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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 Learning from the Mistakes of New Church Starts

Ten Most Common Mistakes Made by New Church Starts (Challis Press, 2008) by Jim Griffith and Bill Easum is a must-read for pastors founding new churches and those who work most closely with them. The authors draw from years of experience with new church starts to outline concisely ten practices that can limit the success of new churches. Given the…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Transformative Power of Listening

Religious leaders are often socialized to be better at speaking than at listening. It is understandable that preachers want to preach, teach, and lead with their voices and their carefully honed understandings of scripture and theology. Listening is difficult because it requires us to give up the role of expert and become a learner again. The act of letting go…

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Leading Ideas
0 Passing the Mantle: Crisis or Opportunity?

Four years ago a new bishop came to serve our area. For the first time in my ministry, I was older than my bishop! Around the same time, I turned fifty. These two events led me to think anew about my calling and my hopes and dreams for my life and ministry. One of the things I discovered was that…

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Leading Ideas
0 Who is Visiting Small Churches These Days?

When small church lay and clergy leaders gather, the first comments you often hear reflect an understandable anger, defensiveness, and dread of an imminent future. This is understandable given the challenges they face. But if you listen long enough, as I have done regularly for the last several years, you begin to pick up signs of hope — hope consistent…

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Leading Ideas
0 God’s Leaders Multiply, Not Maintain

As we begin thinking about fall stewardship campaigns, our minds may turn to the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30), the story of a master who entrusts property to his slaves and then calls each of them to account for how they cared for his property. Some predictable sermons immediately come to mind. This time of year, talents are usually…

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Leading Ideas
0 Ministry as Leadership

How are the practices of ministry understood and how are they learned? Is there an organizing principle for all the functions of ministry, or do they remain a list of skill sets that require separate forms of mastery? To put it another way, are these various abilities oriented toward a common purpose? I think so, and that purpose is religious…

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Leading Ideas
0 A Generation of Tinkerers

Robert Wuthnow’s book After the Baby Boomers (Princeton University Press, 2007) is about younger adults — a group he defines as persons from 18-45 years of age. Wuthnow, who is a sociologist, examines how the characteristics of this generation affect their practice of religion and spirituality. He introduces a variety of topics that seem to make a difference to younger…

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Leading Ideas
0 Strong Youth Ministry and the Call to Ministry

The other day I was driving down the interstate when I pulled into a roadside rest stop. Just as I stepped from my car, a long bus pulled up that had a sign that ran nearly the entire length with the name of a United Methodist church from North Carolina. A whole herd of youth poured out and headed for…

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Leading Ideas
0 The Ministry of the Missional Church: Community Led by the Spirit

The Ministry of the Missional Church (Baker Books, 2007) by Craig Van Gelder is not leadership in search of theological rationale. It is a theology of the church in search of the leadership practices intrinsic to the nature and mission of the church. And church leaders who have the patience to read through the theology to get to the practice will…

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Leading Ideas
0 It’s In the Mind

Most people know that it was Roger Bannister who first ran the mile in less than four minutes. It was on May 6, 1954, in Oxford, England, that Bannister achieved what was, at the time, the unbelievable feat of running the mile in 3:59.4 minutes. Have we convinced ourselves that low goals are all that are possible and thus have…

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Leading Ideas
0 Jesus as Transformational Leader

A leader’s continual presence among followers is integral to transformational leadership. It creates teachable moments, fosters relationship, and allows for targeted and personalized interactions. Transformational leaders focus on the whole person, attending to their followers’ needs for growth and achievement in ways that acknowledge and manage individual needs and desires. All this is possible because the leader is readily available…

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Leading Ideas
0 Living in Paradox — The Life of American Clergy

Brooks Holifield of Candler School of Theology has offered a monumental service to the church in his comprehensive and richly documented history of clergy in what we now know as the United States. In God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (Eerdmans, 2007). Clergy embody “an irreducibly paradoxical relation to American culture.” This tension at the center…

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Leading Ideas
0 Diversity Leadership in the Church

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,…

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Leading Ideas
0 Pastoral Transitions — Leaving Well

If you will be moving to a new congregation this summer, keep in mind the importance of ending your ministry well at your current location. It is easy to shift one’s thinking and emotional energy to the anticipated new congregation and neglect some key elements of leaving well and preparing the way for your successor. Most mistakes clergy make in…

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Leading Ideas
0 Pastoral Transitions — Preparing the Way for Your Successor

Below are some of the best practices related to pastoral transition suggested by several hundred pastors and denominational leaders. Spend quality time with your successor with an agreed upon agenda. Invite the new pastor to visit and ask what types of information would be most useful so you can prepare for the meeting. Maintain good successor relations. Prepare the way…

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Leading Ideas
0 Deliberate Outreach Strategy Leads to Growth

Worship attendance at Gardendale-Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church in Gardendale, Alabama, has increased more than 5 percent each year since 1999. One reason for the increase is three different worship experiences with one common message. We often begin the year with a series of messages designed with the unchurched in mind. For example, this year we began with a message…

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Leading Ideas
0 17 Ways to Welcome College Students

Your church can make a big difference in the life of a college student!  Here are some fun and easy ways to welcome college students who visit your congregation. They’ll appreciate your efforts and your church will be enriched by their participation. Feeling welcomed is the number one concern of students who attend a new church. Make a point to…

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Leading Ideas
0 By Any Means Necessary

Her name is Essalia. She is 25 years old. Ella no tiene tampoco novio o esposo, no sweetheart and no husband, but she is going to have a baby. She also does not speak English. Once we got our names straight at the nail salon when I was on vacation, she commented on my ring. “Que bonita! Su esposo es…

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Leading Ideas
0 Everyone Welcome?

Many congregations truly do believe they are open to everyone until someone different comes along making them feel uncomfortable. I meet people all the time — faithful people, smart people, good and decent people — who have walked away from the church because they have come up against our barricades — our rules, regulations, dress codes, and expectations of behavior.”…

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Leading Ideas
0 Why We are Losing Ground with Young Adults

I have the amazing privilege of working with spiritually sensitive and passionate young adults from across the southeast. I am also charged with understanding why the church is losing ground with young adults. After hundreds of conversations with young adults, I have identified some common strands running through their decisions to leave the church, or at least our version of…

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Leading Ideas
0 Changing Religious Traditions: Not New but Accelerating

The recently released report on shifting religious affiliations among Americans is receiving significant media attention. Prepared by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the report followed interviews with over 35,000 adults in the United States and gives a detailed picture of what most religious leaders had already assumed. While a shifting religious economy is not new, the extent…

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Leading Ideas
0 Review of What’s Theology Got to Do With It?: Convictions, Vitality, and the Church

Many of us intuit that there is a critical deficit of theology in contemporary congregations. Like Anthony Robinson, we have seen the “Pecos River syndrome,” a congregation that is a mile wide and a foot deep. Like Robinson, we have groped for a middle way between congregations that are indifferent to core beliefs and congregations that are uncharitable in handling…

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Leading Ideas
0 Eight Strategies for Managing Conflict

In her book Getting to Amen: Eight Strategies for Managing Conflict in the African American Church, Lora-Ellen McKinney summarizes key strategies for managing conflict in what she calls “The 8 P’s.” Church conflict results from the different perspectives held by the very human members of God’s house. For conflict to be resolved, church members must explore ways to move beyond…

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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.