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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 Recommendation

We attend dozens of worship services in different churches every year. Way too often we hear the preachers implore along the scripted lines: “Come back next week, and bring a friend.” The preacher boasts a wide smile, thinking, “This is so obvious, so easy. Why don’t they just do it?” And the listeners are subconsciously thinking, “Yeah, right.” The congregation…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Emergence of “Dones”

A friend alerted me to a blog by Thom Schultz, founder of Group Publishing, on “The Rise of the Dones.” At first I thought there must be a misprint. Surely the title meant to refer to the rise of the “Nones,” the increasingly large number of people, especially among those under 30, who choose as their religious affiliation “None.” But…

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Leading Ideas
0 Christmas Eve Opportunities for Newcomers

I have discovered over the last several years a surprising source of energy in the preparations for our church’s Christmas Eve worship service. Relative newcomers to the church become the best source of volunteer support for this special night of worship. Typically, one month before Christmas Eve, I begin making general announcements in worship about the need and importance of…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Color of Your Advent Candles Doesn’t Matter

I have no patience for debates over the color of Advent candles and whether or not to sing Christmas songs in Advent. God became incarnate, and candles and carols are all some church professionals seem to care about. Give me a break. Here’s my problem with all this. Spoiling Advent First, it’s adiaphora, which is a nice Greek word that…

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Leading Ideas
0 Removing Obstacles to Giving

Sometimes churches have financial systems designed for the convenience of those receiving the contributions rather than for those who are giving. When you design and communicate financial policies, make sure they are done from the perspective of the giver and not for the convenience of those handling the funds. For example, consider this notice that appeared in an actual church…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Listen

National news recently quoted a speech by a Microsoft executive who said women should trust the “system” to take care of their pay raises. Previously, few of us knew about The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC). The gathering began in 1994 with 500 attendees. By 2010, over 2,000 were attending. Last year 4,750 took part. And their…

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Leading Ideas
0 Sifting Our Inheritance: What to Keep and What to Let Go

A few years ago, my mom passed away after having lived a good life. Dad asked us to help him sort through my mother’s possessions. Though we knew this task was coming, it was unexpectedly hard. That was not because my mother had a lot of things, but because many things had memories associated with them. Most things weren’t precious;…

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Leading Ideas
0 Celebrate to Build Your Church’s God-Esteem

Dying churches are often churches with low self-esteem. Your task as a leader is not to build up the church’s self-esteem but to build up its God-esteem — its sense that God is guiding them and is a big stakeholder and participant in its life and future, their sense that God loves them and is hard at work, and visibly…

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Leading Ideas
0 When is a Proposed Change a Deal Breaker?

God told Jeremiah “to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” These biblical directions are the definition of innovation in the church. If congregations truly recognize that the future is now, they will identify ministries, practices, traditions, ideas and behaviors that need to be plucked up, pulled down, destroyed, and overthrown. They…

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Leading Ideas
0 Create New Entry Points

Churches have long assumed that new people would engage their congregations by first attending worship. When they are not growing and attracting new people, people blame the style of worship, the music, the preacher, the worship time, the paint color in the sanctuary, or the length of the service. Yet, it may not be any of those things. Worship was…

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Leading Ideas
0 Remember That We Are Working in Sand

Each summer my family spends a week at the beach. And every year my daughters, their friends, and I build a sand castle. We’ve discovered that the problem with sand castles is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how tall or wide you make them, they are fragile. They are so terribly temporary. They are not built…

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Leading Ideas
0 Five Leadership Insights I Wish I Knew 25 Years Ago

This summer marked 34 years in ministry for me. Although I appreciate what I learned in seminary, I have learned from experience five key lessons I wish I had known from the start. 1. Silence does not mean people agree with you. Early on when I would lead meetings, I tried very hard to sell ideas about which I was…

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Leading Ideas
0 Eight Reasons I was Wrong About Short Term Mission Trips

I used to think short term mission trips were a complete waste of resources and a distraction from our church’s core mission. They basically amounted to “petting the poor” or “poverty tourism.” But my attitude changed after having the privilege of leading a short term trip with Living Water International. It helped me appreciate the ways short term mission experiences…

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Leading Ideas
0 What’s Your Church’s “Ladder”?

When people think of your church, what comes to mind? Is your church seen as similar to other churches? Different? How would church members answer those questions? How would others in the community respond? Do people think of your church as one of many churches, or do they associate your church with something distinctive? It matters. A Faith Community Today…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Believe Things Can Happen

One of the most important contributions a leader can make is to believe that things can happen. When we do not, they will not. It is that simple. I learned this lesson when my congregation needed to raise three to five million dollars to buy a plot of land for a larger facility. I found this financial challenge intimidating. When…

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Leading Ideas
0 Spiritual Lessons from a Vinedresser

Judith Sutera, a Benedictine sister, has spent decades as vinedresser for her monastery’s garden after careful apprenticeship with a mentor wise to the ways of fruitfulness. Below are lessons she learned about the ways fruitfulness occurs. They are from her book The Vinedresser’s Notebook: Spiritual Lessons in Pruning, Waiting, Harvesting, and Abundance, published by Abingdon Press and illustrated by Paul…

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Leading Ideas
0 Tell Your Stewardship Story

Early in my own ministry, I always found stewardship season anxiety-producing. While I got better at it, I still found the fall campaign difficult. One year the program we were using strongly suggested the pastor make his or her pledge public as part of the stewardship sermon. In our congregation, there was a lot of anxiety about the confidentiality of…

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Leading Ideas
0 Music — the Bellwether of Church Health

After air quality, music is the single greatest environmental factor for your community, because it determines how people feel in your church. It has the power to make them feel like pampered customers or dissatisfied ones. It also has the power to make them feel like they’re part of the movement of growing disciples that we want our parish to be. Furthermore,…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Importance of a Narrative Budget

Narrative budgeting has a critical role to play in any comprehensive parish stewardship program. Basic philanthropic theory indicates that people want their money to have an impact. Narrative budgeting is the best tool I have found to demonstrate to donors how their money and time are filtering through the church to touch the lives of people in need. We make…

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Leading Ideas
0 Use Trial Periods for New Ideas

Lovett H. Weems Jr. says using a trial period to launch new ideas is a non-threatening approach. Trial periods also encourage feedback and engagement in decision making. It is much easier for people to “live their way into a new way thinking” than to “think their way into a new way of living.” Yet church leaders almost invariably ask people…

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Leading Ideas
0 Trend toward Older Clergy Continues in 2014

For the past 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…

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Leading Ideas
0 Change Leaders Persevere

Regularly we remind others and ourselves that resurrection never happens until after a death. Yet often in leading a significant change, we panic. When the smooth upward trajectory that we expected does not happen, we may blame ourselves for not being a better leader. We may even abandon the entire project. In graphing change, we tend to draw an arrow or…

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Leading Ideas
0 Models for Budget Building

Churches use a variety of budget building models. No one model or combination of models is right for every church. What approach might best fit your situation? You do not want a budget that is doomed to fail because the goals were out of reach. On the other hand, you do not want the budget to be so modest and…

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Leading Ideas
0 The New Church Family

Given the title of Linda Ranson Jacobs’s new book, Attract Families to Your Church and Keep Them Coming Back (Abingdon Press, 2014), one might assume it focuses on how a church can develop top-notch programs for children and youth to draw young families and bring new life to tired and aging congregations. While she affirms that high-quality children’s ministry is…

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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.