Ministry Leadership

If we desire to honor God in all we do, we need to be in his Book every day. Through the Bible, God offers us so much more wisdom for living and leading-and for every domain of life—than anything this world can ever give us. That's why Hobby Lobby founder and CEO David Green wrote The Leader's Devotional. By sharing the biblical principles that are the foundation of his life and leadership, he challenges and encourages each of us to seek God's guidance for our lives, for our families, and for our organizations.

Mark DeYmaz presents seven common obstacles to building a healthy multi-ethnic church, taking the reader beyond merely understanding the need for diversity, to the practical challenges and ramifications of day-to-day leadership within a diverse congregation of faith.

With decades of leadership experience in business, nonprofits, and Christian higher education, Uli Chi helps listeners build this foundational virtue. Looking to Scripture as well as art and literature, Chi illuminates the nature of wisdom as fundamentally relational and other-centered. In the context of leadership, biblical wisdom shows us the importance of wielding power with humility. Chi also provides a framework for the formation of character and vision in the lifelong journey of gaining wisdom.

Noted author and pastor Andy Stanley points out that by investing energy into intentionally designed organizational systems, leaders can create powerful, sustainable ministries God can use to transform lives.

Nothing is more dangerous than a single compelling idea that is lived out and nothing is more harmless than lots of little ideas never applied. By creatively communicating one Big Idea every week your church will transform people into genuine Christ followers who live out the mission of Jesus. Less is more!

Researchers have uncovered the following three trends: First, distrust of institutions, including the church, is at an all-time high. Second, young people raised in the church are leaving at alarming rates and not returning. Third, loneliness and social isolation are at pandemic levels. What’s the connection? It appears that an entire generation is starving for the very thing the church is called to provide but has chosen to look for it elsewhere. Why is this happening?

Evangelical Christianity is a paradox. Evangelicals are radically individualist, but devoted to community and family. They believe in the transformative power of a personal relationship with God, but are wary of religious enthusiasm. They are deeply skeptical of secular reason, but eager to find scientific proof that the Bible is true. In this groundbreaking history of modern American evangelicalism, Molly Worthen argues that these contradictions are the products of a crisis of authority that lies at the heart of the faith.

The Jesus People movement was a unique combination of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity. It first appeared in the famed "Summer of Love" of 1967, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and spread like wildfire in Southern California and beyond, to cities like Seattle, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. In 1971 the growing movement found its way into the national media spotlight and gained momentum, attracting a huge new following among evangelical church youth.

In The Pathway to Powerful, Danny Silk - author of Culture of Honor and Keep Your Love On - teams up with Carla Chud to offer a practical road map for becoming a more powerful, healthy leader. Drawing from the journey Carla and her leadership team have taken to transform themselves and their organization, she and Danny lay out the steps to overcome fear-driven, dysfunctional leadership and establish the core values and practices of honor in their lives, team dynamics, and organizational culture.

This deeply contextual biography centers on the tensions generated by the pope’s attempt to turn the Church away from power and tradition and outwards to engage humanity with God’s mercy. Through battles with corrupt bankers and worldly cardinals, in turbulent meetings and on global trips, history’s first Latin-American pope has attempted to reshape the Church to evangelize the contemporary age. At the same time, he has stirred other leaders’ deep-seated fear that the Church is capitulating to modernity.

In Confident Leader!, Dan Reiland draws from his 39 years of leadership experience to share a practical, workable, and transformational process that results in your ability to become a more self-assured leader and achieve maximum success. Building unshakable confidence will positively impact your personal work performance, your belief in self, your support and approval from others, and your trust and reliance on God.

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.

In Radical, David Platt's plea for Christians to take back their faith from the American Dream resonated with readers everywhere and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Now in Radical Together, the author broadens his call, challenging us to unite around a gospel-centered vision. How, he asks, might such a vision reshape our priorities as the body of Christ?

When I was called to pastor my first church, I was certain of only one thing—I was in over my head! This small church had nearly closed its doors. They were running about 35 on a Sunday, were steeped in tradition, and I was bi-vocational. I had a dream of revitalizing our church to become a healthy, evangelistically effective church that was fulfilling the Great Commandment and the Great Commission but wasn’t sure how to do it. The D.R.E.A.M. Church shares the strategies that our church and thousands of others have used to experience healthy, long-term growth.

We hear all to often that someone has decided to leave the Evangelical Christian faith and to join the Church of Rome, or Eastern Orthodoxy, or High Anglicanism. The lure is liturgy and tradition, and since the Evangelical and Reformed churches so often have such poor worship, it is not hard to understand the pull exercised by those churches that have a heritage of formality, sobriety and beauty. This cure, however, is far worse than the disease.

Organizational behavior is an important and growing field in leadership and management studies, yet it has been largely overlooked by leaders of churches and other Christian ministries. This introduction to the topic accounts for the unique dynamics of Christian organizations, gives theological foundations, and provides key insights and guidance to those studying or practicing leadership in churches and ministries.

Is it possible our world is just one big high school lunchroom? In a world fraught with polarization and division—where we form separate tables based on political beliefs, skin color, economic status, theological ideas, and personal preferences—can we find a way to live differently, more aligned with the ways of Jesus? In Lunchroom Theology, Heather Gorman and Mark Nelson confront our societal and theological rifts, and by weaving together scriptural and sociological insights, they expose the many ways our contemporary divisions are mirrored by the church today.

A right understanding of honor is vital to healthy churches. It’s a word that’s mentioned hundreds of times throughout the Bible. But what does honor really look like for us in everyday church life? Who should we honor, and how? Adam Ramsey brings a fresh understanding of true honor in our churches. He paints a vision of an honoring church that captivates your mind and heart—a church that shines brightly in the community because of the way its members value and respect each other and their leaders and, above all else, bring honor to God.

You may be a new believer and wonder what it means to belong to a church; you may be reluctant to commit to your church because of past experiences; you may have recently relocated and want to find a church where you feel at home; or you may love your church and desire to commit to it more deeply and serve it more fully. Whatever the case, this book will help you to see that belonging to a church is a good gift from God, the outworking of our identity as brothers and sisters in Christ, and worth your time, love, and commitment.

Dangerous churches should be norm. Church leaders and church people alike shrink back from danger because we want safety. Jesus said that he's overcome the world and its troubles. Dangerous churches put everything on the line for the one thing that matters most: reaching lost people.It's dangerous not to be a dangerous church. The book is less about methods or even the message of God, but about a church that risks everything it has to reach lost people.