Church Ministry

Most leaders start out with passion, a sense of calling, and a focus on building ministry skills. Such things might get some results, but they are not enough to sustain a healthy ministry - or a healthy life. Beyond the vocational capacities every church planter needs, there's a range of capabilities more difficult to measure but even more essential: What veteran church planter Tim Morey calls spiritual competencies. Morey provides here a practical guide to spiritual formation geared to the unique needs of church planters.

Brokenness, communion, servanthood, and obedience. These four characteristics provide the framework for Leadership as an Identity. Examining each trait, Loritts undermines the pervasive and unbiblical assumptions about leadership.

In Sunday Matters, Paul David Tripp shares 52 devotions about the beauty and significance of church, helping Christians engage in vibrant gathered worship each week. Each short, accessible meditation highlights an essential spiritual topic, including divine grace, gratitude, our identity in Christ, and dependence on the Lord. Over the course of a year, Sunday Matters will strengthen each believer’s personal relationship with God and fill churches with joyful, engaged, and passionate worshipers.

To many in the West, Orthodoxy remains shrouded in mystery, an exotic and foreign religion that survived in the East following the Great Schism of 1054 that split the Christian world into two camps - Catholic and Orthodox. However, as the second largest Christian denomination, Orthodox Christianity is anything but foreign to the nearly 300 million worshipers who practice it. For them, Orthodoxy is a living, breathing reality; a way of being Christian ultimately rooted in the person of Jesus and the experience of the early church.

For those who are weary of Christian cliché and compromise crowding out what was supposed to be good news, The Naked Gospel offers the fresh take on the story of Jesus you've been waiting for. As a university student, Andrew Farley found himself physically and emotionally addicted to street evangelism and Bible study. Yet despite his fervid behavior, he knew something was missing. That something was an understanding of the gospel that is stripped of the churchy jargon and hypocrisies of the modern church.

What is an ideal church, and how can you tell? How does it look different from other churches? More importantly, how does it act differently, especially in society? Many of us aren't sure how to answer those questions, even though we probably have some preconceived idea. But with this book, you don't have to wonder any more.

Fellowship among believers is more than just talking over coffee after church service. Biblical fellowship in New Testament times - or koinonia - had rich and varied meanings, including covenant relationship, partnership in the gospel, communion with God and others, and the sharing of earthly possessions. In True Community, best-selling author Jerry Bridges guides you through koinonia and its implications for today’s church.

Everyone seems to understand that healthy organizations nurture flourishing individuals and societies—what Jesus desires for all. How can Christian business and ministry leaders create a positive organizational culture and identity? Justin Irving has spent twenty years studying, teaching, and reflecting on organizational leadership. Drawing wisdom from the Bible, contemporary leadership theory, and the insights of over two hundred executive leaders, Irving provides a theological framework that makes human flourishing the driving motivation for leading organizations well.

Budgeting for a Healthy Church examines each section of the budget in light of Biblical principles to show how a church budget can lock in healthy approaches to ministry. Whereas most books on church budgeting are "how" books, explaining how the budgeting process should work, this is a "what" book, helping church leaders determine the pastoral implications of what they choose to fund in their budgets.

In Biblical Counseling and the Church, Bob Kellemen and Kevin Carson have assembled over twenty respected ministry leaders who examine the relationship between counseling and the church. This comprehensive resource, part of the Biblical Counseling Coalition series, helps leaders and counselors develop a vision that goes beyond being a church with a biblical counseling ministry to becoming a church of biblical counseling—a church culture that is saturated by "one-another" ministry.

Through a close exegetical reading of Paul's letters, this volume shows how Paul prioritized moral formation and community-building in his pastoral ministry and placed the practice of communal discernment in churches at the heart of life in the Spirit. Applying these fundamental insights for today's churches, Lewis reclaims Paul's primary pastoral emphasis on moral discernment and community-building, showing how this practice can be used in a variety of local church communities.

Jim Cymbala—New York Times best-selling author and long-time pastor of The Brooklyn Tabernacle—has been watching the pressing need for back-to-the-basics spiritual leadership among Christians, and he's seen so many churches come to defeat because so many leaders forget this one truth: Your church is not your church. It's Christ's church. In order for his church to flourish, we have to minister his way.

Every church, every organization, has experienced them: betrayal, deception, grumbling, envy, exclusion. They make life together difficult and prevent congregations from developing the skills, virtues, and practices they need to nurture sturdy, life-giving communities.

Real-Life Discipleship explains what should happen in the life of every Christian and in every small group so that the church becomes an army of believers dedicated to seeing the world saved. With the overriding goal to train disciples who know how to make more disciples, this book offers proven tools and strategies from Real Life Ministries, one of America’s fastest-growing churches. Discover what the Bible says about true and effective discipleship with these strategies and practices.

This book contains stories told from the point of view of those who experienced the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, giving us insight into their meaning. While the section headings provide context for the revelations, they don't tell the complete story. What questions prompted the revelations? What did the Lord's responses mean to those He addressed? How did they respond? Perfect for study with the Doctrine and Covenants.

It’s time to break free from our Sunday-centric, formulaic versions of church and instead architect fresh kingdom ecosystems as an ancient yet new frontier for sustainable mission. The temptation for many church leaders is to take what’s worked elsewhere and use it as a paint-by-number. Yet Jesus showed us a different way. Every word he spoke and everything he did utterly broke the molds, rules, and laws that people had created to confine God and his kingdom.

Over the last 30 years, many influential church leaders and church planters in America have adopted various models for reaching unchurched people. An “attractional” model will seek to attract people to a local church. Younger leaders may advocate a more “missional” approach, in which believers live and work among unchurched people and intentionally seek to serve like Christ. While each of these approaches have merit, something is still missing, something even more fundamental to the mission of the church: discipleship.

Sex and money scandals. An exploding divorce rate. Drug-addicted youths. And an ever-growing worldliness. Today's evangelical church is fighting battles on all fronts. And we seem to be losing these battles to the relentlessly encroaching world. Perhaps the answers to our problems are not in the present, but in the past. Because there was time when Christians were able to stand up to world.

Is your organization in danger of Mission Drift? Without careful attention, faith-based organizations drift from their founding mission. It's that simple. It will happen. Slowly, silently, and with little fanfare, organizations routinely drift from their purpose, and many never return to their original intent. Harvard and the YMCA are among those that no longer embrace the Christian principles on which they were founded. But they didn't drift off course overnight. Drift often happens in small and subtle ways.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life represent the basic conflict between the powers of darkness and the Kingdom of God. There Were Two Trees in the Garden is a study of the fundamental differences between these two trees and how they still affect our lives today.