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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 Metrics: A Tool for Learning, Not Judging

The current focus on setting numerical goals for ministry and reporting on the results is not new, though it is now greatly expanded. In the past, virtually all the goals churches set had to do with money. The most obvious example is the annual budget. A budget is a goal that the church works all year to achieve, monitors the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Thinking Like a Host

From beginning to end, the Bible teaches us how to be hospitable. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we find stories of people acting as hosts, welcoming strangers, and discovering that there is something truly holy in their acts of hospitality. Yet, we have largely forgotten this in the life of the church. As hosts, we are constantly challenged to…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Older Clergy Bubble Grows Larger in 2012

The Lewis Center for Church Leadership today released the 2012 version of its annual report on Clergy Age Trends in the United Methodist Church. The report, prepared with assistance from the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits, also includes figures from other denominations for the first time since 2008. The preponderance of older clergy is a trend across all mainline…

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Leading Ideas
0 Feedback without the Pain

A limitation to most feedback systems is that they tend to accentuate the negative. We know that leaders want and need feedback for growth, but the normal evaluation systems often leave them more discouraged than energized to improve. We also know that while people tend to remember the criticism from reviews, it is praise that truly motivates people to change.…

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Leading Ideas
0 From Assimilation to Acculturation

I believe that when we talk about the integration of new members into a congregation, we need to embrace the language of acculturation, not assimilation. In the 1980s, literature and workshops about assimilating new members became the rage in church circles. People were asking, “Why are attendance and membership numbers showing such rapid decline?” Leaders were convinced that better systems…

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Leading Ideas
0 Shifting Entry Points

Traditionally, worship has been regarded as the primary venue through which individuals enter the life of a congregation. In The Inviting Church (Alban, 1987, 74-75), Roy Oswald and Speed Leas linked new-member assimilation with spiritual growth. They named six levels of incorporation into the spiritual life of the church that progressed in this order: joining, belonging, participating, searching, journeying inward,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Stewards of God’s Grace

A noted British economist recently submitted to the government a review of the equity markets in England. In writing about the current situation of financial institutions in general, John Kay noted that “trust in the financial sector is at an all-time low.” He chose an intriguing title for his piece: “Finance Needs Stewards, Not Toll Collectors.” That is a very…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Wilderness Experience

For a number of years our leaders have been using “exile“ as a metaphor for the situation of the church. Their assumption is that we have been removed from our place of prominence in the culture and find ourselves without power and status, much like an exile. Even if that language is not used, the numerous charts showing the decline…

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Leading Ideas
0 Expanding Small Group Involvement in Your Commitment Campaign

Small groups are an important setting for conversation around the theme of a church’s annual commitment campaign. In churches with a consistent, coordinated small groups ministry, this can be as simple as incorporating study material related to your stewardship message into their program. But there are ways to extend the impact of small group conversation beyond those who regularly attend…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Parable of the Sower and the Experience of Church Growth

The parable of the sower speaks deeply of my experience of church growth and vitality. In the parable, seeds were sown. Good seeds. It is not far-fetched to assume that somewhere there were likely many unnamed seeds planted in nice neat rows with plenty of room for plants to expand — that would be only expected. But in this parable,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Church as an Uncommon Community

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” says the LORD through the prophet Isaiah (56:7). What could this possibly mean for us today, in our highly fragmented society? I am a parish pastor, and my passion for hospitality comes out of a deep love for the church and a strong desire to see congregations become…

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Leading Ideas
0 Continuity and Change: Two Tunes All Leaders Must Know

It is exciting to hear of the energy and vitality with which so many churches are planning for the future. Many of you report changes planned for this fall that have much potential for helping your churches reach more people in deeper ways. God’s new future for churches is always connected to their past. Connecting the changes with the church’s…

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Leading Ideas
0 Planning Inspired by the Spirit

Drawing on his experience leading a strategic planning process, Pastor Myung Sun Han identifies key lessons to keep a church-wide planning exercise positive, productive, and Spirit-led. What makes a strategic planning process fruitful? The church I serve recently undertook a long-range planning exercise to create a clear mission statement, identify key priorities, and develop plans for accomplishing our goals. This…

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Leading Ideas
0 Tapping the Gifts of Homebound Leaders

People who must remain at home because of physical limitations have often been seen by the church as recipients of ministry rather than as active disciples. The healthy church engages these people in ministry that fits their life situations. Coordinating this ministry is a special leadership opportunity and can often be handled by a homebound person. Following are some ways…

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Leading Ideas
0 Religion Census Reveals Changing Trends

While about 80 percent of people in the U.S. identify themselves as Christians, just under half of those belong to a local congregation. This is one of the findings of the 2010 U.S. Religion Census released May 1 by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. Their decennial study identified 344,894 local congregations with data from 90 percent of them. The…

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Leading Ideas
0 Five Must-Know Facts about First-Time Guests

Healthy and growing churches pay close attention to the people they count as members, as well as those people who are not yet a part of the flock. These churches know that new people are the lifeblood of a growing church. Like a spigot, they want to keep the valve open for the flow of new people, and most importantly,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Lessons from Wesley for All Churches

Martin E. Marty once observed that between the time of Luther and Calvin and our own time, John Wesley symbolized the genius of adaptation to modernity. In his foreword to E. Brooks Holifield’s Health and Medicine in the Methodist Tradition (1986), Marty reminds us that the Wesleyan movement was so successful that for one or two centuries it was one…

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Leading Ideas
0 Ministry with Veterans

They can be skittish, untrusting, and resistant to offers of help, as well as sometimes stubborn and skeptical. They are the veterans of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many of them are hurting and broken. Some of them may be members of your congregation, or relatives of your congregants, and they may turn to you for help. Are…

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Leading Ideas
0 Gaining Commitment

How do you reignite a church when it seems that no one wants to lead? In every space and place, God wants transformation to occur. God has already placed people in every church. Leaders have to find them and lead them to the point of commitment. 1. People have to see, hear, and feel the leader’s passion.When leaders care in…

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Leading Ideas
0 Reclaiming the Lost Art of Story Telling

How can we gather and tell the stories of our congregation? Born in an oral culture when stories and traditions were as important as written law, the church was once a story-telling people. Today, this art is all but forgotten. But new technologies can help us remember and retell our stories. The people of our church reclaimed a sense of…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Tussle over Metrics

Church leaders may think that leading in the business world is so much simpler than in the church since there is “one bottom line” and financial measures give business leaders all they need to know about how they are doing. Not so. A recent survey of global business leaders found that 75 percent say they need better non-financial measures. They admit…

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Leading Ideas
0 An Open Letter to Churches Seeking New Members

My husband and I moved to the city a few years ago and have been “between churches” ever since. We’ve been to visit quite a few of your churches and have some observations you may find helpful in encouraging more new members. Don’t let the little things get in the way of connecting people to the Good News. No public…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Do What Is Needed

One of the vivid images of the 1960s is a picture of African American students walking boldly out of Cornell University’s student union building. They left following a thirty-four hour takeover. The photo showed Thomas W. Jones, a leader of the student group, holding a rifle and raising a clenched fist. Cornell president James Perkins lost his job a month…

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Leading Ideas
0 Rocking the Boat without Capsizing

In the late 1980s, rhythm and blues group Midnight Star climbed the charts with a sensational hit called “Don’t Rock the Boat.” Have you experienced these sentiments before as a church leader? If so, you are in good company. If not, get ready. All change needs to be grounded in a clear rationale of how God is glorified in these…

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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.