Diversity Leadership in the Church
By Jeffrey S. Rogers

As church leaders attempt to address the challenges presented by the expanding diversity of local congregations and American culture at large, a new energizing vision is necessary. Churches need new strategies and tactics to speak wisdom to an increasingly foolish and fractured world in which it is impossible to pull out the weeds without uprooting the wheat also. Partiality, partisanship, and polemics masquerading as prophetic witness will no longer do. The energizing vision for our time must be to build a house for all God’s children, not just for some, an enterprise that will require a new breed of “diversity leadership” in the church. To live into a new vision, local congregations and their leaders must develop new expertise – new ways of seeing, thinking, believing, and behaving – to respond wisely and well to the variety of diversities they are encountering.

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Book Notes
by Lovett H. Weems, Jr.

Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church
by Nelson Searcy, Regal, 2007, $12.99

Nelson Searcy began The Journey Church of the City in New York City in 2002. A major focus of the congregation has been to develop systems that strengthen the church’s effectiveness in reaching people. Their assimilation system is described in this book. Every church can learn from their experience in developing practices that make it more likely that first-time visitors not only return but become fully-committed disciples in your congregation.

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Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

Knowing the importance of small groups, many churches struggle to determine what constitutes a small group. William R. Hoyt suggests a question he finds helpful.

Does the group put people into relationship
with a small enough number of people that they can be known, cared for, encouraged, challenged, taught, helped,
and held accountable by the others in the group?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution:  Joe Arnold

Copyright © 2008 by the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Leading Ideas material may be freely distributed with attribution (exclusive of material protected by separate copyright).