Alban at Duke wants to honor the people and the work that went before us. Yet we are called to provide services in the current era…a very different time indeed.
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David Odom: Why focus on developing your staff as leaders?
Why effective leadership today requires the development of people at all levels of a congregation’s life.
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Gil Rendle: Ministry beyond aspiration
People are often well-intended. It is moving from intent to purposeful action that remains the hard work for most of us.
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Healthy Churches, Faithful Pastors: Covenant Expectations for Thriving Together
This book provides concrete steps to aid congregants and pastors communicate their mutual expectations. Keck presents fifty “expectation statements”—examples of what pastors and congregations can expect of one another; a vital resource to anyone who seeks to initiate a discussion of expectations in their own church. Elucidating goals and expectations allows congregations and pastors to support one another and flourish, and fosters church health and harmony.
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Leading into the World
The call to care for creation is a central part of our discipleship as followers of Jesus Christ. However, language and imagery of the earth is often absent in our worship services. This book helps reconnect our commitment to creation care with our life of discipleship. The process includes helping congregational members name ways that they are involved in caring for creation and encouraging them to see ways that these practices are related to Christian faith, and in doing so, nurturing the life of our communities while fostering our identity as those who care for the earth.
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Loren Mead: The importance of the local church
Forty years after starting the Alban Institute, Loren Mead is still convinced that the local church is “where the rubber meets the road.”
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Moving From Leadership 1.0 to 2.0
Not only has the Internet, particularly social media, changed the way we operate, but we can use it as a lens to view congregational leadership from a different perspective, a network perspective. Digital strategists talk about the development of the…
Read MoreThe Jazz Church
The Jazz Church by N. Graham StandishI like jazz. Not so much smooth jazz or the modal jazz popular among many modern jazz artists, but the progressive jazz fusion of the 1970s and early 1980s. This jazz was inspired by Miles…
Read MoreTen Things We Know about Synagogue Leadership
While the American synagogue was built with the financial support of what are commonly called three-day-a-year Jews, referring to those who may attend the synagogue for worship only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that generation of occasional synagogue attendees…
Read MoreGuidelines for Leading Meetings
You may share the sentiment captured in Barnett Cock’s remark, “A committee is a cul-de-sc down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” This somewhat humorous, tongue-in-cheek analogy may have more than a grain of truth for members of…
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