Ministerial leaders often rely as much on the Holy Spirit as they do on a strategic plan. In even more cases, they rely on intuition and gut feelings when putting a new program on the ground. Leaders have a hunch…

Back in 1997, we knew something was coming. But we didn’t know what. We had been growing as a congregation for a few years, and we were running out of room. We needed more storage, classroom, and youth program space….

An old saying goes “If you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.” This suggests that if you are not clear about what you, your staff, and your congregation are to “produce” in ministry—what the…

One of our liberal-evangelical heroes, J. B. Phillips, once wrote a book with a title that we love: Your God Is Too Small. Phillips’s message was right on target, for his context and also for ours. It doesn’t matter how…

Congregational budget-makers frequently divide into two camps that approach the task in different ways. The first camp is likely to include children of the Great Depression, experts in finance, elementary school teachers, and persons anxious about their own money situation….

It was Wednesday morning on an overcast early September day in Caldwell, a community of about thirty-five thousand located southwest of Yorkshire, a midwestern metropolitan area of nearly a million people. When the alarm went off at 6:30 a.m., Lloyd…

Michael Fullan, who writes primarily about public education and business, describes change as a nonlinear, usually chaotic process. “Change cannot be managed. It can be understood and perhaps led, but it cannot be controlled.”1 Given the chaotic nature of change,…

When congregations, with all good intentions, make plans for change but don’t seem to get anywhere, they may be experiencing the very common phenomenon that some have called the “knowing and doing gap.” You know what you need to do,…