Leadership Institute
About the Leadership Institute
Organizational Leadership
The Church & Society
Educational Leadership: The Bishop as Teacher
Spirituality & Personal Growth
Spirituality & Personal Growth
The College for Bishops Leadership Institute was established to provide educational resources for new bishops as well as trending informational resources for all bishops. Spirituality & Personal Growth focuses on specific resources such as:
New items are added monthly. To comment on current items or suggest additional topics and/or resources, please use the feedback form at the bottom of this page.
Devotions & Personal Study
Reconciliation is Spiritual Formation
Each of us is forming and being formed by a multitude of institutions at once: our family, our community, our faith community, our educational institutions, our place of work, our local, state, and national government. An important task of the maturing person is to seek understanding of how the various institutions we are a part of have shaped us—both in their unique gifts and in their unique brokenness. Whether we are to be blamed or not, there is always an invitation to take responsibility for transforming the institutions we are a part of into reconciling communities.
Walking Through Closed Doors This Easter--The Resurrection of the Body
All that our physical presence means to being community, to being the body of Christ, has been radically altered in the past year. Even one-on-one relationships have changed in subtle ways as we keep 6 feet apart and flap our arms to symbolize cheerful hugs. This Easter, perhaps like never before, we need to name and reaffirm the embodied nature of our lives and of our resurrection faith.
The Longest Year: Reflections on 2020
Philip Yancey offered this review of the past pandemic year in Comment Magazine, focusing on the new realities of community life, lessons learned in quarantine, and a template of Gospel hope for the new year ahead.
Small Apocalypses
Living apocalyptically is living with both urgency and hope. There is work to be done. Lives and institutions can collapse if no one is there to offer some wisdom, generosity, and courage. But we are not alone, and our allies are not merely flesh and blood. We can approach real and tremendous challenges with a confidence born of eschatological hope.
Uncertainty: The Beauty and Bedrock of Statistics
In these uncertain times, we imagine we would be stronger if we just knew for certain what lies ahead. We just want the answer, without a wait, without a confidence interval. We want the truth: truth without grace—no “grace period” for learning, no “grace interval” for uncertainty. And yet, as we search the Scriptures, we find precious little support for this kind of obsessive quest.
We Had Hoped: An Easter Faith in a Time of Lament
Where are hope and faith when we sense so powerfully the gap between what we cannot see and what we are seeing? Perhaps Luke’s Gospel offers companions for this dissonance and grief in the account of Cleopas and his unnamed companion on the Emmaus road.
an antiracist reading list
Many helpful antiracist reading lists have been published recently but perhaps one of the best was curated by Ibram X Kendi and published last year in the New York Times. As Kendi writes in the introduction: “Think of it as a stepladder to antiracism, each step addressing a different stage of the journey toward destroying racism’s insidious hold on all of us.”
the path to ending systemic racism in the us
Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, Rashad Robinson, Dr. Bernice King and Anthony D. Romero discuss dismantling the systems of oppression and racism responsible for tragedies like the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and far too many others -- and explore how the US can start to live up to its ideals. (This discussion, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was recorded on June 3, 2020.)
jesus is a jew
The Jerusalem lens gives us one way of seeing Jesus, but in one important way the Jerusalem lens is different from all the other lenses. It is the one on which all the other lenses depend because it is the prism within which the historical Jesus lived his actual life. It is the lens all of Jesus’s disciples used to see Jesus because they were Jews encountering another Jew. David Brooks offers this perspective on the historical Jesus.
The End of Empathy
Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind. The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your "enemies," but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That's practically a taboo. And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.
Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction
Hidden away in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer may be found a small masterpiece of pastoral theology called "A Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or in Conscience." The prayer is a kind of exploded collect—longer and more complex than is typical. This prayer has not achieved a prominent place in the Anglican tradition, but it contains great wisdom and comfort for our present day.
How the Poor Became Blessed
Greco-Roman gods had no interest in the poor nor was organized charity considered a religious duty. How was caring for the poor treated differently in the Torah? What accounts for the difference between Greco-Roman and Jewish/Christian approaches to the care of the poor? Was Christianity different and what led to this distinction?
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
Second-mountain people lead us toward a culture that puts relationships at the center. They ask us to measure our lives by the quality of our attachments, to see that life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one. They ask us to see others at their full depths, and not just as a stereotype, and to have the courage to lead with vulnerability. In this article from The New York Times, David Brooks tells how second-mountain people are leading us into a new culture.
Choosing Church
At a time when church attendance is declining in many parts of the world, there are indeed many depressing real reasons why some choose to avoid church. However, as Marilyn McEntyre outlines in this article from Comment Magazine, the list of reasons to choose church is longer, more interesting, and ultimately more compelling.
The Necessity of Community
What can churches and Christian communities offer to today’s society that is so defined by isolation and alienation? What they can offer is a form of community that isn’t available anywhere else and that doesn’t necessarily take the same forms that community took in eras when more people got married, more people had families, and you could rely on those kinship networks as the basis of community. In a world where you have lots of divorced sixty-seven-year-olds who have one kid who lives halfway across the country, you need communities that are ready to welcome people and take them in and build communities around something other than the nuclear family.
The Pastor as Theologian
The tasks of today’s ministers are manifold and often study is lost in the minutia of ministry. Still, a commitment to study deepens our preaching, gives us a wider perspective on God’s presence in the world, and enables us to more creatively respond to the questions of seekers as well as congregants.