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Leading Ideas
Delivered every Wednesday, our free e-newsletter Leading Ideas offers articles by thoughtful, cutting-edge leaders on subjects you care about — navigating change, reaching younger people, financing your ministry, communicating effectively — to help you be the leader God is calling you to be.

The Lewis Center is committed to helping congregations and denominations thrive and grow by providing ideas, research, resources, and training for vital and fruitful leadership. Through Leading Ideas, we share vignettes of leaders and congregations, book reviews, leadership quotes, and helpful “right questions” built around the premise that leaders don’t need answers — they need to know the right questions.

Leading Ideas
0 Take an Annual Church Health Checkup

At the beginning of every year, many people take time to evaluate their lives and determine new priorities and directions. The same should be true for churches. You need to evaluate honestly your church’s progress during the previous year to define the right direction. Measure Your Church’s Vital Signs You probably have heard discussion about metrics within the church. Metrics…

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Leading Ideas
0 Spiritual but Not Religious. Really?

A common phrase used in recent years to describe some people is “spiritual but not religious.” It sounds good and believable given our modern individualistic tendencies and self focus. In a sense, it was a bit comforting to think that those who no longer attend church or practice their religion publicly are still personally spiritual and attuned to the things…

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Leading Ideas
0 Living with Open Hands

My wife, Danelle, and I have always tried to live our lives with open hearts, open hands, and an open home. We have fed hundreds of people gathered around our dinner table. We have invited struggling college students and families with children to live with us until they could get back on their feet. We sponsor Compassion International children, give…

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Leading Ideas
0 Christmas Carols in Advent? Yes!

This year, worshipers at the Washington, DC, church where I serve will be hearing Christmas carols on November 29, the first Sunday of Advent. In the past, we’ve saved Christmas carols for the liturgical season of Christmastide, which begins on Christmas Day and continues through Epiphany on January 6. During Advent, we enjoyed Advent hymns, such as “O Come, O…

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Leading Ideas
0 A More Empowering Christmas Gift Give-Away

The gifts of the Magi make perfect sense theologically, but the presents certainly weren’t practical. The arrival of a child requires diapers and bottles, cribs and strollers, feeding supplies and bathing equipment. Sometimes the gifts we give to our neighbors resemble those of the traveling kings in terms of their usefulness. One Christmas Eve at Cass Community stands out in…

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Leading Ideas
0 Collective Genius

Much conventional wisdom about leadership has assumed a sole visionary providing primary leadership for a group. The temptation, likewise, is to think that the answer for our congregation is a single innovative leader. The right pastoral leader is surely important, but we are long beyond the ability of any single individual to solve today’s challenges. One leader, even one with…

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Leading Ideas
0 Does Everyone in a Church Need to Know Everything?

Every congregation has a set of expectations, mostly unspoken and never completely identified, about making decisions. And sometimes, these expectations are unhelpful. One such unhelpful expectation is the belief that everyone needs to know everything, and the church can’t act until everyone approves. The expectation that everyone must know and approve gives tremendous power to discontented members. The whole church…

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Leading Ideas
0 Putting Ourselves in the Places Where Life Happens

Keith Anderson says our churches must get outside of our buildings, both digitally and physically, and claim a broader understanding of where faith happens. I’m convinced that one of the major challenges for today’s church leaders is a matter of perspective. For ministry leaders, the church, whether by that we mean the building or the institution, is often at the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Ten Ways Congregations Can Promote the Financial Wellbeing of Clergy

Financial wellbeing is essential to the overall health and well being of those in pastoral ministry. Accordingly, the United Methodist Board of Pension and Health Benefits’ “50 Ways to Support Your Pastor’s Health and Well being” included these ten suggestions for how congregations can contribute to the financial health of their pastors: Compensate the pastor fairly according to his/her experience,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Why Clergy Personal Finances Matter

“For where your treasure is, there your heart shall be also.” (Matthew 6:21) Jesus talked a great deal about money. And in our monetized society, effective pastoral ministry has a lot to do with how it is acquired, how it is spent, how it is accounted for, and how it can be both a resource and a stumbling block for…

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Leading Ideas
0 Making Space for Faithful Following

As people live longer and are healthier and active further into older adulthood, a logjam of sorts is created. Older adults who have found great meaning in their congregational roles over the years are reluctant to step back from those roles. Sometimes holding on to those roles becomes a way of denying the effects of aging or the coming end…

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Leading Ideas
0 A New Way to View Vitality in Smaller Congregations

I spend my working days as a pastor trying to name reality for my congregation as we wind a precarious way between the heights of aspiration and the depths of self-criticism. We know that we are supposed to be the tree planted by streams of living water that brings forth fruit in due season (Psalms 1:3), but some days feel…

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Leading Ideas
0 Fresh Expressions

“Fresh expressions” is a movement that began in the Church of England and British Methodist churches but soon spread to other denominations in England and now to churches in many countries. What is This? Fresh Expressions refers to relatively new worshipping and witnessing communities that are reaching those not previously reached by the church. These are not new efforts to…

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Leading Ideas
0 Is Your Church Driven by a Shadow Mission?

Some congregations adopt purpose statements that are widely known and frequently repeated, such as “Connected with God, Growing in Faith, Serving with Love,” or “Honoring God through Worship, Witness, and Service.” A mission statement, an expression of common practices, or a logo can communicate priorities, reinforce identity, and provide focus. Mission statements give direction to staff and volunteers about what…

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Leading Ideas
0 Trust is Results Driven

There is nothing more corrosive to the life of a congregation than an underlying absence of trust that may manifest itself as congregants not having confidence in their pastoral staff, the congregation’s governing board, one another, or all three. Until trust is established within the congregation and with its leadership, the congregation will struggle to accomplish anything at all. I…

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Leading Ideas
0 Games People Play During Budget Season

Is budget season in your church plagued with political maneuvering and game playing? Watch out for some of these common ploys that Richard J. Vargo names in Essential Guide to Church Finances (with coauthor Vonna Laue, Your Church Resources/Christianity Today International, 2009). Churches that fall prey to these games may be allocating their resources in wasteful or unwise ways, says…

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Leading Ideas
0 Overcoming the Fear of Talking About Money

I confess to a complicated relationship with wealth. When I was in college, I thought of money as the “root of all evil.” I even asked the older brother of a dear friend how he could possibly go to business school, since all businessmen were motivated only by greed! (OK, I was young and idealistic.) But my problem with money…

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Leading Ideas
0 Making Outsiders Feel like Insiders

Growing churches are churches that have learned that God intends for us to be a people for others. The church needs more than its pastor or senior lay leader to advocate for people who are not there yet. Enlist the opinion of relative newcomers often. Have them speak to their experience of the process of assimilation — positive and negative…

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Leading Ideas
0 The “Nones” and the Spirituality of Everyday Living

One of the most important challenges confronting the church today is the rise of the so-called “Nones,” that is, the religiously unaffiliated, those who check “none” when asked for their religious or denominational affiliation. Today, 20 percent of Americans and 30 percent of people under thirty are Nones, and those numbers are growing by about 20 percent year after year.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Young Clergy Numbers Grow Among Young Clergywomen

For over ten years, the Lewis Center in partnership with the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits has reported annually on Clergy Age Trends in the United Methodist Church. The Lewis Center prepares these reports so that church leaders can see the most important trends in clergy numbers and ages in such a way that they understand these trends, can…

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Leading Ideas
0 Taking Prayer to the Community

Several recent research efforts addressing the spiritual practices of those not connected to religious communities have found that prayer is a practice that those inside the church and those beyond the church hold in common. Pew Research Center’s often-cited study, Religion and the Unaffiliated, found that 27 percent of people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” pray daily.…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Church That Wouldn’t Die

Detroit is almost surgically separated into east and west by Woodward Avenue. Woodward stretches northwest from the Detroit River downtown all the way up through the suburbs until it dead-ends in Pontiac. Both sides of Detroit have been plagued with church closings during the last 40 years. Some of the congregations have merged and others have moved, but far too…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Over-Stuffed Bulletin

Do you remember those prank peanut cans? You would buy one at a novelty store, and then give it to one of your friends. When they opened the can, a fake snake exploded out of the can and flew toward their face. Maybe I’m remembering it more dramatically than it was, but there were a few Sundays when our church…

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Leading Ideas
0 Crafting Better Commitment Campaign Messages

Many churches have a one-size-fits-all approach to their annual stewardship appeal. Everyone in the congregation receives the same “Dear Friend” letter inviting them to prayerfully offer up their tithe to the church for the coming year. While this approach is simple and easy to execute, it’s generally not the most effective or meaningful way to communicate with people about their…

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Leading Ideas
0 Inspiring Generosity with a Thank You Letter

How often have you opened up what looks like a form letter and read, “On behalf of blah blah blah, I want to thank you for your generous donation.”? In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this. And believe me, it’s way better to receive a boring thank you letter than to receive nothing at all. How many faithful stewards do…

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This article is reprinted by permission from Leading Ideas, a free e-newsletter from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary available at churchleadership.com.