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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 The Power of Laity in Connecting to the Community

For much of my ministry, I had a recurring fantasy each time I was moving to a new church as pastor. I would imagine myself going ahead of time to the new community, finding a popular local hang out, and spending time there. I would listen and learn some of the news and ways of the town from the perspective…

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Leading Ideas
0 Connecting with “Those People”

For four years, I’ve been the pastor of Women at the Well, a congregation within a women’s prison in Mitchellville, Iowa. I meet some amazing women there. When I hear their stories, I can’t help thinking that I haven’t met many women like them in the churches I’ve known and pastored. It’s not because they aren’t in our communities. I…

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Leading Ideas
0 Commencement Season Lessons for All Leaders

Next Monday is Commencement for Wesley Theological Seminary of which the Lewis Center for Church Leadership is an integral part. Commencements are happy and glorious occasions. The location of Wesley’s commencement service at the Washington National Cathedral adds to the grandeur of the day. It is impossible to evade the tension between those common sense practices that make ministry possible…

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Leading Ideas
0 What if Your Church Had No Building?

On the weekend of my first Easter as a church planter in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, I made the drive from my house to a local city park. It was Saturday, and I noticed church after church hosting their annual Easter egg hunts. The parking lots were packed, and children filled church lawns covered in pastel covered eggs. A part of…

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Leading Ideas
0 Tying Facility Needs to Mission

Churches that have been around for many years often face numerous property challenges. With aging buildings, there are frequent unplanned property issues that arise and insufficient funds in the operating budget for these repairs. Just when we seem to make some progress, something else has to be fixed. This can be frustrating for everyone. For example, I was dispirited to…

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Leading Ideas
0 Five Guidelines for Doing Good Well

A few years ago, I ran into Tony Campolo, prominent leader in missional evangelism. He had been at the Clinton Global Initiatives meeting. We sat down for lunch, and he was fuming. “David, do you know how many Christian organizations are at work in Haiti today? There are 900. And after 40 years of all that mission work, Haiti is no…

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Leading Ideas
0 Your Leadership Attitude is Contagious

A co-worker arrived at the door of my office waving an angry email from one of our most talented adult education teachers. The teacher was disgruntled because she had forgotten to let us know about some teaching supplies she needed, and felt unprepared in her classroom as a result. Yet her email (unjustly) blamed my co-worker for the oversight. Whatever…

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Leading Ideas
0 Millennials Seek Larger Framework to Understand God

A group from my church often visits a restaurant right across the parking lot to share a meal after Bible study. One night the server asked one of my friends if we lived nearby. “Not far,” he replied. “But we work together every Tuesday night over at Resurrection. Have you ever been there?” “Nah,” said the server, “I don’t usually…

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Leading Ideas
0 Baseball and the Simplicity of Leadership

The new baseball season is upon us, and hope emerges anew in major league cities across the country. Baseball fans and some who had paid little attention previously were amazed last season when the lowly Kansas City Royals made it to the playoffs and World Series for the first time since 1985. And in 2012, the Washington Nationals surprised everyone…

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Leading Ideas
0 Look for Options, Not Solutions

Leaders are constantly faced with problems. They engage such challenges with energy because they know that these issues represent what stands between their current reality and God’s vision for the future of their congregation. Leaders can celebrate that they are aware of what the problems are in order to address them. A worship leader has a worship service that is…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Stewardship Intervention Counters Fundraiser Dependence

I pastor a church that believes in the power of fundraisers. Over the decades, Beulah African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a historic congregation in rural South Carolina, has built new church facilities, maintained operational funds, purchased land, and funded new ministries through fundraisers. Last year, 35 of 52 Sundays involved appeals for extra giving not associated with tithes, offerings, or…

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Leading Ideas
0 Are You Glad When Passing the Peace Ends?

I once had a friend who attended church regularly with his wife, but he would wait in the narthex until after the “passing of the peace” portion of the service that occurred near the beginning. “My wife loves it,” he often said, “but that part of the service just does not work for me.” Maybe that’s the kind of person…

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Leading Ideas
0 Becoming More of What We Have Been

We were in a rut! I think we knew we were in a survival mode, and something needed to change. Our language reflected too much passivity. “If people want to come to church, they will come” was a common expression. We were a bit too comfortable for us to break through to take God’s next faithful step.  We did not…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Interpret the Present in Light of the Past

Leaders create holding environments for innovation in part by helping the community interpret its legacy, present situation, and future. This centers on asking questions to which leaders genuinely do not know the answer, questions for which there are no easy answers, questions that the community must own and engage. Organizational scholar Edgar Schein calls this “humble inquiry” — the art…

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Leading Ideas
0 All Are (Not) Welcome

Church people might see themselves as welcoming, because they run promotions claiming, “Our doors are open,” and “Our lights are on,” or maybe they hang banners and sing songs proclaiming, “All Are Welcome.” But is it so? Maybe lost people don’t feel welcome in these churches because sometimes they’re not welcome. Lost people might be shallow and unsure in their…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Learn from Their Failures

The Super Bowl in January had the highest viewing audience ever — a record of over 114 million. Those who attended the first Super Bowl would have found it hard to imagine what a cultural phenomenon this sporting event would become. The site for that first Super Bowl was selected six weeks before the game, and the date was set…

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Leading Ideas
0 Eight Reasons People Aren’t Listening to Announcements

This weekend, all across the country, leaders are going to get up in front of their churches and talk about upcoming events and opportunities to connect with the community. They want to move people to action, but in reality a large portion of those in the room will simply tune out for that part of the service and then tune…

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Leading Ideas
0 Telling an Alternative Story

People have been discussing the decline of the church for quite a few years now. We’ve gotten used to the dire warnings and predictions of the end. It is part of our collective story. But despite the fact that fewer people attend church regularly, or feel the need to attend at all, many congregations keep plodding forward without much change.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Expanding a School Partnership through Community Dinners

For the past 20 years, First United Methodist Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been in a partnership with the Eugene Field Elementary School. About ten years ago, the school announced it was going to become a “community school” that attempted to serve the whole child by expanding the focus beyond academics to include a wide range of health and social…

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Leading Ideas
0 Should a Pastor Know What Church Members Give?

Every time I teach a stewardship workshop or class, this question invariably comes up: “Should a pastor have access to contribution records?” In some congregations, pastors are prohibited from knowing what people contribute. In others, pastors choose to shield themselves from this information. There are valid pastoral, spiritual, and developmental reasons why pastors, and sometimes other key church leaders, should…

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Leading Ideas
0 Best Practices for Short-Term Mission Trips

There is no single “right” way to do a mission trip. What works depends very much on the goals of the congregations and participants, the strengths and concerns of the host community, and the context of each mission group and each trip. But after several years of talking to short-term mission participants, reading scholarly accounts of the short-term mission phenomenon,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Where do People Find Meaning Today?

The church wonders why regular worship attendance is now being redefined for many churches as once a month, rather than once a week. Leaders are disappointed at the eroding levels of commitment and think that if they can only invite people more effectively, they will respond just as they used to. The church wonders why, when faced with a choice…

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Leading Ideas
0 Could Your Church Have Developed WD-40®?

The church today requires innovation, not improvement. Making things better through improvements is always welcomed, but we are past the time when merely improving what we are already doing is sufficient to address the new cultural and social context in which the church finds itself. In a stable environment in which the church held sway as a cultural icon and…

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Leading Ideas
0 Worship Leadership Requires Planning and Evaluation

What is your current worship planning system? Your first response may be, “We don’t have one.” In reality, every congregation has a planning system, but it may be unintentional and lack focus. The way that worship unfolds each week is your planning system. No matter what size the church, time spent evaluating the week’s service is helpful to the goal…

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Leading Ideas
0 Measuring What Matters: A Conversation about Metrics and Mission

If your life is anything like mine, you may find yourself at the beginning of the year focusing on numbers from the past year. In both professional and personal spheres, these numbers become more important, whether they relate to personal finance, denominational data, institutional capacity, or charitable giving. In the absence of clear thinking, we simply remain busy in our…

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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.