013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin

016 Should I Take This Shortcut? | Founder, President & CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life Michael Wear

Michael Wear had a clear vision for the Center for Christianity and Public Life: deep formation work, deep investment in cohorts of twelve to sixteen fellows, commitments measured in years. Some potential funders kept pointing to cheaper models. Other organizations were reaching thousands for less. The constant temptation was to take a shortcut, starting with something splashy and backfill the real work later. Michael kept asking one question: a shortcut to what? A shortcut would have built something else entirely. He launched in October 2022 without a full year's budget, watching financial thresholds with the runway ahead quickly running out. His first hire came on two weeks before launch. He talks about what it took to know the moment was right: a board that embodied the mission rather than just orbiting it, the intuition that comes from knowing something inside out,  the pressure of asking someone else to divert their career to join you in something unproven, and and why he framed CCPL as a 30-year mission from day one. Michael Wear is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan institution dedicated to the formation of Christians for the sake of public life. CCPL's flagship Public Life Fellowship Program is now in its fourth year. He previously served in the White House directing faith outreach and writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

015 The Path of Humiliation | Harrison Center for the Arts Exec. Director Joanna Taft

Joanna Taft proposed starting a charter high school out of the arts nonprofit she was leading. She had no background in education.  Her artists were leaving Indianapolis because nobody was buying their work, and she decided the fix was to grow a new generation of art patrons. (Talk about a long-term vision…) She raised the idea to a city commission expecting someone else to run with it. They just looked back at her, waiting for her to take it on. But right after the hearing, a board member pulled her aside and told her she was not the person to lead this school, and asked her to step down from the new initiative. However, nobody else would take her place. So she got to work.  Joanna says her biggest fear is humiliation, and her specialty is starting things she knows nothing about. Sounds like a lot of fun, right?  But that willingness to go forward through her fear keeps doing great things. It built an art center inside a near-empty church. It launched the charter school, now with more than 3,000 graduates. It also conceived of a neighborhood cultural preservation museum and opened in only fourteen months, using assemblage art and augmented reality she had never worked with before.  Joanna describes the only thing she believes she knows how to do: weave other people's ideas into something worth caring about, something fundable and sustainable.  Joanna Taft is the Founder and Executive Director of the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, housed in the city's oldest Presbyterian church building. She has lived four blocks from the Center for nearly 40 years.

014 The Decision After the Decision | World Relief President & CEO Myal Greene

Myal Greene inherited an organization with a mission statement that everyone loved. World Relief had run on that mission statement for fifteen years. Internal staff admired it. External donors knew it. Myal knew it needed to change anyway. This conversation is about the eighteen-month, discerning, board-engaged process. Myal walks through how the decision surfaced during strategic planning, why he never saw himself as the decision maker but as the person facilitating the board toward a good decision, and how he handled staff who were terrified of the process. But while Myal thought he was deciding about a mission statement, he was actually making the decision after the decision. A single upstream choice forces a cascade of downstream effects not fully grasped. Strategy. How the organization raises money. Who it hires. How it allocates capital. Years later, World Relief is still living into the consequences. We also talk about hiring for culture addition rather than culture fit, and why Myal considers capital allocation the most underrated decision a nonprofit CEO makes. Myal Greene is President and CEO of World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization founded 80 years ago that works around the world and across the US as one of the major refugee resettlement agencies. He spent fourteen years at the organization before stepping into the CEO role five years ago.

013 Please Don't Let Me Break This! | Christianity Today President & CEO Nicole Martin

Nicole Martin is five and a half months into leading Christianity Today. The prayer she keeps coming back to: "God, please don't let me break this!" She began leading a 70-year-old organization founded by Billy Graham, and found it trying to be five things at once on one budget with one team. It was a philanthropy, a media company, an investigative journalism outfit, an external presence for the church, and a pastor. Something had to give. In her second month, she gathered her leaders and wrestled for hours with one key question: What are we?  The answer redefined the budget, the editorial direction, and the culture. And it meant admitting the organization is one thing, and it is not the other four. This conversation is about inheriting something significant and then reshaping it without destroying it. Nicole talks about the daily discipline of building a new culture inside a legacy institution. Rev. Dr. Nicole Martin is President and CEO of Christianity Today. CT reaches 41 million people annually through its journalism, podcasts, and publications, with a third of its audience outside English-speaking contexts.

012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken

Phil Ryken had believed for years that Wheaton College's signature orientation program should be required for every new student. The research was there, and he saw what it could mean for Wheaton.  But that meant scaling a high-connection, immersion program from 200 students to 550 in a single year. And that, in turn, meant recruiting 45 additional faculty members, asking them to give up two weeks of August and solving problems that didn't have easy answers. And yet, Phil made the change. This conversation covers what COVID made possible, what he did with criticism about moving too fast, and how he and his wife rode bicycles all over the city to meet up with students at a key time.  Phil also talks about where the hardest decisions arise, what he wishes someone had told him before he became president, and one piece of conventional leadership wisdom he quietly ignores. Dr. Philip Ryken is President of Wheaton College in Illinois, a Christian liberal arts institution with $206 million in revenue in 2024.