Religious Leadership

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...

Current church planting, growth, and development strategies cannot be sustained. We need to work smarter in our rapidly changing world. We must become disruptive. And yet we typically hesitate to embrace change. We like our traditions. We prefer our familiar patterns and comfortable ruts. Still...

Get a better understanding of the Bible through ten words that help define God's plan for restoring and redeeming our broken world. The Bible contains around 750,000 words—a number that would intimidate even the most seasoned readers of the Bible. Yet, from the beginning of time, God set in...

Against profiles of other leaders, drawn from different times in history, Jesus emerges as a role model whose example resonates powerfully with all of us leaders - in corporate boardrooms, in government, in social causes, in sports teams, in families, in every facet of life.

The Garden in Eden was filled with fruit-producing trees, sprouting plants and grasses, and gently flowing rivers. Adam, G-d's chosen king/priest, was called to cultivate the garden's fertile soil, to guard the sacred space from external enemies, and to rule over the Earth. After breaking covenant with YHWH, his king, Adam was banished to the field, a place of thorns and thistles, where he became a slave to the earth. The Temple Revealed in the Garden: Priests and Kings examines the Garden story from an ancient Near East perspective.

In recent decades, Americans in Rome have revived an ancient Christian custom: the daily pilgrimage to dozens of Rome's most striking churches during Lent and Easter Week. Along this historical and spiritual pathway, pilgrims encounter hidden artistic wonders and treasured Christian commentaries while also confronting the great mysteries of the Christian faith through a program of biblical and early Christian readings. The itinerary of the Roman station church pilgrimage offers Christians an opportunity to reflect on their religion and ponder the quality of their discipleship.

C'è un'ansia di cambiamento nel mondo. Papa Francesco la raccoglie nei suoi gesti e nelle sue parole, specialmente in un tempo di crisi quale quello che stiamo vivendo. È chiaro che abbiamo tutti bisogno di capire che cosa ci sta accadendo, di dare una lettura umana e spirituale di quel che viviamo. Francesco, come si comprende in questo volume, assimila la visionedi sant'Ignazio di Loyola così come emerge negli Esercizi Spirituali.

Read by the author. Ministry is complicated, and every leadership challenge is unique. How can you lead effectively when there isn't a clear path forward? Real life ministry is complicated--far more complicated than is typically captured in leadership books. There are moving parts and people who...

This book will open your eyes to the needs, frustrations, dreams, and potential of your church’s greatest resource—the 60 percent of its members who provide far more than 60 percent of what keeps it going. The women of your church think the world of you, pastor. But they deeply wish you...

It doesn’t take a long list of statistics to convince you that our world is broken. Mission trips, service projects, and supporting children through relief organizations are just a few of the ways that many youth workers engage their students in serving the least, the last, and the lost. As...

When we really love something, we talk about it. This is true when find a great new restaurant, enjoy a sports team, or when we stumble onto a fantastic new product. We want to share the joy and tell others. We naturally “evangelize” and invite others to experience what we have found...

“When are you going to become a real pastor?”“When are you going to get your own church?”“How long will you be here?”During his thirty-one years serving in churches across the country, Doug Fagerstrom has both known the joys of being a ministry staff member and experienced many...

Groundbreaking research based on a national database of over 200,000 churches shows that the overall United States population is growing faster than the church. The director of the American Church Research Project, Dave Olson, has worked to analyze church attendance, showing that it is virtually...

The Great Commission is not just for professional clergy; it is a charge to every follower of Christ—ordinary Christians like you and me.Bob Roberts Jr. urges disciples of Jesus to reclaim their role in God’s transforming work around the globe. In Real-Time Connections, Roberts illuminates...

Lyn Brakeman was among the first women to enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church just after the General Convention voted in 1976 that women could be priests. The bishop of her diocese had voted against ordaining women priests, and hospitality toward female aspirants was guarded at best. So why would a 40-year-old institutional naïf, suburban housewife, and mother of four enter such unfriendly territory to seek priestly ordination at a time when her personal life was in chaos?

Herbert Cooper was headed down a very different road, living a reckless lifestyle that would have destroyed him in the end, but God had a different plan. He heard the gospel at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting, at which he wasn’t even supposed to be, and he gave his life to Christ...

Your career is compelling. Your ministry at church is God’s calling. But do you realize how these outside activities capture your heart and steal your time and energy from your family? Adventure becomes what you want to do, while family is what you are supposed to do. Now author Rich Wagner...

The Multiplying Church is a primer for pastors and lay leaders involved in, or wanting to learn about, the church multiplication groundswell in North America. It shows how multiplying churches should be a natural, regular function of every church to reach the 70 percent of Americans who have no...

A New Kind of Youth Ministrychallenges you to take a fresh look at your ministry through the concept of “reculturing”—the act of changing the way things are done or simply creating a culture of change. No fly-bynight, change-for-the-sake-of-change concept, it’s about altering our...

The gospel presents a life-changing NUTS wisdom that conflicts with normal ways of making sense of the world. There is the World According to Normal. There is the World According to NUTS . . . where NUTS is an acronym for Never Underestimate the Spirit. The wisdom of Jesus is a NUTS wisdom...