Podcast

When preparing to lay the brick and mortar for a new business facility, the engineers and architects make sure the foundation is structurally secure. But when FONA International built its headquarters in Geneva, Illinois, founder Joe Slawek added a beautifully literal foundation: before the concrete was poured, employees placed Bibles beneath the floors of key […]

For many driven professionals, the cultural prescription for career success is simple: push harder, move faster, and accumulate more. We wrap our identities in our productivity, white-knuckling our way through demanding schedules until we find ourselves completely trapped in a toxic cycle of exhaustion.   Alissa Crouse knew this reality intimately. At forty years old,

Few things crush a professional ego faster than throwing your entire heart into a project, only to watch it completely flop. Chris knows that feeling! In the early days of Mission Central, he spent weeks making phone calls, sending LinkedIn messages, and pulling every relational lever he had to launch a leadership cohort, only for

How would you explain the meaning of a kiss to an alien who had never seen one?   You could describe it anatomically, of course, or define it abstractly as a symbol of romantic affection. But a kiss isn’t experienced as a mere abstraction. It doesn’t just represent love; it physically communicates and accomplishes it.

Many of us look at the word entrepreneur and picture a distinct archetype: a natural risk-taker, someone driven by economic opportunities and a lifelong dream of building an enterprise from the ground up. But what happens when the calling to build a business comes not from long-standing ambition, but from a quiet, practical necessity to

Have you ever been sitting in a church service, looked down at the bulletin to see the morning’s scripture reading, and internally gasped, “Oh no, not that passage?”   Whether it is a dense theological directive on submission, the daunting call of the Great Commission, or Jesus’ uncompromising standard for radical forgiveness, we all have

We have a habit of building beautiful, sacred structures and then assuming they will take care of themselves. In our excitement to build the “new, shiny thing,” we frequently forget the quiet, unglamorous work of taking care of what God has already entrusted to us. We build sanctuaries for worship, but we leave the deferred

Not long ago, Chris and his wife Katie—a hospice nurse practitioner—were watching an intense emergency room drama called The Pitt. In one scene, the doctors run a series of lab tests on a critical patient and one of them calls out the results: a potassium level of 12.2. Katie immediately gasped in horror. Chris, completely

If you grew up in church, you’ve likely heard about the noble woman of Proverbs 31. She is a staple of Mother’s Day sermons and home-decor plaques, usually praised for her domestic devotion and tireless care for her family. But if we look closer at the text, we find a description that sounds less like

When Chris was in the fourth grade, he traveled to Texas for a cousin’s wedding and experienced a minor ecclesiastical crisis. Having grown up in an Anglican tradition, Chris was used to robes, incense, and liturgy, and he was deeply disturbed to find the Baptist pastor at his cousin’s church wearing a simple three-piece suit.