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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 Take Your Ministries Outside the Walls

How do I get my church started on the missional path? The simplest way is often the best. What would happen if every ministry of the church began to give some of its effort to an outside-church experience? For example, what if the Trustees Work Day at church also included an hour of picking up trash in the surrounding neighborhood and,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Giving our Best to God?

A phrase made popular by management writer Philip Crosby is “quality is free.” It reminds us that efforts to ensure that work is done right do not cost us time and money. It is the errors that cost. Just think how much extra time and effort are required to correct a mistake or redo something not done properly in the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Stop Complaining about Sunday Morning Sports

It’s a common complaint among clergy types, “Sunday morning sports are taking people away from worship!” This lament and the exasperation that accompanies it go deeper than just whether a family shows up on a particular Sunday. It is the lament of the loss of the privileged place that the Church — and clergy — once enjoyed in our culture.…

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Leading Ideas
0 Listening: A Key Team Building Skill

It just may be that the best way to make people feel truly honored is to listen to them with rapt and sincere attentiveness. Few practices are more meaningful than the person who will give you undivided attention; few oversights are more demeaning than when someone makes you feel that listening is an unwanted chore. One reason some groups never…

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Leading Ideas
0 Unclutter Your Church

What needs to die in your church? We begin the journey of restarting your church by allowing for, even encouraging, places of death. We choose to have a memorial service for what worked in the past, to honor the prior period of time, and to make a decision to move forward. We choose to let the past set us free…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Theology of Social Media

Social media outlets have become indispensable resources to church leaders seeking to be faithful to the Gospel in the modern world. While there are practical reasons for implementing social media as part of our ministry models, the more fundamental reasons are theological. We were created to be in relationship with one another. Our need for relationship is part of the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Working with Committees and Boards

One of the least glamorous jobs of any church leader is attending board or committee meetings. Understanding the purpose, vision, and goals of each ministry board or committee is immensely helpful in making the most of time spent in meetings. Meetings are inextricably linked to church work, and everyone desires that their meetings be effective. Yet few leaders are taught…

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Leading Ideas
0 Limitations of an Annual Review

December is often the time when congregations and denominations require annual evaluations of clergy and staff. Evaluation is a good thing. But when the only feedback provided is in the once-a-year formal evaluation, the limitations often exceed the benefits. There are two basic types of assessment. The required once-a-year review is an example of “summative” evaluation. Usually these are required…

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Leading Ideas
0 Mission-driven Church Mergers

In their book Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird examine the recent wave of church mergers. The book makes the bold claim that mission-driven mergers have the potential to transform the church world by expanding the impact of strong churches while revitalizing plateaued or declining churches. Mergers today succeed when there is a united,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Doing Church “as Usual” Is Not Working

The Pew Research Center’s recent report on changes in religious affiliation in the United States received major attention among both secular and religious media. Some of the findings were expected. The report shows Protestants declining to below 50 percent of the population, continuing a long trend. The U.S. Protestant majority that began in colonial times has been eroding more rapidly…

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Leading Ideas
0 Stewarding God’s Gift of Time

God has given each of us the ability to do many things. Yet we have to make choices, to say no to some activities in order to do well the things God has called us to. Using our time wisely requires focus and discipline. Stewardship is the theological principle that underpins making such choices. God blesses us with material resources,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Worship as Mission

When congregations and their leaders think about worship or about mission, it often appears that they think of the two as compartmentalized and entirely separate from each other. Worship and mission are, it seems, quite different aspects of a congregation’s life and ministry without any necessary or intrinsic relationship to each other. In a new post-Christendom world, everything a congregation…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Risks and Rewards of Being an Associate Pastor

Let’s face it. Working as an associate pastor is not glamorous. You are not preaching every Sunday, your name is not on the church sign, you get paid less (or in some traditions, not at all), and many church members assume your tenure will be brief. Some senior pastors have been solo pastors for so long that they tend to…

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Leading Ideas
0 The One Room (Church) Schoolhouse

My mother attended a one room schoolhouse for all but the last two years of her public education. As a Baby Boomer, I grew up riding the wave of school growth and consolidation and the several accommodations that went with the territory: school buses, area rather than local sports, and, above all, specialization in curriculum with division of the student…

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Leading Ideas
0 Focus Can Help Christmas Mission Giving

Many churches confront a question of missional focus, especially as the holiday season approaches. One group proposes an angel tree project. Another wants to do a coat drive. Someone else is collecting toiletries for the homeless, grocery cards for the hungry, toys for needy children. Needs are great everywhere. So shouldn’t your church offer many opportunities for people to help?…

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Leading Ideas
0 Showing Appreciation for Your Pastor

Some of you may know that October is designated Pastor Appreciation Month in some denominations and congregations. This is not a major national observance, but some churches do use the designation to make sure they show appreciation for their clergy leadership. While such gestures are thoughtful and appreciated, most clergy would settle for more modest ongoing respect and encouragement. It’s…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Keystone Habit for Our Time

A much-talked-about book currently is The Power of Habit. The author, Charles Duhigg, attempts to answer the questions, “Why do habits exist, and how can we change them?” While Duhigg presents scientific evidence about how habits set our patterns of behavior, the most important part of the book, in my opinion, are the stories of how habits are changed, not…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Digital Ministry Bible

The “hope for revitalizing our churches,” maintain Elizabeth Drescher and Keith Anderson, “is related to the ability of leaders in ministry to engage people exactly where they are. And ‘where they are’ increasingly includes social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.” Their book, Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012) is packed with information about social media tools…

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Leading Ideas
0 Metrics: A Tool for Learning, Not Judging

The current focus on setting numerical goals for ministry and reporting on the results is not new, though it is now greatly expanded. In the past, virtually all the goals churches set had to do with money. The most obvious example is the annual budget. A budget is a goal that the church works all year to achieve, monitors the…

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Leading Ideas
0 Feedback without the Pain

A limitation to most feedback systems is that they tend to accentuate the negative. We know that leaders want and need feedback for growth, but the normal evaluation systems often leave them more discouraged than energized to improve. We also know that while people tend to remember the criticism from reviews, it is praise that truly motivates people to change.…

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Leading Ideas
0 From Assimilation to Acculturation

I believe that when we talk about the integration of new members into a congregation, we need to embrace the language of acculturation, not assimilation. In the 1980s, literature and workshops about assimilating new members became the rage in church circles. People were asking, “Why are attendance and membership numbers showing such rapid decline?” Leaders were convinced that better systems…

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Leading Ideas
0 Shifting Entry Points

Traditionally, worship has been regarded as the primary venue through which individuals enter the life of a congregation. In The Inviting Church (Alban, 1987, 74-75), Roy Oswald and Speed Leas linked new-member assimilation with spiritual growth. They named six levels of incorporation into the spiritual life of the church that progressed in this order: joining, belonging, participating, searching, journeying inward,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Stewards of God’s Grace

A noted British economist recently submitted to the government a review of the equity markets in England. In writing about the current situation of financial institutions in general, John Kay noted that “trust in the financial sector is at an all-time low.” He chose an intriguing title for his piece: “Finance Needs Stewards, Not Toll Collectors.” That is a very…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Wilderness Experience

For a number of years our leaders have been using “exile“ as a metaphor for the situation of the church. Their assumption is that we have been removed from our place of prominence in the culture and find ourselves without power and status, much like an exile. Even if that language is not used, the numerous charts showing the decline…

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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.