Igniting Imagination

In these five episodes of Season 5, we’ll be meeting stunning spiritual entrepreneurs who are making a profound impact as they follow God’s call on their lives. They are the recipients of the 2022 Locke Innovative Leader Award.  To help us set the stage for these conversations, we begin with Brian McLaren! In book after book (his newest book Do I Stay Christian? comes out in May… we talk about it!...

Season 5 of Igniting Imagination is coming soon! Host Lisa Greenwood and co-host Matt Russell talk about spiritual entrepreneurship and innovative ministry with author, activist, and public theologian Brian McLaren and our four 2022 Locke Innovative Leaders. Listen to this short trailer for a glimpse of our conversations with courageous leaders sharing their powerful, inspiring stories. If you lik...

In our final episode for the season, Mandy McDow, pastor of Los Angeles First UMC, shares the story of LA First who razed their building in 2002. Yep. No building. That reality forces a posture of constant discernment: God, what is the difference you would have us make in this neighborhood in this season? Theirs is not a tidy, perfect story. It’s messy and real and very much in process. We hope it...

“What does ‘Distributing Power’ look like for a congregation?” is a frequent question we get about our fourth adaptive muscle. Now we can say: listen to this interview with Mike Mather! Mike helps us make the connection between distributing power and abundance. When Mike and his congregation started actually living out their beliefs that everyone (both inside and outside of the church) has gifts,...

Adam Barlow-Thompson, co-founder of The Neighboring Movement, wants us to meet our actual neighbors. While that may seem like a simple idea, research (and perhaps experience) shows us that few of us truly engage our neighbors. Adam invites us to move from the theoretical ‘love your neighbor’ to the literal: meet your neighbors in the eight houses or apartments around you and discover the gifts God...

Most of us can readily identify with having a love-hate relationship with the Institution of the Church. Gil Rendle’s latest paper, Jacob’s Bones: On the Church’s Institutional Future, addresses our ambivalence head-on and offers a distinction that is a gamechanger. He states, “Institutions are not organizations that house values. Institutions are values and disciplines that need organizations to...

One big takeaway about the Five Muscles (Grieving Well, Discerning Purpose, Walking Alongside, Distributing Power, Expanding Imagination) is that they are all connected. Shannon Hopkins, co-founder and lead cultivator of RootedGood, profoundly understands that grieving well makes discerning purpose and expanding imagination possible. Shannon shares the origin story of her organization RootedGood....

Vice President of Leadership Ministry and host Rev. Lisa Greenwood welcomes guests Rev. Rachel Billups and Rev. Matt Rawle to discuss disruptive trends impacting churches. Drawing from recent articles about 2022 trends by Carey Nieuwhof, Joe Park, and Thom Rainer, the three discuss how multi-access is here to stay, the shift to more decentralized power, the role of authority, giving permission to...

The fifth and final muscle the church needs to strengthen in order to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now is Expanding Imagination. Dr. Amy Oden teaches theology, the history of Christianity and spiritual formation. Her ability to combine deep theological thought with spiritual practice and bring ancient wisdom to inform contemporary life is not just relevant…her work is truly revelatory for th...

The fourth of five muscles the church needs to strengthen in order to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now is Distributing Power. Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University. He has spent the last two decades addressing the relation of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in...

The third of five muscles the church needs to strengthen in order to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now is Walking Alongside or Neighboring. Coté Soerens is the owner and midwife of Resistencia Coffee shop in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. She is also the co-founder of Cultivate South Park, a non-profit that lends infrastructure to neighborhood community development projec...

The second of five muscles the church needs to strengthen in order to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now is Discerning Purpose. Susan Beaumont is well known for her groundbreaking work in organizational leadership dynamics. She is a consultant, coach, author, spiritual director, and an ordained minister within the American Baptist Churches. She has worked with hundreds of congregations and den...

The first of five muscles the church needs to strengthen in order to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now is Grieving Well. Suzanne Stabile is well known as an expert on the Enneagram. This past year, she has done extensive work on grief and the Enneagram because she believes grieving in real time is so important in our world today. Suzanne offers us remarkable insights through this in-depth int...

You’re listening to Igniting Imagination, a podcast to spark the spirit within you from Wesleyan Investive and Texas Methodist Foundation. This season, we are sharing conversations about the five adaptive muscles the church must strengthen to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now. For more information about these muscles, visit tmf-fdn.org/leadership-ministry . TMF’s Leadership Ministry team had...

You’re listening to Igniting Imagination, a podcast to spark the spirit within you from Wesleyan Investive and Texas Methodist Foundation. This season, we are sharing conversations about the five adaptive muscles the church must strengthen to be fit, agile, and ready for God’s now. For more information about these muscles, visit tmf-fdn.org/leadership-ministry . “God Has Work for Us To Do” music a...

Co-hosts Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile talk with Emmanuel Andre, 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner. Emmanuel prefers to be known as a “Community Defender” instead of a “Defense Attorney,” which says a lot about his approach to his work both inside and outside the courtroom. Restorative justice is more than a program. It is a way of being to Emmanuel, who believes transformation is po...

Co-hosts Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile talk with DeAmon Harges, 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner. DeAmon is the original “Roving Listener” who defined the role by his posture of curiosity and his passion for discovering the gifts and talents of the people in his community. He is also the founder of The Learning Tree, a non-profit that uses the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD...

Co-hosts Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile talk with Rev. Leroy Barber, 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner. Leroy has dedicated 30 years to eradicating poverty, confronting homelessness, restoring local neighborhoods, healing racism, and living what Dr. King called “the beloved community.” Leroy is the Co-Founder of the Voices Project, which gathers leaders of color across fields, who pur...

Co-hosts Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile talk with Dr. Matt Russell, 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner, about what he calls the “improbable friendships'' that have enriched his life and influenced the direction of his ministry. From these improbable friendships emerged projectCURATE, a non-profit educational and social enterprise incubator that seeks to build bridges across cultural, e...

Co-hosts Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile talk with Rev. Jen Bailey, 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner, about her womanist-led Faith Matters Network, whose mission is to catalyze personal and social change by equipping community organizers, faith leaders, and activists with resources for connection, spiritual sustainability, and accompaniment. Jen, founder and executive director, discus...

Igniting Imagination is a podcast to spark the spirit within you, from Wesleyan Investive and Texas Methodist Foundation. This season, we are sharing conversations with five spiritual entrepreneurs who were awarded the 2021 Tom Locke Innovative Leader Award from the Wesleyan Investive. These five spiritual entrepreneurs share their wisdom through stories and reflections that will encourage and cha...

Rev. Liliana Padilla is the Senior Pastor of Westlawn United Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas. She has overcome many obstacles in ministry. When she was ordained in Mexico, she was prevented from pastoring a church because she was a married woman. When she came to the United States, she had to go through the ordination process again. When she went through divorce, she had to overcome the sti...

How we tell the stories of our lives and the life of our church or organization makes all the difference. Bishop Robert Schnase, Bishop of the Rio Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church, details for us how narrative connects to resilience by sharing personal stories from his time as pastor and his observations as Bishop. He shares how the stories we tell ourselves shape our capacity to mo...

What is it like to live through storm after storm...after storm? Rev. Romonica Malone-Wardley is District Superintendent of the Southeast District of the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. She has met people and congregations who have lived through one devastating storm after another. Living through a storm though doesn’t mean just surviving. Romonica shares how instead of thr...

What is needed to enlarge the capacity of pastors, congregations, annual conferences and the denomination to become more resilient, i.e. to absorb change and retain its integrity and purpose? We pose that very deep and difficult question to Erin Hawkins, Executive Director of Connectional Ministries for the California Pacific Annual Conference and Bishop Cynthia Harvey, bishop of the United Method...