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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 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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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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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.