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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 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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Leading Ideas
0 Fruitfulness for Others

The fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel contains rich imagery of the vine and the branches, an image that would have been obvious to those who labored in vineyards and enjoyed the fruit of the vine. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” he teaches his disciples. We draw our strength, our life, from him: “I am the vine; you…

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Leading Ideas
0 If Churches Can Change, They Can Grow

An exceptionally revealing report on church growth is now available from the Faith Communities Today research project. Drawing on extensive survey data, noted researcher C. Kirk Hadaway paints a compelling picture of factors leading both to church growth and decline. Churches have differing degrees of control over these factors. Congregations that involved children in worship were more likely to experience…

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Leading Ideas
0 Evangelism Today Requires New Wineskins

Churches are struggling with their evangelistic outreach. What worked in the past doesn’t seem to work today. In studying African American churches, I have come to see something prevalent across a range of churches. Their evangelistic practices are not wrong so much as they are based on assumptions grounded in the experience of a previous generation. Some of the old…

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Leading Ideas
0 Preaching and Money

How can the issue of money be addressed honestly and effectively from the pulpit? Two new books guide preachers in defining a homiletic posture that balances the theological imperatives and practical realities that can make stewardship, giving, and economic realities difficult sermon subjects. Craig Satterlee’s Preaching and Stewardship: Proclaiming God’s Invitation to Grow (Alban, 2011) deals with preaching to encourage…

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Leading Ideas
0 Essential Acts of Leadership

Donald L. Laurie, in his book The Real Work of Leaders (Perseus, 2000), focuses on what he calls “The Seven Essential Acts of Leadership.” Leaders have a responsibility to communicate what is going on that matters and why it matters, especially in times of change. Here is how Laurie names them: 1. Get on the balcony. A leader must be…

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Leading Ideas
0 An Opportunity for an Invitation

While my husband and I were out recently, a young college student took our order at a fast food restaurant. Noticing her name tag, I commented that that was my mother’s name and I loved it. She smiled and thanked me. Then when she asked for the order name, I told her my name and she said, “That is my…

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Leading Ideas
0 Characteristics of a Healthy Youth Ministry

Congregations that succeed in nurturing the faith of young people tend to demonstrate certain key characteristics. What are the top characteristics of a healthy youth ministry? 11. Safe space. Young people need safe spaces (time, relationships, or physical space) where they can “be” themselves instead of trying to “prove” themselves. They need the emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual freedom to…

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Leading Ideas
0 Time to Invite

In the last year, several friends who live in different parts of the country have returned to church after a number of years of inactivity. This is encouraging and counter to the national trend since 2002 of fewer people attending church. There are two striking characteristics among these church returners. None returned to a church of their former denomination. All…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leading in Challenging Times

What if you knew that your congregation were on a collision course with its demise? What would you do? Whom would you tell? How would it change the way you lead? Would it affect your sense of urgency? Would it help you better distinguish between minor and major issues? Business as usual for established churches is going to lead us…

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Leading Ideas
0 Worshiping at Two Vital Congregations

Readers of Leading Ideas are familiar with the Lewis Center’s focus on the church’s challenge to “reach more people, younger people, and more diverse people.” I recently attended two churches not of my own denomination that seem to be succeeding in this task. The distinctives of the Brooklyn Tabernacle are in many ways similar to City Church. They include the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Picking People — Lessons from Peter Drucker

Selecting or helping to select personnel, paid staff, and volunteers is a prime task of leaders. Below are suggestions that come from the legendary management thinker Peter F. Drucker. They are found in The Essential Drucker: Selections from the Management Works of Peter F. Drucker (HarperBusiness, 2001, chapter 9). Of all the decisions a leader makes, none is as important…

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Leading Ideas
0 Getting to Know the “Mayors” of Your Community

Congregational revitalization happens when the community and the church come together to make it happen. But it can’t be the church saying, “This is what the community needs.” It has to be the community in the church and the church in the community finding their common voice, speaking a vision of hope, and laying out a plan for bringing their…

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Leading Ideas
0 Helping Youth Have a Faith of Their Own

The fact that youth participate in church less as they get older and often are not present in church as young adults can lead church leaders to assume they lack religious interest. A new book growing out of the National Study of Youth and Religion challenges that assumption. Sociologists Lisa Pearce and Melinda Lundquist Denton found that older teens and…

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Leading Ideas
0 Teaching Children to Tithe

Teaching children to tithe is an important part of their faith education that we often overlook. Giving to God is a core value of our faith that should be taught early and reinforced often. The most common way that I see tithing taught to children is simply by grownups giving children a quarter to put in the offering plate. This…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Soul of a Small Church

These are anxious times for the lay and clergy leaders of small congregations. The repercussions of a disappointing economy, aging and shrinking membership, and a growing sector of happy seculars combine to raise hard questions. How long can we go on like this? Fail to connect with those outside our doors? Afford our pastor? Keep up this building? Not everything…

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Leading Ideas
0 Turning Church Spectators into Active Participants

The story told in John 21:15-19 is almost too familiar. Three times Jesus asks if Peter loves him, three times Peter says yes, and each time Jesus responds with the commands: “Feed my lambs.” “Take care of my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.” Ministers know this passage, and yet most feel lucky to see even half their flock at church. Too…

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Leading Ideas
0 Will the Mainline Denominations Get It Right?

“We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.” New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman used these stark words to describe the challenge now facing the United States. Perhaps a similar dilemma faces mainline denominations with many of them facing major decisions at denominational assemblies. We know that with or without reform, the coming years will be…

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Leading Ideas
0 Meeting Your New First-Time Guest

Fifty years ago a person moved to town, looked in the newspaper or phone book for a church of their denomination, visited a couple of them (if there were more than one), and then joined the church. Twenty-five years ago a person moved to town, looked in the newspaper or phone book for churches in general, visited three or four…

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Leading Ideas
0 Your Website is Your Church’s Welcome Mat

Increasingly, those looking for a church begin their search online. Therefore, a congregation’s website must function as a satellite of their church. Consider every part of the website from the perspective of visitors and the unchurched. Consider these facts: Eighty to 85 percent of people searching for a church use the internet. For church websites generally, 19 percent of “content views”…

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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.