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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 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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Leading Ideas
0 Overcoming Motion Sickness

Have you ever experienced motion sickness? Persons who suffer from motion sickness become severely ill when traveling at certain speeds or distances. In many cases, this limits or prevents extensive travel. Not only can this rob the person of valuable experiences, it may also hamper the travel of other family members. Visioning, change in pastoral leadership or leadership style, new…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Appropriate Use of Email in Church Leadership

In this era of electronic media, clergy are faced with particular challenges in pastoral conversations — particularly those conducted by email. This wonderfully efficient means of communication can easily become a vehicle for spontaneous and reactive expression of thoughts and feelings that would never be said in person. It is my pastoral practice not to reply by email or text…

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Leading Ideas
0 Relationships Are Everything

Just as all Christian leadership originates in our relationship with Christ, our day-by-day leadership depends on relationships with others that mirror the ideals of our faith. Leadership success is increasingly dependent on getting along with others. A recent global survey found that not delivering “acceptable results” was not among the most common reasons for failure. This does not mean, however,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Taking Time to Refocus

Not long ago, I realized that I had spent several weeks in a reactive mode — constantly dealing with one thing after another that popped onto my radar screen or crossed my desk as pastor. Certainly there are times in the ebb and flow of ministry when things spring up that require immediate attention. And that’s okay to a point.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Ask Bigger Questions

In June 2011, Steve Jobs made a twenty-minute presentation to the Cupertino City Council to introduce Apple’s plans for a new corporate headquarters, affectionately known as “the mothership.” This presentation caught my attention because it happened on the heels of Jobs’s big introduction of OSX Lion, iOS5, and iCloud at the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. I laughed that even…

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Leading Ideas
0 Expanding Your Prayer Ministry through Twitter

People in your community — many unknown to you — have prayer needs each day. Many of them share their prayer concerns using Twitter, the social media tool which allows people to broadcast short messages. Some churches are finding that using Twitter to expand their prayer ministries allows them to connect better with individual needs and community-wide concerns. I learned…

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Leading Ideas
0 Remaining Fruitful in the Midst of a Financial Reset

I think the American Church is undergoing a reset. America is getting older; and the Church is even older. For a generation, expenditures have increased while membership has declined. Mainline Protestant churches are at unsustainable levels of salary, benefits, and indebtedness. We can’t just downsize temporarily or ride out the storm. There must be fundamental changes in the way we…

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Leading Ideas
0 Congregational Focus

Dan Aleshire, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools in the U. S. and Canada, went back to his home town in Ohio to chronicle the ways in which the churches of the community had changed since his family moved there fifty years before. One church was Concord United Methodist Church located in open country when Dan was growing…

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Leading Ideas
0 Taking Note of Leadership Lessons

There is truth in the adage “Experience is the best teacher.” But how can we best capture the lessons experience teaches?  A few years ago, I started recording experiences and insights related to my pastoral leadership. I organized the document first in terms of the key elements of my job. Then, I continued with sections on great ideas, quotes, and…

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Leading Ideas
0 Fast Forwarding Your Church’s Community Engagement

Many churches today are pioneering a shift in which they are truly engaging their communities in mission. These churches are not only deploying their own members for service; they are engaging with people who aren’t part of their church, but who are attracted to rolling up their sleeves to bless the community. They are strategically engaging with other churches and…

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Leading Ideas
0 Christmas is Not Your Birthday

There was a time when churches were reluctant to take an offering at their Christmas Eve services. The reasoning was that many people at those services would be those who rarely came to church, and the last thing the church wanted to do was to confirm their preconception that churches only care about money. But today, in many places Christmas…

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Leading Ideas
0 Christmas Giving for Christ

Soon the seasons of Advent and Christmas will be with us, and we will be inundated with commercials and product advertisements on television, radio, and the internet. Consumerism at times overshadows the focus of the season. Many believers exchange gifts with co-workers, friends, and family, yet fail to present the season’s honoree — Jesus Christ — with a special gift…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Worship Recession

It is commonplace to hear references to what it means for churches to function in “the current financial recession.” But there is another recession going on in the United States that has been affecting churches far longer and more consistently than the economic downturn. It is the worship recession. Figures collected by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership from four…

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Leading Ideas
0 Reaching More Disciples

The first decade of the 21st century was one of highs and lows for U.S. congregations. In the wake of the tragedy of 9/11, many more people went to church for the next five Sundays or so. Then the numbers turned downward. If 9/11 and its aftermath shaped much of the external environment in the early years of the decade,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Renovate or Die

Bob Farr offers a generous collection of tools for congregational development in his book Renovate or Die: Ten Ways to Focus Your Church on Mission (Abingdon, 2011). Most of them are borrowed from others, but all of them are stamped from his experiences as a pastor of five vulnerable congregations and as the director of congregational excellence in the Missouri…

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Leading Ideas
0 Key Competencies for a Missional Congregation

The “missional DNA” of Floris United Methodist Church has been one of the keys to our growth and vitality. Fruitfulness in mission has had a dramatic impact on everything from worship attendance to stewardship. I am convinced that vigorous mission engagement is one of the key synergies that drives vitality in congregations of all sizes. What steps can a congregation take…

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Leading Ideas
0 Being a Stewardship Leader Requires Clarity

What do you think about financial stewardship? While there are a host of resources for churches on developing giving, it’s important to clarify your own thinking. The clearer you are yourself, the easier it will be for you to offer others a challenge to give. Leaders need to know what we think about giving, and we need to share that…

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Leading Ideas
0 2011 Clergy Age Trends Report Shows More Older and Younger Clergy

The Lewis Center for Church Leadership today released the 2011 version of its annual report Clergy Age Trends in the United Methodist Church. The report, prepared with assistance from the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits, shows increases in both older and younger clergy. The historic high median age of elders set in 2010 continues, as does a marked…

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Leading Ideas
0 Challenges to Active Church Participation

Virtually all churches are experiencing a changing environment regarding what they can expect from members in relation to time, participation, and energy. Some feel this is one reason for the ongoing worship attendance recession that began in 2002 and continues today. A new report from the Faith Communities Today research project provides data to substantiate this changing landscape. Based on…

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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.