Over the years, the ON community has been blessed by interactions and collaborations with all kinds of great scholars and leaders from a wide variety of fields. Their lives and their fields are as busy and ever-changing as ours! Here are a few updates on what some Friends of the ON are up to:
Lisa Slayton: New Blog at Tamim Partners
Lisa Slayton is well known in the faith and work movement from her decades of work in Pittsburgh, helping form godly leaders for the church and the world. ON readers may recall her striking comment during Karam Forum 2017 on the crisis of discipleship – that we have too many pastors who are not disciples of Jesus Christ. She’ll be headlining a session at Karam Forum 2020 on Discipling People in the New Economy (register now for the early bird price!).
Lisa has recently launched the consultancy Tamim Partners, and with it a new blog: The Wholeness Journey. The blog kicked off with an insightful series on Myths and Truths of Calling and is now in the middle of a series on Living in a VUCA World – a new world that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. The consultancy helps organizations and leaders learn how to work and lead more effectively in this new environment.
Christopher Brooks: New Pastorate at Woodside Bible Church
Christopher Brooks has been an important contributor to the ON community over the years. We asked him to give the opening after-dinner address at our 2014 faculty retreat; he spoke on The Church and Economic Renewal. These thoughts and more were distilled into his 2015 Economic Wisdom Project Talk Rethinking Urban Poverty, one of our very first EWP Talks and still one of the most urgent for our times. Chris went on to take that message to the 2016 Faith at Work Summit. Chris was also a session host at the inaugural Karam Forum in 2017.
This May, after many years as the lead pastor at Evangel Ministries, Chris became senior pastor of Woodside Bible Church. From this post he continues his leadership bringing the gospel and fresh approaches to poverty to the Detroit community. And those of you who were with us in 2014 and recall his humorous comments about having just had his first daughter might like to see how she’s doing!
John Inazu: New Initiative at The Carver Project
John Inazu, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference. The book offers a masterful survey of the difficult issues involved in building a society where Christians and others live together, both from the point of view of secular law and from the point of view of the church’s mission. John shared his insights with us in workshops at the 2017 ON faculty retreat.
Later that year, John started The Carver Project, which works to cultivate Christian leaders at Washington University. It began as an interdisciplinary faculty fellowship; in 2018, the project had its first public event, featuring Tim Keller and Lacrae, on “Christian witness in a fractured age.” Its 2019 event, on “art and the divided church,” featured Mako Fujimura and Sho Baraka. Next year’s event, on “forgiveness, justice and reconciliation,” will feature Rachael Denhollander and Dominique Gilliard. The project also sponsors faculty reading groups, mentoring relationships and cultivation of future Christian faculty.
