Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership with Ruth Haley Barton

This week Ruth welcomes Donna McIntosh, a spiritual director and hospital-trained chaplain and TC alum, to speak to the experience of when our body betrays us. Donna describes experiencing a stroke while in seminary and the primary and secondary losses that followed—health, confidence, work, reading tolerance, gait, balance, clapping, speech, and fine motor skills—along with ongoing physical challenges and the need to slow down and accept care for herself. She shares wrestling with healing expectations and blame, finishing seminary despite these challenges, and experiencing God as increasingly real and present as she “processes this every day,” finding companionship with Jesus, who also walked with a limp.


Over on Substack Ruth and Donna continue their conversation where Donna shares the most important practices that have held her in recent seasons.

 

Season 29 is titled Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body and life in the spirit, to hear stories of people who experienced their bodies as a place of encounter with God, and to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership. We will be having deep, spiritual conversations with friends of the Transforming Center about their very human experiences in their bodies and how they’ve experienced God in and throughout these experiences. We will explore God in concrete bodily realities like gender, sexuality, race, ability, aging, illness, and death, to name a few.





Mentioned in the Episode: 

Limp by Jonathan McReynolds

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Springs of Living Water from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive special bonus conversations with each of our guests. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self!

 

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With longtime friends and ministry colleagues Glenn and Margo Balsis, Ruth introduces a spiritual conversation on grief and loss. Margo and Glenn recount their daughter Kristen’s cystic fibrosis diagnosis, 28-year life, and death, and their journey with God through grief. Glenn describes the pressure to “defend God,” and the loneliness of others trying to fix their pain. Together all three reflect on marriage, debunk divorce statistics after child loss, and share the formative role of contemplative practices and Transforming Community in their grief journey. They also delve into other unexpected experiences with grief throughout their lives and how they’ve met God there.

 

Over on Substack the three continue their conversation with Margo and Glenn sharing the practices that have been helpful and sustaining to them in their journeys with grief.

 

Season 29 is titled Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body and life in the spirit, to hear stories of people who experienced their bodies as a place of encounter with God, and to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership. We will be having deep, spiritual conversations with friends of the Transforming Center about their very human experiences in their bodies and how they’ve experienced God in and throughout these experiences. We will explore God in concrete bodily realities like gender, sexuality, race, ability, aging, illness, and death, to name a few.





Mentioned in the Episode: 

 How Can So Many Pastors and Leaders Be Godly and Dysfunctional at the Same Time? By Todd Wilson 

The Guest House by Rumi (poem)

Pilgrimage Through Loss by Linda Lawrence Hunt

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Tender Moment from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive special bonus conversations with each of our guests. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self!

 

*this post contains affiliate links

Welcome back for our twenty-ninth season of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast. This season is years in the making. We’ve long wanted to bring a season full of Spirit-directed conversations on the experience of being human, in all its complicated glory, but the timing was never quite right. And now, it’s finally here: Season 29 | Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body and life in the spirit, to hear stories of people who experienced their bodies as a place of encounter with God, and to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership. We will be having deep, spiritual conversations with friends of the Transforming Center about their very human experiences in their bodies and how they’ve experienced God in and throughout these experiences. We will explore God in concrete bodily realities like gender, sexuality, race, ability, aging, illness, and death, to name a few.

 

In this first episode Ruth helps to set up our upcoming season, laying down the biblical and foundational groundwork for embodied spirituality. Drawing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, she reminds us that we are “spiritual beings learning to become human.” This episode is a map to help us know where we’re going this season. Ruth concludes with Brian Wren’s hymn “Good is the Flesh.”





Mentioned in the episode:

Soulful Spirituality by David Benner

 How Can So Many Pastors and Leaders Be Godly and Dysfunctional at the Same Time? By Todd Wilson 

 Tending Soul, Mind and Body, the Art and Science of Spiritual Formation by Todd Wilson

Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird

Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton

Honoring the Body Biblical Foundations (document Ruth references in the episode)

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Led by the Spirit from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive special bonus conversations with each of our guests. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self!

 

*this post contains affiliate links

Here we are on the threshold of another Lenten season! Since the Paschal mystery is the culmination of the Lenten season, we are going to "begin with the end in mind" by exploring this great mystery of our faith and where it might be playing itself out in our own lives.  Relying on Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s description in The Holy Longing, Ruth identifies the five movements of the Paschal mystery and the inner dynamics that can help us enter more fully into our own journey of suffering, death, burial, and transformation. This episode is intended to usher you in to the Lenten season with purpose and thoughtfulness.




Mentioned in the episode: 

The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser

 

Music Credit:
Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Returning from Lent Music in Solitude

There’s still room to join us in our upcoming course, Theology that Shapes the Soul. Many Christian leaders have a well-formed theology of what they believe about God, but far less clarity about a theology of spiritual formation: how those beliefs shape the way we live and lead.

Led by Ruth Haley Barton, Theology That Shapes the Soul is a six-week guided experience for leadership groups who want to engage a biblical, theological, and spiritual framework for Christian formation—not merely as abstract ideas, but as truth to be embodied within communities. The course begins on March 4, 2026. Find out more and register here.

 

We’ve started a Substack! This will be “a new home for reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.” Our new Substack is called “On the Journey with the Transforming Center,” and it will include thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This will also be the new home of all of our podcast patron content! There will be free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack.

 

Support the podcast! During Lent we are providing paid Substack supporters guided practices to help them journey through Lent meaningfully. Led by members of our TC alumni community, these practices include a prayer of surrender, a scripture based breath prayer, a practice of holy naming and truth telling before God, a guided meditation of one of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' passion and more. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self! Learn more and apply HERE.

 

*this post contains affiliate links

In this final episode of the Advent season Ruth and Marilyn discuss the unique spiritual invitations and soul work of the winter season. They touch on the inward journey of self-examination, processing grief, and embracing the transformation in life's dormancy. They conclude with a deep discussion on themes of letting go, living in the present, and the spiritual significance of endings and new beginnings. The episode also features a poignant poem by Robert Hayden and an Advent-themed prayer by Ted Loder.

 

Questions for Reflection:

How would you name or characterize the season that you're in?

 How can we be present in the season that we're in versus clinging to something else? 

How  can we trust the letting go process of one season, letting go of one in order to embrace the next? 

 

In this season of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast, Ruth invites listeners to embark on a unique journey during Advent 2025. Departing from traditional liturgical approaches, we will focus on the overlap between the seasons of Advent and winter, inspired by Marilyn McIntyre's book 'Midwinter Light: Meditations for the Long Season.' Ruth will be joined all through Advent by Marilyn McIntyre, herself. Together they will explore themes such as inner reflection, the significance of silence, and the profound connections between spirituality and the physical season of winter. 

 

Marilyn McEntyre is an author of over 20 books, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (2021) and Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict (2020). Her book, What’s in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause won the Christianity Today book award in spirituality. Midwinter Light, reflections on poems for the “long season,” has just been released. A former professor, now writer, writing coach, speaker, and retreat leader, her deepest interests lie in connections between spirituality, language, healing earth, and each other. She teaches regularly for programs at Western Seminary, New College Berkeley, and the Oblate School of Theology.

 

Music Credit:
Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Joseph’s Prayer from Advent Music in Solitude

 

We’re starting a Substack! This will be “a new home for reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.” Our new Substack is called “On the Journey with the Transforming Center,” and it will include thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This will also be the new home of all of our podcast patron content! There will be free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. (Existing patrons, check Patreon for a special link to provide you with a discounted rate!)


Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive spiritual practices tethered to the lectionary readings to accompany them through Advent. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self! Learn more and apply HERE.

 

*this post contains affiliate links