VISIONARIES & Jony Ivy left Apple to “the accountants” because of Apple’s bloated organizational structure. Does your church plant, ministry or school suffer from this malady too? Here’s one way to cure it.

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: Tacticians, those who crunch the numbers and analyze feasibility, are necessary on your team. But when they start to stonewall the team and their decisions – then the visionaries will leave.

The end result is that the tacticians slowly constrain and contract the organization until it’s less healthy and eventually marginalized. Read this article in The New York Times to understand how this organizational atrophy attacked Apple.

Why Jony Ive Left Apple to the ‘Accountants’
by Tripp Mickle, The New York Times, 5/1/22

It was 2014, and Apple’s future, more than ever, seemed to hinge on Mr. Ive. His love of pure, simple lines had already redrawn the world through such popular products as the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Now, he was seated at a conference table with Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, the two men embodying nearly 40 years of collaboration, with one designing and the other assembling the devices that turned a failing business into the world’s largest company. They both wanted another hit, but Mr. Ive was pushing for a product reveal more audacious than any in the theatrical company’s history.

… With time, his (Jony Ivy) grievances would grow. In the wake of Mr. Jobs’s death, colleagues said, Mr. Ive fumed about corporate bloat, chafed at Mr. Cook’s egalitarian structure, lamented the rise of operational leaders and struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.

Disillusioned with Mr. Cook’s Apple, Mr. Ive would depart five years later, in 2019. His exit would change forever the balance of power at the top of a company long defined by its product ingenuity, leaving it without one of its most creative thinkers and the driving force behind its last new device category.

Today, Apple boasts a market value of $2.57 trillion and a lineup of legacy products that have helped it preserve its perch as America’s largest public company. In Mr. Ive’s absence, Mr. Cook has accelerated a shift in strategy that has made the company better known for offering TV shows and a credit card than introducing the kind of revolutionary new devices that once defined it.

ONE WAY & Robert Jeffress on the Exclusivity of Jesus

by Matthew Haag, New York Times, 4/18/18.

Mr. Jeffress, who leads one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the country, suggested in a 2010 interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network that some churches might shy away from saying “anything that’s going to offend people” to try to grow their congregations. He made it clear he was going to preach what he believes the Bible says.

He added: “Judaism — you can’t be saved being a Jew. You know who said that, by the way? The three greatest Jews in the New Testament: Peter, Paul and Jesus Christ. They all said Judaism won’t do it. It’s faith in Jesus Christ.”

In the past decade, Mr. Jeffress has assumed a prominent role in conservative politics, appearing frequently on Fox News and urging in sermons and on television to elect a Christian as president. Non-Christian religions are sending their followers to hell, he preached in a September 2008 sermon.

“Not only do religions like Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism — not only do they lead people away from the true God, they lead people to an eternity of separation from God in hell,” Mr. Jeffress said. “Hell is going to be filled with good religious people who have rejected the truth of Christ.”

COMMUNICATION & Researchers find it’s getting harder to talk about God #NewYorkTimes

by Jonathan Merritt, New York Times, 10/21/18.

More than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to them. An overwhelming majority of people now say they don’t feel comfortable speaking about faith, most of the time.

… More than one-fifth of respondents admit they have not had a spiritual conversation at all in the past year. Six in 10 say they had a spiritual conversation only on rare occasions — either “once or twice” (29 percent) or “several times” (29 percent) in the past year. A paltry 7 percent of Americans say they talk about spiritual matters regularly.

But here’s the real shocker: Practicing Christians who attend church regularly aren’t faring much better. A mere 13 percent had a spiritual conversation once a week.

…According to my survey, a range of internal conflicts is driving Americans from God-talk. Some said these types of conversations create tension or arguments (28 percent); others feel put off by how religion has been politicized (17 percent); others report not wanting to appear religious (7 percent), sound weird (6 percent) or seem extremist (5 percent). Whatever the reason, for most of us in this majority-Christian nation, our conversations almost never address the spirituality we claim is important.

… A study in the Journal of Positive Psychology analyzed 50 terms associated with moral virtue. Language about the virtues Christians call the fruit of the spirit — words like “love,” “patience,” “gentleness” and “faithfulness” — has become much rarer. Humility words, like “modesty,” fell 52 percent. Compassion words, like “kindness,” dropped by 56 percent. Gratitude words, like “thankfulness,” declined 49 percent.

A decline in religious language and a decrease in spiritual conversation does not necessarily mean that we are in crisis, of course. But when you combine the data about the decline in religious rhetoric with an emerging body of research that reveals how much our linguistic landscape both reflects and affects our views, it provides ample cause for alarm.

Read more in the Dallas News reprint of the New York Times article here … https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/10/21/getting-harder-talk-god

STRANGE BUT TRUE & Most Americans choose a political party before choosing whether to join a religious community or how often to attend religious services. #NewYorkTimes

“When Politicians Determine Your Religious Beliefs” by Michele Margolis, New York Times, 7/11/18.

Michele Margolis is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.”

… a key fact: Most Americans choose a political party before choosing whether to join a religious community or how often to attend religious services.

Faith often becomes a peripheral concern in adolescence and young adulthood — precisely the years when we tend to form stable partisan attachments. Religion typically becomes relevant again later, after we have children and start to think about their religious upbringings. By that time, our political views are set, ready to guide our religious values and decisions.

…I find that twentysomething Democrats and Republicans were equally secular: Most had pulled away from religion after high school, and Democrats and Republicans did so at similar rates. But nine years later, Republicans had become much more likely to attend church than their Democratic counterparts. In contrast, even those who bucked the secular trend and remained religious in their 20s were no more likely than less religious members of their cohort to join the Republican ranks in their 30s.

…In other words, those who were already Republican sought out kindred political spirits at church, while Democrats opted to spend their Sundays elsewhere.

WEALTH & Rich People Just Care Less? Yes, says research. Here’s why… #NewYorkTimes #research

“Those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power.”

by Daniel Goleman, New York Times, 10/06/2013 on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: “Rich People Just Care Less.”

…Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most.

While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work.

The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference.

Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions,

in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power.

To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

EQ IQ emotional intelligence

SEEKERS & Data That Suggests They are Turning Away from Churches for Help: Googling for God

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: This morning’s New York Times article points out that Google searches for God’s existence are up in the first half of this decade. But Google searches for churches are down 15% in the same period. Seems like seekers are turning away from our churches as a place to find help. Take notice!

Googling for God

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times, 9/18/15.

IT has been a bad decade for God, at least so far. Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. Searches questioning God’s existence are up. Many behaviors that he supposedly abhors have skyrocketed. Porn searches are up 83 percent. For heroin, it’s 32 percent.

How are the Ten Commandments doing? Not well. “Love thy neighbor” is the most common search with the word “neighbor” in it, but right behind at No. 2 is “neighbor porn.” The top Google search including the word “God” is “God of War,” a video game, with more than 700,000 searches per year. The No. 1 search that includes “how to” and “Walmart” is “how to steal from Walmart,” beating all questions related to coupons, price-matching or applying for a job…

ISLAM & Patricia Crone, Questioning Scholar of Islamic History, Dies at 70 #NYTimes

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel; “Patricia Crone was one of the most impactful historians to study the rise of Islam. To understand the beginning of this religion including the reason for its internal conflicts read this New York Times overview.”

By Sam Roberts, The New York Times, 7/22/15.

… Fred M. Donner, a professor of Near Eastern history at the University of Chicago, said Professor Crone had “made it clear that historians of early Islam had failed to really behave as historians — that is, had failed to challenge the validity of their sources, but rather had accepted complacently what I call the ‘traditional origins narrative’ created by the Islamic tradition itself.”

As a result, in books like “Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World” (1977, written with Michael Cook), she disputed assumptions that Islam had been transmitted by trade from Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, suggesting that it had been spread by conquest instead. She also identified how indigenous rural prophets in what is now Iran had defied conquering Arabs and helped shape Islamic culture, setting the stage for conflicts within Islam that endure today.

Current events frequently intruded on Professor Crone’s scholarship on historic divisions in the Middle East between secularism and Islamic orthodoxy, and between the Arab world and the West. Writing about present-day Muslims on the website openDemocracy in 2007, she said, “Wherever they look, they are being invaded by so-called Western values — in the form of giant billboards advertising self-indulgence, semi-pornographic films, liquor, pop music, fat tourists in indecent clothes and funny hats, and politicians lecturing people about the virtues of democracy…

In another essay for openDemocracy, Professor Crone focused on the Prophet Muhammad himself, writing that “we can be reasonably sure that the Quran is a collection of utterances that he made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God.” She summarized the major themes of the Quran as “God’s unity, the reality of the resurrection and judgment, and the imminence of violent punishment.”

She also wrote that Muhammad was perceived not as the founder of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament tradition, hailing the coming of a messiah. His success, she argued, “had something to do with the fact that he preached both state formation and conquest: Without conquest, first in Arabia and next in the Fertile Crescent, the unification of Arabia would not have been achieved.”

Her other books include “God’s Rule: Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought” (2004) and “The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran” (2012), which detailed the historical precedents for local rebels defying the ruling elite…

BIGOTRY & Love and Terror in the Black Church #NYTimes

by Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times, 6/20/15.

At the sprawling Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas one day last spring, I was met by five men with earpieces who escorted me to the pastor’s office. As I prepared to preach that morning, a rolling phalanx of bodyguards shadowed my every move — when I greeted parishioners in the church’s spacious narthex and even as I made a stop at the men’s room. We walked from the church study into the 4,200-seat sanctuary, the security team whispering into their wrists.

I was entering a sanctuary, a sacred space to speak the word of the Lord and to lift the spirits of God’s people. But I was also entering a black church, a site of particular power in this country, and a site of unspeakable terror.

That is what the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., became on Wednesday, when a young white male wielding a .45-caliber handgun unloaded his rage on nine souls, and that is why for the foreseeable future we will enter our houses of worship wary of violence.

Sites and spaces of black life have come under attack from racist forces before, but the black church is a unique target. It is not just where black people gather.

In too many other places, black self-worth is bludgeoned by bigotry or hijacked by self-hatred: that our culture is too dumb, our lives too worthless, to warrant the effort to combat our enemies. The black sanctuary breathes in black humanity while the pulpit exhales unapologetic black love.

For decades, these sites of love have been magnets for hate…

GENERATION Z & A younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority #NYTimes

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, May 17, 2012, New York Times.

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.

While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”

CHURCH PLANTERS & What Do We Give Up When We Become Freedom-Seeking Entrepreneurs & Church Planters? A Lot, Actually.

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: “David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald in their classic research paper titled ‘What Makes an Entrepreneur?,’ discovered that: ‘The probability of self-employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift.’ This research needs to be applied to church planters, but seems to forecast that successful church planters may have a member of the family that is gainfully employed and able to support the family so the church planter does not have to. For more details see the link to Blanchflower and Oswald’s paper as well as this overview in the New York Times.”

PRIVILEGE & What White Privilege Means by Professor Naomi Zack #UnivOfOregon #NewYorkTimes #ReMIXbook

An interview by George Yancy, New York Times, 11/5/14

“Middle-class and poor blacks in the United States do less well than whites with the same income on many measures of human well-being: educational attainment, family wealth, employment, health, longevity, infant mortality. You would think that in a democracy, people in such circumstances would vote for political representatives on all levels of government who would be their advocates. But the United States, along with other rich Western consumer societies, has lost its active electorate (for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here). So when something goes wrong, when a blatant race-related injustice occurs, people get involved in whatever political action is accessible to them…

People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate. The death of Michael Brown, like the death of Trayvon Martin before him and the death of Oscar Grant before him, may be but the tip of an iceberg…

Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries. What’s happening now in Ferguson is the crystallization of our grief…

CONFLICT & Learning to Love Criticism #NewYorkTimes

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: “Research cited in this article points out that women leaders receive more criticism than men, and that the criticism is often unfairly directed toward their personality traits. This article offers helpful ways for everyone to handle unfair criticism.”

TRENDS & Church Is More Informal, Like Society, Study Finds #NationalCongregationsSurvey #NYTimes

by Michael Paulson, New York Times, 9/11/14

A new study — the latest version of a regularly conducted survey of American congregations — finds that houses of worship, like the broader culture, are becoming increasingly informal, and increasingly open to gay men and lesbians. More and more Americans worship in congregations where drums are played, words or images are projected on screens, and praise is expressed via upstretched hands. And more and more congregations, although still a minority, allow gays to hold volunteer positions as leaders.

“Congregations are embedded in our culture and our society, and they are reflecting both the trends, but also the divisions and the conflicts,” said Mark Chaves, the director of the study and a professor of sociology, religion and divinity at Duke University.

The third National Congregations Study is based on data collected in 2012 from interviews with leaders of 1,331 congregations: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and others.

The informality of congregational worship has been growing steadily since the first National Congregations Study was conducted in 1998. Forty-six percent of Americans worship in congregations where drums are played, up from 25 percent in 1998, while 56 percent are in congregations where organs are played, down from 70 percent. Fifty-nine percent of worshipers now attend services in congregations where hands are raised as an expression of praise — up from 48 percent in 1998. Choir-singing and vestment-wearing are down, while the use of visual projection equipment and the practice of jumping, shouting or dancing by worshipers is up.

“Behaviors associated with evangelical worship style are ticking up, and there is a shift of people to large churches where this is more common,” Mr. Chaves said.

POST-CHRISTENDOM & An Afterlife for Europe’s Disused Places of Worship #NYTimes

by Celestine Bohlen, New York Times, 6/2/14

“… Perhaps nowhere is the plight of churches more stark than in the Netherlands, where about 1,000 Catholic churches — about two-thirds of the country’s total — are due to be shut down by 2025, a reorganization forced by a steady drop in attendance, baptisms and weddings. Those were the figures given by Cardinal Willem Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht, in a report delivered to Pope Francis last December.

This trend is building up to an ‘immense tsunami,’ said Ms. Grootswagers, council secretary for the Future for Religious Heritage. ‘Every day, there is a story in the papers about another church closing. Before, it was kept quiet. Now they are saying it in the open.’

From Italy to Estonia, communities are scrambling to find ways to save oft-beloved buildings from destruction, neglect, and in some cases the ravages of mass tourism. The status of religious buildings varies widely. In France, churches built before 1905 mostly belong to the municipalities. In Britain, most belong to the Church of England.”

SPECIAL NEEDS & Talking to Children About Their Disabilities, With Metaphors and Minecraft #NYTimes

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: “Physically challenged people comprise one of the most underserved cultures of our faith communities. This article gives practical ideas regarding how to welcome them into our Christian fellowship and lives. Ministry to these individuals and their support networks is a critical cultural outreach that the church must face head on.”

by Sarah Wheeler, 5/13/14

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