Ministry Leadership

Leadership expert and New York Times–bestselling author John Maxwell offers powerful principles for connecting with others so you can lead them well. This practical guide to fostering relationships in all areas of life equips you to tap into the most precious resource of all: people.

"I'm tired of helping others enjoy God―I just want to enjoy God for myself." With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls. Each chapter includes a spiritual practice to ensure your soul gets the nourishment it needs. Forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God is the best choice you can make for yourself and for those you lead.

Leadership in Christian Perspective brings the best of leadership theory and research together with biblical reflection and examples of leadership in action. Organized around "nine empowering practices," it integrates solid research in leadership studies with biblical and theological reflection on the leadership ideas that are most compatible with Christian faith, making it an important resource for professors and students in leadership and pastoral theology courses, pastors and church leaders, and Christian business leaders.

Is Atheism Dead? is an entertaining, impressively wide-ranging, and decidedly provocative answer to that famous 1966 Time cover that itself provocatively asked “Is God Dead?” In a voice that is by turns witty, muscular, and poetic, Metaxas intentionally echoes C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton in cheerfully and logically making his astonishing case, along the way presenting breathtaking - and often withering - new evidence and arguments against the idea of a Creatorless universe.

Let's Take Our Job Back is an urgent call to action for pastors and ministry leaders to reclaim the church's mission: to be the transformative force that Jesus envisioned. Kelly Stickel addresses the global church's response to contemporary crises—COVID-19, political polarization, racial injustice, and more—emphasizing that now, more than ever, the church must step up, take responsibility for its shortcomings, rediscover its true identity, and become the solution to the world's problems.

In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology.

We've seen the news stories and heard the rumors. Maybe we ourselves have been hurt by a narcissistic church leader. It's easy to throw the term around and diagnose others from afar. But what is narcissism, really? And how does it infiltrate the church?

No one wants to see a church die. And yet, far too many churches are dying. For more than 25 years, Dr. Thom Rainer has helped churches grow, reverse the trends of decline, and has autopsied those that have died. From this experience, he has discovered 12 consistent themes among those churches that have died. Yet, it's not gloom and doom because from those 12 themes, lessons on how to keep your church alive have emerged.

Rachel Hollis has seen it too often: women not living into their full potential. They feel a tugging on their hearts for something more, but they’re afraid of embarrassment, of falling short of perfection, of not being enough. In Girl, Stop Apologizing, number-one New York Times best-selling author and founder of a multimillion-dollar media company, Rachel Hollis sounds a wake-up call. She knows that many women have been taught to define themselves in light of other people - whether as wife, mother, daughter, or employee....

Many Christian families have never experienced the joys and benefits of family worship. But as Donald S. Whitney makes clear, the daily worship of God by families at home is a practice rooted in the Bible and common throughout Christian history. How can people unfamiliar with family worship lead it in their own homes? How do busy households in today's culture recover faithfulness in family worship? This practical book shows you how simple and easy it can be.

For every celebrity pastor exiting the ministry in the spotlight, there are many more lesser-known pastors leaving in the shadows. Pastor and best-selling author Paul David Tripp argues that lurking behind every pastoral failure is the lack of a strong leadership community. Tripp draws on his decades of ministry experience to give churches twelve gospel principles necessary to combat this leadership crisis.

Saint, slave or scholar? Patrick of Ireland is known as all three, but who is he really? Let K. C. Murdarasi bring to light the real life of this father of the Christian faith. Kidnapped from his home and family as a young boy you would think forgiveness would have been far from his mind.Yet with God's grace Patrick returned to the land of his captivity where he preached the good news of Jesus Christ to slaves and kings alike - and left a legacy of faith that would last for centuries.

While many aspects of leadership development are similar for women and men, women face different cultural expectations and have different experiences than their male counterparts. Anna Morgan's own experiences in pastoral ministry leadership launched her search for a holistic way to grow the skills, influence, and authority of women who are gifted and called as leaders. This book provides a positive, comprehensive research-based model for developing women in church and ministry leadership. Morgan identifies seven aspects of leadership development that form a woman over her lifetime.

Being a pastor is a complicated calling. Pastors are often pulled in multiple directions and must "become all things to all people" (1 Cor. 9:22). What does the New Testament say (or not say) about the pastoral calling? And what can we learn about it from the apostle Paul? According to popular New Testament scholar Scot McKnight, pastoring must begin first and foremost with spiritual formation, which plays a vital role in the life and ministry of the pastor. As leaders, pastors both create and nurture culture in a church.

Dangerous Calling reveals the truth that the culture surrounding our pastors is spiritually unhealthy—an environment that actively undermines the well-being and effectiveness of our church leaders and thus the entire church body. Here is a book that both diagnoses and offers cures for issues that impact every member and church leader, and gives solid strategies for fighting the all-important war that rages in our churches today.

Logos Book of the Year. Meetings can sap our energy, rupture community and thoroughly demoralize us. They can go on forever with no resolution. Or they can rush along without consensus just to "get through the agenda." What if there was another way? Church boards and other Christian leadership teams have long relied on models adapted from the business world. Ruth Haley Barton, president of the Transforming Center, helps teams transition to a much more suitable model—the spiritual community that discerns God's will together.

The major difference between achieving people and average people is their perception of and response to failure. John C. Maxwell takes a closer look at failure - and reveals that the secret of moving beyond failure is to use it as a lesson and a stepping-stone. He covers the top reasons people fail and shows how to master fear instead of being mastered by it. Listeners will discover that positive benefits can accompany negative experiences - if you have the right attitude.

Do you feel too overwhelmed to enjoy life, unable to sort out the demands on your time? Are you doing your best work as a leader yet not making an impact? Have you ever felt stuck, powerless to change your environment? In The Emotionally Healthy Leader, best-selling author Peter Scazzero shows leaders how to develop a deep, inner life with Christ, examining its profound implications for surviving stress, planning and decision-making, building teams, creating healthy culture, influencing others, and much more.

Millions are satisfied to sit through hour-long, weekly religious services. Millions more have left the church, brokenhearted and cynical. But God is waking up his people - people who will risk everything and sacrifice anything to become the dynamic, powerful church seen in Scripture. We Are Church calls Christ-followers, young and old, to hold fast to their biblical roots while seeking radical change. Scripture promises an exuberant and unstoppable church. That wondrous early church of acts can be our reality today.

Leading from the Second Chair will raise awareness of the need for strong leaders in secondary positions. It will describe the value they can bring to their organization and to primary leaders when they are serving at their full potential. It will reshape the way they view their role, with an emphasis on their own responsibility as leaders. It recognizes the unique challenges and frustrations of serving in a subordinate position and equips these leaders with the attitudes and skills that they will need to survive and thrive in this new paradigm.