Church Leadership

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.

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.

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.

Discover the secret to igniting a life-giving, soul-transforming, people-inspiring movement in your organization, church, or ministry--and the trick to keeping the momentum going. In Lead Like It Matters, New York Times bestselling author and pastor Craig Groeschel shares the transformative insights he's learned about how to effectively build a thriving, enduring ministry and organization.

"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.

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.

Waiting to be rediscovered in the British Library is an ancient manuscript of the early Church, copied by an anonymous monk. The manuscript is at least 1,450 years old, possibly dating to the first century, Jesus' lifetime. And now, The Lost Gospel provides the first-ever translation from Syriac into English of this unique document that tells the inside story of Jesus' social, family, and political life. The Lost Gospel takes listeners on an unparalleled historical adventure through a paradigm-shifting manuscript.

In The Emotionally Healthy Leader, bestselling 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.

Renowned Bible teacher and best-selling author Andrew Wommack reveals the ten key principles that changed his life and built a worldwide ministry. Using biblical examples and personal stories, he shows how these principles work for anyone who will trust God. They will help you reach your potential and fulfill the plans He has for your life.

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.

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?

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.

Should we actually practice church discipline today? Is it unloving? Once an ordinary part of church life, churches gradually stopped practicing church discipline in the 20th century. But Jesus commands it. Paul practiced it. And churches benefit from it. Why practice church discipline? It shows love for the individual caught in sin, love for the whole church, love for non-Christian neighbors, and love for the glory of Christ.

Authors Eric Geiger (author of the best-selling Simple Church and Creature of the Word) and Kevin Peck argue that churches that consistently produce leaders have strong convictions to develop leaders, healthy cultures for leadership development, and helpful constructs to systematically and intentionally build leaders. All three are essential for leaders to be formed through the ministry of a local church.

There was something different about the way Jesus communicated with the lost: He didn't force answers upon people, he asked questions. So why don't we? Following Christ's lead, Randy Newman has been using a questioning style of evangelism for decades. In this provocative book, he provides practical insights to help Christians engage others in meaningful spiritual conversations. He challenges us to examine how we think about people, their questions, and our crucial message.

Essential to every healthy church is a biblical model of leadership. In the New Testament, church leadership is built around a team of elders working together, each bringing his own unique skills and gifts to the cause of shepherding the flock God entrusted to them. However, in many churches today, the principle of plurality in leadership is often misunderstood, mistakenly applied, or completely ignored. Dave Harvey encourages church leaders to prioritize plurality for the surprising ways that it helps churches to flourish.

Who are you when the teeth come out? For every true act of leadership, there is an equal and monstrous act of sabotage. Our leaders have been entirely routed by the agitated and the anxious. These emotional tyrannies manifest themselves in local libraries, HR cubicles, elder meetings, and at your Thanksgiving dinners.

We have misunderstood Paul, badly. We have read his words through our own set of assumptions. We need to begin with Paul's world view, to see things the way he saw them. What if "original sin" was never part of Paul's thinking? What if the idea that we are saved by faith in Christ, as Luther argued, was based on a mistranslation of Paul's words and a misunderstanding of Paul's thinking?

Why is it that so many gifted and passionate leaders end up on the sidelines of ministry rather than finishing well? How can you avoid the pitfalls that face those who serve Christ and his church? What steps can you take that will propel you forward into a more faithful and fruitful ministry than you ever dreamed? These questions and more are addressed in Leadership from the Inside Out.

From Peace Child author Don Richardson, an unforgettable story of primitive jungle treachery. Another exciting, unforgettable missionary story as Don Richardson shares his experiences of the Stone Age Hell of Java's Jungle!