I worked in Campus Ministry for 15 years. It is a place of "hellos" and "goodbyes", due to students coming and going every few months. This constant shifting landscape helped me better understand how to plan for anticipated change. This vision, anticipation, and planning made me a more proactive leader.

To my fellow Catholics - I get it. You are frustrated by too few good and strong leaders.  You want real renewal and changes that should have happened long ago.  You want piety and reverence, because it seems

I love my own free will, and hate everyone else’s. If only my wife, kids, and everyone else would do what I want, then the world would be perfect, wouldn’t it? We all think like this sometimes. As a father of five children, I sometimes base my happiness on ...

The National Eucharistic Revival is "a movement to restore understanding and devotion to this great mystery here in the United States by helping us renew our worship of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist." This multi-year movement needs your support. Here are six reasons why.

Twice as many people die of drug overdoses in the USA than car crashes. We have entered an age when more than 100,000 people a year are dying from overdoses, mainly driven by the growth of opioid addictions. It is expected that in the next 10 years...

Nobody intentionally welcomed us in. Nobody reached out to us. Nobody initiated a relationship with us. We tried to get our foot in the door and were pushed out. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience for those trying to crack into a new Catholic parish. Even so...

Take a moment to answer these questions on Catholic discipleship. I recommend you write your answers down, before you move on to read the answers.

In the times of the Bible, one of the worst disasters that could befall someone was to be barren (infertile) physically. In fact, it is a major theme of Scripture, to see how someone (or a couple) who was once infertile, has had their situation changed by God and has now gained their fertility. In each reference to infertility, in Scripture...

One of the realities of modern society is that we politicize nearly everything, including the Catholic Church. It seems we can’t approach any issue, have a conversation, or even think about reality itself without it all being invaded by political divides, arguments, and issues.

Who or what has true spiritual authority over you? Not mere power, but authority?  For the sake of this argument we will assume that power and authority are related, but distinct. So, let us define them as:

For years I ran the day to day operations of a large campus ministry staff of over 50 people. At the time, we were widely considered one of the best examples of campus ministry in the world and had huge metrics, by any measure you could make. Yet, we knew that our past successes were no gaurantee of future ones. So, during one staff meeting I asked a “what if” question that changed...

The leading voices in Catholic leadership circles tell us the things we need to do in order to start parish renewal (I do this as well, as this blog so clearly demonstrates). But, what parishes STOP doing is sometimes MORE important, because...

The reality of most Catholic parishes - we are stuck in a culture of comfort, ease, status quo, and administration of the decline of our numbers - will not be easy to change. No one program, event, new idea, tweeking of old ways, conference, gimmick, or online video series will change our parishes. Rather, it takes...

If we made a list of commonly used Catholic buzzwords, then we have to put “accompaniment” near the top. It is used in a lot of different ways and many of them don’t really do much to help us understand what the Church teaches, but...

Many Catholics traditionally do something like give up a favorite food, watch less TV, etc. for Lent. These are good ideas, but below are some more unique ones that we have crowd-sourced.

For several years I was part of a group of Catholic leaders who helped shape and lead a week-long campus ministry formation program every summer. We had funding from a large Catholic foundation and were officially a project of the US Bishops (USCCB). At the end of the week, we gave each participant an official certificate stating they completed the formation program and then...

Many of the Old Testament prophets could be called reluctant in fulfilling their calling. I understand the feeling. I have the charism of prophecy myself and certainly don’t always like using the gift. To explain a bit better, I need to back up and fill in some blanks, before I launch into this post, which I am reluctant to make public.

Yes, it is a provocative statement - the American dream has killed Catholic discipleship. But, I not only believe the argument bears consideration, but that we will never truly win the nation to Jesus until we jettison the idea that Catholicism and American idealism are 100% compatible.

If you have been Catholic long enough, you have seen the Catholic version of the military draft that many parishes enact annually. Before or after Mass, someone gets up for the announcements and tells the parish that...

The more I listen to the experiences of Catholics, the more I get the sense that we are facing a quiet epidemic of loneliness.