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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 Is Your Church History a Static or Dynamic Force?

Church history is a lot like gravity — it is always with us whether we are aware of it or not. While church history may seem unrelated to congregational leadership, those who attempt to change things soon discover that it lurks just beneath the surface. We have all heard the seven deadly words, “But we’ve always done it that way!”…

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Leading Ideas
0 Paying Attention to Those Who Give and Those Who Don’t

I have come to see the importance of thinking about different segments within the congregation. There is tremendous diversity within any congregation when it comes to spiritual development and spiritual growth. One of the things that I have had to learn to do is to think about how we are connecting with each segment. Two examples on either end of…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Single Voice

I had been attending a new church for a little over two months, when something changed. I was active in this church, attending Sunday school and participating in the hand bell choir, among other things. During that time a few people made me feel very welcome, especially those people who sat around me or who were in my Sunday school…

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Leading Ideas
0 Is Outreach to Young Families with Children Still Enough?

“What we really need is more young families with children.” How many times have we heard those familiar words spoken in churches? The image of many young families with children brings memories of a time many churches associate with their heyday decades ago. But there are changed realities to consider if churches want to move forward into the future instead…

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Leading Ideas
0 Coaching and Christian Leadership

Coaching has become a popular topic in Christian leadership. A number of books and resources, as well as training opportunities, are available to help church leaders adapt coaching techniques to the practice of ministry. What can be learned from these resources? While training and supervision generally occur around a prescribed set of goals and expectations, coaching occurs around topics selected…

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Leading Ideas
0 Review of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership

Gather stories from 125 corporate leaders, reflect on the common themes, and the end product is a revealing, instructive, and inspirational book. Bill George is a professor at Harvard Business School, and former chair and CEO of Medtronics. He has spent his life exploring what it means to be an authentic leader and is clear that his faith helped shape…

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Leading Ideas
0 Review of Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Robert Schnase

How can churches today be as vital as the early Christian communities described in the Book of Acts? How can we reclaim the fruitful piety of the early Methodists? Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, a new book by United Methodist Bishop Robert Schnase, describes five foundational practices to help congregations be fruitful in ministry to their members and in service…

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Leading Ideas
0 An Interview with Bishop Robert Schnase

Leading Ideas had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Bishop Robert Schnase, author of Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations (Abingdon Press, 2007).  Here are some highlights from our conversation about the book. Christ’s ministry was radical, passionate, intentional, risk-taking, and extravagant. Wow! Dare we settle for anything less? What led you to write this book? For me, the book helps answer…

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Leading Ideas
0 Igniting a Ministry

Ultimately Responsible: When You’re in Charge of Igniting a Ministry contains plenty of practical advice on how to jumpstart tired programs and engage church members in meaningful ministry. Sue Nilson Kibbey, executive pastor of Ginghamsburg Church in Tipp City, Ohio, outlines a comprehensive system for ministry development that begins with analysis of the essential components of individual leadership and goes…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Pastor Describes Her First Day in a New Community

Having attended a workshop on transitioning into a new appointment, I kept remembering the stress put on the importance of your “first official day.” “You only have one first day,” the workshop leader had said. “Use it well.” I am your new pastor, and I wanted to call you on my first official day. I am honored to be your…

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Leading Ideas
0 10 Tips for Handling Criticism in Ministry

Margaret Marcuson says that criticism and complaints are an issue in almost every area of ministry. She outlines ten strategies for handling complaints and criticism in ways that can sustain relationships and help you achieve your goals. Dealing with criticism and complaints is an issue in almost every area of ministry. Church leaders have had to deal with complaints from…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leadership from Inside Out

Ever since I read Wesley Granberg-Michaelson’s Leadership from Inside Out, I have urged every minister I could button-hole to read it as well. My attraction to the book can be summed-up in its subtitle: “Spirituality and Organizational Change.” Sometimes in direct ways, but more often in subtle ways, it takes on our present day penchant for “top-down” leadership in religious…

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Leading Ideas
0 Can White Mainline Churches Outside the South Reach New Christians?

This is the question raised by Martha Grace Reese and the Mainline Evangelism Project she directed. The results of her research, funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., were published recently in Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism (Chalice Press, 2006). The purpose of the Mainline Evangelism Project was to see how well mainline churches were doing in helping people become…

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Leading Ideas
0 Lessons for Clergy Preparing to Leave a Congregation

Lawrence W. Farris writes that how a pastor leaves a congregation is crucial for the pastor’s future work and well-being as well as for the congregations. Good endings to pastorates open the door, for both pastor and congregation, to promising futures of new faithfulness to God’s work in the world. Abbreviated, curt, lack-of-closure endings, on the other hand, encumber both…

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Leading Ideas
0 Ten Commandments for Pastors Leaving a Congregation

Lovett Weems recommends a book to help pastors who are ending ministry with a congregation or moving to a new pastoral assignment. Lawrence W. Farris has written a superb book to help pastors who are approaching the time of leaving ministry in a particular place. Using the model he applied to his earlier book for pastors who are new in…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Tully Principle of 52 Equal Sundays

Bill Tully’s principle of 52 equal Sundays strives to have powerful worship every Sunday of the year to best reach visitors at all times of year. After Easter, attention in the church is likely to turn toward plans for the summer. Such plans often include a “change of pace” with adjustments in worship times, number of services, types of music,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Should You Change the Worship Time for the Super Bowl?

Adam Hamilton relates how changing a worship time to avoid a conflict with the Super Bowl helped connect with the non-religious and nominally religious. We have five worship services each weekend at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. The last of these services begins at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday evening. This year, on the Sunday the Super Bowl was…

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Leading Ideas
0 Jesus Asked the Right Questions

Marc Brown explores how Jesus defines the reality of God’s kingdom and his own identity by asking the right questions. In the ninth chapter of Mark, Jesus asked his disciples: “What were you discussing on the way?” He was evidently aware that the disciples had been debating who the greatest was among them. Jesus could have responded to the disciples’…

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Leading Ideas
0 It Takes Teamwork

Kevass Harding writes that God calls us to be in relational ministry where God’s people work together for the building up of God’s kingdom here on earth. Teamwork is essential to the vitality and life of the church. One person cannot do it all. The pastor of the church should not attempt to do all the work in the church.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Keeping Your Ministry Fresh and Creative

Self-care is a key to staying fresh and creative in ministry over the long haul according to Jim Somerville. I’ve been an ordained minister for 20 years, which means that when Easter Sunday comes around this year, I will climb the steps to the pulpit, look out over that beautiful, bonneted congregation, and breathe a heavy sigh. How will I…

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Leading Ideas
0 Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Lovett Weems draws church leadership lessons from Jim Collins’s book Good to Great and the Social Sectors, which itself draws lessons from the business world for the non-profit sector. When Jim Collins’s book Good to Great was published in 2001, it received immediate and widespread attention because of his previous work and the exhaustive research that went into the book, as…

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Leading Ideas
0 Small Churches as Healthy Family Systems

Lewis Parks examines basic concepts of family systems theory as a positive framework to understand the dynamics of small membership churches. While teaching pastoral care and counseling to a group of licensed pastors who serve small membership churches, I decided that a lecture on family systems would be just the ticket. Students of the pioneering work of Murray Bowen and…

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Leading Ideas
0 Measuring Church Numerical Growth is Not as Easy as it Seems

George Bullard suggests an expanded understanding of what represents real numerical growth in light of each church’s situation. A recent request for the names of growing churches caused me to think about how hard it is to measure church growth. One’s first reaction might be that it is an easy task. If a church has more people in attendance this…

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Leading Ideas
0 It’s Not about the Numbers…. Actually It Is about the Numbers

Lovett Weems stresses the need for quantitative metrics, arguing that churches will never make the changes needed to attract new people until they commit to reach those people. Qualitative and quantitative measures of church vitality both have their place.  A frequent indicator of ineffective leadership is a tendency either to ignore or to excuse actual outcomes and accountability. Have you…

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Leading Ideas
0 What Leaders Need to Know about the Emerging Church

Susan Cox-Johnson shares insights about the the Emerging Church and ways of connecting with postmodern generations. It was only a few years ago that I first heard of “The Emerging Church.” I encountered the literature of the emerging church in an evangelism class, and it immediately resonated with me. At that time, I was serving Broadway United Methodist Church located…

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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.