Is your church viable in the changing marketplace of today--and tomorrow?Today's church market is comprised of four cultural paradigms--Youth, Baby Busters (Generation X), Baby Boomers, and Pre-Boomers. Each has unique characteristics in terms of attitudes, spiritual orientation, values, emotional needs, moral perspective, and lifestyle. This implies significant changes for the church--new approaches to ministry and different methods of communication and interface. Church Wake-Up Call's un...

First published in 1999, Advanced Strategic Planning explains why planning is so important to carrying out the church's mission. Now in its third edition, this classic resource offers•a nine-step strategic thinking and acting model•useful ideas for developing a ministry strategy•diagrams to help illustrate concepts•a new section on spiritual formationThe methods in this book are proven to work, having already helped many churches articulate the...

Presents a portrait of Christian leadership within a biblical framework while comparing and contrasting it to today's hottest leadership models.

You can be a great leader. Here's how.Your job title, education, and training won't make you a great leader—only God can do that. But The Making of a Leader can help you see where you are in the process and what steps you should take next. After examining the lives of hundreds of historical, biblical, and contemporary leaders, Dr. J. Robert Clinton gained perspective on how leaders develop over a lifetime. By studying the six distinct stages he identifies,...

Reggie McNeal's bestseller The Present Future is the definitive work on the "missional movement," i.e., the widespread movement among Protestant churches to be less inwardly focused and more oriented toward the culture and community around them. In that book he asked the tough questions that churches needed to entertain to begin to think about who they are and what they are doing; in Missional Renaissance, he shows them the three significant shifts in their thinking and behavior that they ...

Youth ministry veteran and bestselling author, Duffy Robbins, offers an updated and revised edition of his book about the important, behind-the-scenes mechaincs of youth ministry. The tasks of budgeting, decision-making, time management, team ministry, staff relationships, conflict resolution, working with parents, and a range of other issues, are the things that keep a ministry together and functioning well. Nobody gets into youth ministry because they want to think about these things; bu...

In this provocative book, author, consultant, and church leadership developer Reggie McNeal debunks these and other old assumptions and provides an overall strategy to help church leaders move forward in an entirely different and much more effective way. In The Present Future, McNeal identifies the six most important realities that church leaders must address including: recapturing the spirit of Christianity and replacing "church growth" with a wider vision of kingdom growth; deve...

How are we doing? The church, that is. And how are we doing it? Congregations have long measured success by "bodies, budget, and buildings"--a certain record of attendance, the offering plate, and square footage. But the scorecard can't stop there. When it does, the deeper emphasis on accountability, discipleship, and spiritual maturity is lost. Ignoring those details, we see fewer lives transformed, Christian influence wane, and churches thin out--a situation that is all too familiar acro...

All local churches experience a predictable life cycle of growth and decline. But if a church is on a downward trend, how can it turn around? Taking Your Church to the Next Level explains the impact of age and size on churches and outlines the improvements that must be made at each point for a church to remain fruitful and faithful to its mission. McIntosh deftly describes the cycles of fruitfulness and the importance of continual improvement to diminish destructive forces that ke...

Over 90 percent of all Christian churches in the United States have fewer than 200 members. While they vary in shape, size, ethnicity, and denomination, they have one thing in common: the desire to grow. So why is it that some churches fail to grow for years, while other congregations in the same community increase exponentially?The problem, says church marketing authority Richard Reising, is that most churches should not be doing promotion. Instead, they should focus on the prepar...

All churches like to think that theirs is the friendliest in town. But do visitors see it that way? Church consultant Gary McIntosh invites readers to take a look at their church through the eyes of visitors and potential visitors. His starting point, grounded in an understanding of God as a "welcomer," is that churches should see those who enter their doors as not merely visitors, but as guests, and themselves as gracious hosts. This practical book offers sound advice on assessing and imp...

Most books on church planting offer a model for churches to replicate--usually one that is tied to a particular style, generation, or demographic. But what churches really need is a process that is flexible, not bound to a particular time or current fad. In The Nuts and Bolts of Church Planting, trusted author and church-planting expert Aubrey Malphurs shares the basic steps any church planter will need, regardless of his or her generation now or in the future. These steps include...