We are so excited about this season of the  Igniting Imagination Podcast  as Rev. Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean and Rev. Lisa Greenwood have conversations with four exceptional, innovative faith leaders who are profoundly influencing the way we think about the church’s mission and witness. It’s stunning and inspiring! Our guest this week is Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III. Heber’s story, the story of...

Have you enjoyed Season 10 of our Igniting Imagination Podcast as much as we have?! We started with Margaret Wheatley and we are ending the season with two remarkable innovative leaders, who also happen to be part of our leadership learning and innovation team, Rev. Kathi McShane and Derrick Scott, III. If you haven’t been listening, this conversation can guide you toward the episodes that most sp...

In this week’s episode of the Igniting Imagination Podcast , we talk with professor Eric Barreto who invites us into a biblical imagination for our work together. We love how he reminds us to keep coming back to the good news of Jesus. Yes! That is what inspires us, forms us, equips and animates us! We hope this conversation gives you a new imagination for what’s possible and if it does, please sh...

Dr. Randy Woodley, professor, scholar, farmer, and indigenous American, speaks of indigenous ways of leading that seem, on the surface, to be counter-intuitive, and yet as we sit with them, we see how resonate with Jesus’ teachings they are. We are so curious what you think as you listen. What do we have to learn from indigenous cultures about leading in this season? What old patterns do we need t...

This week’s episode of Igniting Imagination is a bit of a departure for us – for the first time, our guest is a politician! Yep, State Representative James Talarico. We decided that if we are going to do a season on Facing Reality and Claiming Leadership, we ought to directly address the polarization in our country – and where better than Texas politics!?!   James Talarico, a lifelong Christi...

Rev. Dr. Dave Odom, who leads Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, works with hundreds of congregations and leaders from multiple faith traditions across the country. As such, he has a unique vantage point to view the realities of the church and what is needed for leaders today. In this week’s podcast episode, Dave shares that a new kind of support is needed for the work of ministry today – spec...

The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler is a master at facing reality and claiming leadership. In her newly released memoir, Beautiful and Terrible Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other , she weaves together what is real and messy and hard with what is true and hopeful and redemptive, reminding us that the journey of faith is inextricably all those things. In our conversation with Pastor...

If you are having conversations about innovation in the church, chances are that Andy Root’s name has come up. Writing books like, When the Church Stops Working and The Church After Innovation and The Pastor in a Secular Age , Dr. Andrew Root is leading the way in helping leaders to name and face current reality and lean into new ways of leading. What we love in Andy’s work, and it comes through i...

Our guest is Dr. Aaron Kuecker, President of Trinity Christian College in Chicago. We can’t wait for you to hear what they are doing at Trinity Christian to tend to the wellbeing of their students. It is intentional and generous and nothing short of life-changing – from their approach to the funding model to how they are protecting the mid-week “Wellbeing Wednesday.” You can’t help but think: What...

This conversation with Dr. Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief , is hope-filled, encouraging, validating, and motivating. Her insights manage to be both practical and weighty. She reminds us that we live in a mastery culture – that is, we want to be in control, have the answers, and win – which is, of course, a myth, so we are a nation (yes, a whole natio...

Jump into 2024 with a special Bonus Episode of Igniting Imagination! We have invited two of our most frequent (and beloved) guests, Rev. Rachel Billups and Rev. Matt Rawle, to engage with  Carey Nieuwhof’s list of 7 Church Trends That Will Disrupt 2024.  Matt and Rachel reflect that this year’s list seems particularly spot on. From the endangered stable church to the normative adoption o...

Read Rev. Dr. Paul Escamilla’s response to the Wheatley episode on our website here.   In this episode, you’ll hear us: Discuss of Wheatley’s unsettling insistence that we are ‘addicted to hope’ (9:19) Consider what the notion of “islands of sanity” means for local congregations (13:55) Analyze becoming vs. gaining (22:34) Interpret Wheatley’s Two Loop theory for the work of the church today...

Dr. Margaret Wheatley has greatly influenced our leadership ministry work over the past several decades. We have given her book Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Restoring Sanity, Claiming Leadership to many leaders. Meg’s foundational idea that “conversation is the currency of change” is at the heart of everything we do. The Two-Loop Theory she developed with Deborah Frieze has helped us cl...

Rev. Kathi McShane, a retired United Methodist pastor, and Rabbi Elan Babchuck, a millennial, experienced an immediate connection when they met, a Spirit connection that made them fast friends from the beginning. In this episode, they share how their friendship naturally manifested in Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire . They discuss the vision of the book, moving away from the pyramid...

The guests in this episode became friends through a common commitment to activism and social justice. Dr. Cleve V. Tinsley IV and Rev. Dr. Matt Russell became best friends both by cultivating their common ground and exploring the very real differences between their perspectives and experiences. They share how their friendship has profoundly shaped their work, their personal growth, and their lives...

The guests in this episode are ‘all in’ with the church; they are dear friends of our host, Rev. Lisa Greenwood, who also happen to be Bishops in the United Methodist Church, Bishop Laura Merrill, and Bishop Janice Huie. In their conversation the three of them explore what has been meaningful about their friendship and how their friendship has impacted their leadership for the better, throughout t...

This episode features two “besties” talking honestly and openly about their friendship of many years and how it has deeply nourished them, even though they’ve never even lived in the same state. They discuss being fully present in real friendship, giving each other accountability, compassion, love, and care. They engage with the challenges that all leaders face, especially clergy and lay leaders i...

One of God’s greatest gifts to us is friendships, especially what our guest Rev. Dr. Victoria White calls “holy friendships.” These are the friendships that not only make life more enjoyable and more creative, but they are also core to who we are and who we become. They are “mutual and sacred relationships formed in God’s love,” and they help us be who God designs us to be. She gives us permission...

In a world of surface-level connections, true friendship is a divine experience. Friendship forms us and allows us to show up as our true selves. Join us as this season as we delve into the power of sanctifying friendship.

Rev. Alisha Gordon wants black single mothers not just to survive but to thrive socially, economically, and emotionally. This vision, borne out of Alisha’s own experience as a single mother, led to the start of the Current Project, an advocacy and mission-driven organization focused on supporting the well-being of black single mothers by connecting them to the resources needed to attain and mainta...

When Rev. Tyler Sit set out to plant a church in Minneapolis in 2015, he began by listening. He walked every neighborhood in the city to listen for God’s dreams and discern where God wanted him to plant a church. He listened to neighbors over meals to hear what kind of church they would want to be a part of. What emerged was a church led by BIPOC leaders focused on eco-justice, community organizin...

“This place makes me feel human again” is a phrase often heard at Galveston Central Church from people at radically different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Being a part of the community grounds people in the truth that they belong to each other. It is not too much to say that this conversation with Rev. Michael Gienger will make you feel human again. We talk with Michael about the church’s t...