Barnabas File

I receive a daily e-mai l from   Christian History  magazine citing significant historical events from that particular date.     The magazine is part of the Christianity Today family, so you can expect a rather conservative bent to their material, but what they point out is usually very accurate.     I look at these each day and post (with some editing) on my Facebook page.     They often use the term “greatest” or “most influential” about a person, and I think those terms are always dependent on the larger context, so I usually take those out.       I am often surprised by the responses I receive on these posts. This was one of my posts last week:   May 8, 1845: The Southern Baptist Convention organizes in Augusta, Georgia, separating from the Triennial Convention in order to support the appointment of slaveholders as missionaries.   The post received 71 likes, 26 comments, and 37 shares.  Following the shares w...

Although mentoring has been practiced for generations on both informal and formal bases, the practice has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years as a means to encourage gender, racial, and socio-economic diversity in leadership of all types of organizations. In Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring , Lisa Z. Fain and Lois J. Zachary offer a three-part model for taking advantage of this process to develop leaders in contemporary settings:   Part One:  Learn Forward into Differences Part Two:  Learn from Differences Part Three:  Leverage Differences There are three key foundational ideas for this model.  First, differences can be leveraged to build successful mentoring relationships.  Second, mentoring takes intentional planning, hard work, and commitment to effective communication.  Third, the learning that comes from mentoring is a two-way street--it benefits the mentor as well as the protégé, providing le...