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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 What’s Your Church’s “Ladder”?

When people think of your church, what comes to mind? Is your church seen as similar to other churches? Different? How would church members answer those questions? How would others in the community respond? Do people think of your church as one of many churches, or do they associate your church with something distinctive? It matters. A Faith Community Today…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leaders Believe Things Can Happen

One of the most important contributions a leader can make is to believe that things can happen. When we do not, they will not. It is that simple. I learned this lesson when my congregation needed to raise three to five million dollars to buy a plot of land for a larger facility. I found this financial challenge intimidating. When…

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Leading Ideas
0 Spiritual Lessons from a Vinedresser

Judith Sutera, a Benedictine sister, has spent decades as vinedresser for her monastery’s garden after careful apprenticeship with a mentor wise to the ways of fruitfulness. Below are lessons she learned about the ways fruitfulness occurs. They are from her book The Vinedresser’s Notebook: Spiritual Lessons in Pruning, Waiting, Harvesting, and Abundance, published by Abingdon Press and illustrated by Paul…

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Leading Ideas
0 Tell Your Stewardship Story

Early in my own ministry, I always found stewardship season anxiety-producing. While I got better at it, I still found the fall campaign difficult. One year the program we were using strongly suggested the pastor make his or her pledge public as part of the stewardship sermon. In our congregation, there was a lot of anxiety about the confidentiality of…

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Leading Ideas
0 Music — the Bellwether of Church Health

After air quality, music is the single greatest environmental factor for your community, because it determines how people feel in your church. It has the power to make them feel like pampered customers or dissatisfied ones. It also has the power to make them feel like they’re part of the movement of growing disciples that we want our parish to be. Furthermore,…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Importance of a Narrative Budget

Narrative budgeting has a critical role to play in any comprehensive parish stewardship program. Basic philanthropic theory indicates that people want their money to have an impact. Narrative budgeting is the best tool I have found to demonstrate to donors how their money and time are filtering through the church to touch the lives of people in need. We make…

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Leading Ideas
0 Use Trial Periods for New Ideas

Lovett H. Weems Jr. says using a trial period to launch new ideas is a non-threatening approach. Trial periods also encourage feedback and engagement in decision making. It is much easier for people to “live their way into a new way thinking” than to “think their way into a new way of living.” Yet church leaders almost invariably ask people…

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Leading Ideas
0 Trend toward Older Clergy Continues in 2014

For the past ten years, the Lewis Center in partnership with the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits has reported annually on Clergy Age Trends in the United Methodist Church. The Lewis Center prepares these reports so that church leaders can see the most important trends in clergy numbers and ages in such a way that they understand these…

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Leading Ideas
0 Change Leaders Persevere

Regularly we remind others and ourselves that resurrection never happens until after a death. Yet often in leading a significant change, we panic. When the smooth upward trajectory that we expected does not happen, we may blame ourselves for not being a better leader. We may even abandon the entire project. In graphing change, we tend to draw an arrow or…

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Leading Ideas
0 Models for Budget Building

Churches use a variety of budget building models. No one model or combination of models is right for every church. What approach might best fit your situation? You do not want a budget that is doomed to fail because the goals were out of reach. On the other hand, you do not want the budget to be so modest and…

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Leading Ideas
0 The New Church Family

Given the title of Linda Ranson Jacobs’s new book, Attract Families to Your Church and Keep Them Coming Back (Abingdon Press, 2014), one might assume it focuses on how a church can develop top-notch programs for children and youth to draw young families and bring new life to tired and aging congregations. While she affirms that high-quality children’s ministry is…

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Leading Ideas
0 Worship from the Eyes of a Child

To make worship more family friendly, you might look at it through the eyes of a child. Ask other ministers and church leaders what they think a child would see. Go in your sanctuary or worship center and get down on your knees and take a look around. What does the environment look like from a three- or four-foot level?…

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Leading Ideas
0 Learning to Fail Fast

While reading recent studies in leadership development trends, I was reminded of Paul’s call in Romans to be “transformed by the renewal of your minds.” It is from such renewed ways of thinking that we are able to discern God’s will and be the leaders God would have us be. The complexity and rapidity of change today requires much more…

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Leading Ideas
0 Effective Church-School Partnerships

Effective church-school partnerships take a true commitment and willingness to build long-term, sacrificial relationships. Learning from the many congregations that have begun partnerships with low-income schools, we can take away several key lessons on what works and what doesn’t. Find out what schools need, and meet those needs. Period. While I understand the temptation to dictate what we see as…

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Leading Ideas
0 Educating All God’s Children

Any church leader looking to be convinced that the state of public education in America is a Christian concern need look no further than Nicole Baker Fulgham’s Educating All God’s Children: What Christians Can — and Should — Do to Improve Public Education for Low-Income Children (Brazos Press, 2013). The book makes a compelling case that the academic achievement gap…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Power of Five Questions

In a local church, feedback will happen — whether you ask for it or not! But the challenge is to collect feedback in a systematic and constructive way when so much spontaneous feedback is qualitative and subjective. Feedback is the lifeblood of creative, responsive church leadership. So it is important for leaders to model the behavior of giving and receiving…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Love Letter to a Closed Church

You walk up the concrete steps between the tall white columns. You try the door. It doesn’t open. You try again. It is locked. It’s Sunday morning and the church is locked. You listen at the door — but you hear no sound. Everything is quiet. For the first time in ninety years — the doors are locked tight on…

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Leading Ideas
0 Learning from Growing Churches in England

The Church of England set out to learn from the 18 percent of their churches that grew in the decade up to 2010. A study conducted between 2011 and 2013 sought to investigate the factors influencing church growth in the Church of England. While there is “no single recipe” for growth, they concluded there are some ingredients closely associated with growing…

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Leading Ideas
0 What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Last summer I joined a large group of extended family and friends at the beach. There were, on and off, about twenty-five to thirty of us. Come Sunday morning, some slept in, some worked out, two went running, one read the newspaper and watched the Sunday morning talk shows. Most of the group undertook an obligatory annual ritual of pancakes…

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Leading Ideas
0 Intergenerational Ministry and the Small Church

Church leaders typically consider it a liability when they are unable to provide focused age-specific ministry to every demographic in the congregation. But in large and thoroughly age-segregated churches where the generations seldom interact, children and youth can move through the church without ever being integrated into congregational life in any meaningful way. They go from the nursery to children’s…

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Leading Ideas
0 What’s Good about That?

It’s good to pay attention to what’s going well. Most congregations — like most people — can accomplish more by building on their strengths than worrying about how to fix everything that could be better. That’s the basic insight of Appreciative Inquiry and other asset-based approaches to strategic planning: Instead of asking “What’s the matter?” ask, “What’s good? What’s going well?”…

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Leading Ideas
0 The First Two Minutes of Worship

For many years, my wife and I were regular viewers of “The Tonight Show” — first with Johnny Carson, then with Jay Leno. We have now become fairly regular viewers of the new “Tonight Show” and its new host, Jimmy Fallon. Fallon has a consistent way of beginning each night. He emerges from behind the stage curtains with joy, exuberance,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Leadership Lessons from The Salvation Army

For most of us, The Salvation Army has been an icon of service throughout our lives. The inner workings of the Army are unknown to most people, overshadowed by their caring presence among the poorest and most vulnerable in our midst. That changed somewhat when noted management expert Peter Drucker called them “by far the most effective organization in the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Social Media and Pastoral Moves

What should pastors do about their social media relationships when they move from one pastoral assignment to another? Do you “unfriend” all former members on Facebook and “unfollow” them on Twitter? After all, members in the church you are leaving may be watching to see if you post affectionate notes about your new church. You might find yourself curious about…

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Leading Ideas
0 Preparing to Receive a New Pastor

Welcoming a new pastor in genuine and effective ways lays the groundwork for a healthy and vital relationship and for the development of stable, long-term ministries together. The following suggestions from 50 Ways to Welcome your New Senior or Associate Pastor will help your congregation receive a new pastor with a spirit of openness and hospitality. Open your hearts and…

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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.