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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 Encouraging Personal Devotion during Advent

December is a time when people are looking for experiences to share with friends and families. Church leaders can plan in advance to offer events and guide individuals and families in ways that will bring greater meaning to Christmas preparations. Because of the pace of December, with its special decorations, parties, gifts, and other activities that people enjoy, people may…

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Leading Ideas
0 Connect Community Events to Worship

For years, Harvest Church hosted a community-wide dodgeball event for teenagers. We advertised it well, and hundreds of kids participated. The winners got cool prizes and everyone had a good time. It seemed like a huge success, but we began to notice that very few of the new kids had gotten involved in our student groups or come back for…

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Leading Ideas
0 Host Bridge Events to Reach New People

One of the disciplines of a disciple of Jesus Christ is to establish relationships with people we do not know — the unconnected — therefore becoming missionaries. This can be done through relationship-building events designed to draw people from your community into relationships with people from your church. We call these events bridge events. Bridge events are conducted outside the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Percentage of Older Clergy Reaches Record High

The Lewis Center for Church Leadership today released the 2013 version of its annual report on Clergy Age Trends in the United Methodist Church. The report is prepared with assistance from the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits. United Methodist elders ages 55-72 reached 50 percent for the first time ever in 2010 and continues to grow as a percentage…

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Leading Ideas
0 Dreams Take Leadership…and Time

Will Campbell died earlier this summer. He was known as an eccentric Baptist preacher who fought fiercely for justice but was never comfortable with the conventional practices of churches. Campbell grew up “dirt poor” in rural southwest Mississippi and was the only white person present at the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King, Jr.…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Ten Minute Rule

The first impression guests leave with determines whether they will be back. So what is it that goes into a good first impression? We interviewed a number of people who had recently visited a church for the first time. We asked them what made the biggest impression on them and what effect it had on their decision to return the…

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Leading Ideas
0 An Annual Report to Support Your Stewardship Campaign

The number one reason people give to their congregation, or any other charity, is because they believe that organization makes a difference. A colorful annual report on your congregation’s ministries and missions will help members and guests feel positive about your church.  Do not focus on facts and plans for the future but the current successes of your congregation. You…

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Leading Ideas
0 Keeping it Real When Launching an E-Newsletter

When Chancellor Baptist Church in Virginia decided to launch an e-newsletter, the staff’s excitement was palpable. Everyone would want this, they reasoned, so it would go a long way toward ending communication problems in the church. If events and information are in the e-newsletter and in the printed newsletter, no one will miss them. Right? The reality was shocking to…

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Leading Ideas
0 Remember the “Light of Day” Test

A controversy arose recently over the Rolling Stone magazine cover featuring Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a Bob Dylan-like photo. Although the issue included a substantive article about Tsarnaev, it was the cover that drew major attention. The editors may have remembered that an edition in 1970 featuring the cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson on its cover…

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Leading Ideas
0 Welcoming Newcomers to Your Congregation

How can you best welcome the next newcomer who crosses the threshold of your congregation? Consider Jesus’ call to the disciples. When he said, “Follow me,” at least according to the gospel writer Mark, the disciples did so immediately. So do not wait. Do not wait until your brochure is finished. Do not wait until your website is public. Do…

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Leading Ideas
0 Wide Welcome: How the Unsettling Presence of Newcomers Can Save the Church

Jessicah Duckworth’s book Wide Welcome speaks to the question of how congregations can best welcome newcomers, engage them in Christian practices, and nurture their faith. But it is not a book of easy answers or quick fixes. In approaching this question, she offers a theologically compelling critique of what passes for evangelism in most mainline congregations and calls the church…

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Leading Ideas
0 Picture Your Community Impact

I am averse to numbers. I switched from being an elementary education major during my junior year in college when I discovered that I had to teach third grade math. In grad school, I nearly had to be committed when I had to pass not one but two statistics classes. But I’ve come to learn an important fact: numbers can…

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Leading Ideas
0 Connecting Generosity to Faith

Several of my family members have worked as restaurant servers. They give me a hard time about church people being terrible tippers. It seems that Sunday afternoon is the most ungenerous time in America. This is a big topic on the web. You may have seen online the picture of an actual restaurant tab. The restaurant had added an 18…

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Leading Ideas
0 No Easy Button for Fruitful Youth Ministry

One of the most common and most debilitating myths about youth ministry might just be the all-too-common belief in the Easy Button. In our work with over 350 churches, our team at Ministry Architects has seen too many churches take an Easy Button approach to building their youth ministries, only to discover too late that short-term sizzle seldom results in…

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Leading Ideas
0 Quarterly Financial Statements Enhance Giving

Every year churches are required to send out an end-of-year giving statement for IRS purposes. Instead of doing it only once a year, consider doing it quarterly. This may send your financial staff persons into a frenzy, but it’s really not bad. And once you put a simple system in place, there are multiple benefits. Sending quarterly statements brings more…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Little Criticism Goes a Long Way

Leaders must have feedback to grow. Those who become exemplary leaders start out much like others. What causes them to grow into stellar leaders is their ability to learn from feedback and mistakes. Instead of adopting an “I’ve got to be me” attitude, they know that God has given them the potential to grow into someone who can be even…

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Leading Ideas
0 Creating Positive Staff Dynamics

Jesus made it look easy. Pick some folks (anyone will do), spend intentional time with them, give them chances to lead, and Bam! A team of nobodies turns the world upside down. So what’s wrong with me? In my first year at my church, three staff members quit. The only thing my staff was turning upside down was our church.…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Go-To Church

The church can no longer fling open the doors and expect the crowds to rush in. We are no longer a “come here” organization as is evidenced by the large number of people who will not or no longer “come here.” But what is the alternative? The answer to fulfilling our call to reach the world is to go to…

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Leading Ideas
0 Separating the Mission from the Medium

A year ago, Encyclopaedia Britannica announced they would cease producing bound volumes. It was a watershed moment when you consider this standard reference was the first of its kind in the English language over 200 years ago. God’s call to churches never can be captured for all time in any of our methods or practices. The new wine of God’s…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Dialogue about Stewardship and Personal Finances

Too often, pastors discuss money with their parishioners in ways that suggest that stewardship is only about donating money to support the church. Faithful stewardship, of course, involves much more than what we give to the church. It is about how we care for everything God has entrusted to us. It is about how we live in right relationship with…

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Leading Ideas
0 Small Churches, Belonging, and the Harley-Davidson Funeral

There is much confusion among churches today resulting from the painful reality that much of our sense of belonging was dependent upon the status and influence the church used to enjoy. We are now challenged to think and act in different ways. The small church offers us one option among others in this new situation. Here in this peripheral setting…

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Leading Ideas
0 Review of Imagining the Small Church: Celebrating a Simpler Path

A previous generation of students such as Carl Dudley, David Ray, and Anthony Pappas have catalogued the unique culture of the small church, here defined as less than 100 in worship. Steve Willis amplifies and illustrates items from that list from his experiences as pastor of and consultant to healthy small churches in rural southern Appalachia and eastern Washington State.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Determine On What Hills You Are Willing To Die

As a much younger leader, I wanted to fight about everything. Growing in this particular understanding may be more a factor of aging and maturing. I’m not sure. I just know that I’m not willing to go to the mat over the color of the carpet or whether the preschoolers use room 5 or 6 at the 10:00 service. I…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Different Kind of Church Shopper

Gone is the denominational and congregational loyalty that was the mark of our parents’ generation. In particular, I have been acutely aware of two types of “church shoppers.” The first is the familiar consumer-oriented seeker who asks “What’s in it for me?” This consumer mentality is looking for the “perfect church.” There is another kind of church shopper. They are…

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Leading Ideas
0 Reach More Volunteers

If the idea of recruiting volunteers has been a challenge in the past, you are not alone. But getting rid of the mind-set of recruiting for a task and switching to the idea of inviting a team can help. Recruiting sounds like work; inviting is a privilege. People want to be needed. Even more than that, they want to spend…

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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.