Why congregations may be one of our best answers to the convenience trap. Julie Beck has a new piece in The Atlantic, “One Reason People Are Spending So Much Time Alone”, that puts a name to something I see in almost every community we work with. Beck is reviewing Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience. She takes a phrase that has been going around social media, “inconvenience is the cost of community,” and flips it: community is often the cost of convenience. Convenien

We live in a culture mesmerized by technology. Early days with the wheel or the printing press. Today it is robots, artificial intelligence, online everything. We were forewarned by 1950’s folklore that President Eisenhower, invited to ask a question of an early Univac mainframe computer, asked, “Is there a God?” After some reflection, the computer answered, “There is now.” Today’s attention goes to artificial intelligence (AI), which is beyond anything we might have imagined

The failure of a project can begin long before the money runs out. It can begin when people arrive in a community with a solution, a budget and a set of outcomes, but no relationship with the people whose lives the project is meant to change. For Ina Walter, it began years ago at a coffee-farming training meant to improve livelihoods. The room was filled with older male landowners. But Walter had already noticed that women and younger people were doing much of the work in the