Showing results for "Religion Matters" in Church & Church Leadership

Meet a man forced to live in a fast changing and godless society. He faced fears about the future, concern for his safety, and the discouragement of world that seemed to be falling apart at warp speed. Sound familiar? His name was Daniel, and with the power of hope, humility, and wisdom, he not only thrived, he changed an empire while he was at it. Though he lived thousands of years ago, he has a much to teach us today.

In 2015, the historian Chris Momany helped discover a manuscript that had been forgotten in a storage closet at Adrian College in Michigan. He identified it as the journal of a nineteenth-century Christian abolitionist and missionary, David Ingraham. As Momany and a fellow historian Doug Strong pored over the diary, they realized that studying this document could open new conversations for twenty-first-century Christians to address the reality of racism today. They invited a multiracial team of fourteen scholars to join in, thus launching the Dialogue on Race and Faith Project.

What if Christianity was far more liberating than the culture wars suggest? Can the conflict concerning Christianity and homosexuality be viewed from a more interpretative lens? James Alison, a Catholic priest who is also a gay man, has been wrestling with the matter for over forty years. This luminous and rigorous book dismantles the fear-based binaries which have dominated conversations in the Church.

Uncover the ways the Christian church has changed in recent years—from the decline of the mainline denominations to the mega-churchification of American culture—and a hopeful reimagining of what the church might look like going forward. The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented...

Insights from Effective Churches on New Member Classes and AssimilationFindings from a national study to improve membership classes and to motivate current members into active ministry.How do churches move members—both old and new—into ministry? Many church staff and lay leaders know they...

Why would a leader ever want to be mean? It's all about the vision. Almost every organization has a vision, but few stick to it over time. Even after short-term success, visions tend to blur, drift, and fade. Why does this happen? Accomplishing the vision requires intentionality. It requires...

The simple practice of loving our neighbors has more power than the best professionally produced Sunday "show" in town. After attending the "coolest" and fastest-growing church in town for a few months, Brian Mavis asked some of his neighbors if they would attend church with him. The neighbors...

In many circles, the image of what a pastor is or does looks nothing like the picture Jesus paints for his disciples of the character that marks citizens of his kingdom. Shepherding Like Jesus is a call to rebel against much of what our culture understands pastoral leadership to be and return to being the shepherd God has called pastors to be. It’s an invitation to recover the most essential element of pastoral ministry: the character of Christ.

There are many books on leadership strategies and church structures, but this one looks at what matters most: the character and attitude of church leaders. It recognizes that the spiritual health of the church leaders in large part determines the spiritual health of the congregation and therefore the success of the ministry. Rico Tice draws on decades of experience in church leadership to call fellow pastors and others with oversight of areas of church ministry to define success biblically, fight their sin, lead themselves, and serve their churches.