Bill sat across from his counselor and recounted the pain of the last eighteen months. After nine years at First Church, he had taken a well-deserved sabbatical to travel, reflect, study, and pray. On his first Sunday back at the…
Read MoreMyth-Busting: Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Competence and the Clergy
Bill sat across from his counselor and recounted the pain of the last eighteen months. After nine years at First Church, he had taken a well-deserved sabbatical to travel, reflect, study, and pray. On his first Sunday back at the…
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Leadership in Scarcity
by Mark Miller-McLemore | My church was located across from an abandoned strip mall and the local “No-Tell Motel,” where drugs and sex were peddled. We worked closely with homeless people through a shelter program in our building. It was a place…
Read MoreSusan Beaumont: Policies, Performance, and Personnel
Most congregations have some version of a personnel committee, or believe that they are supposed to. The practices surrounding these committees vary widely and are driven by denominational polity differences. Denominations use different labels to refer to the human resource…
Read MoreAsk Alban: The Personnel Committee
Q: What is the purpose of a personnel committee, and what is it supposed to do? A: The personnel committee has the potential to be one of the most helpful or most dysfunctional committees at work in the life of…
Read MoreMinisters Managing Time
Managing your time as a minister just may be the single most difficult issue you face. The problem of managing ministerial time has a long and not always hopeful history. The minister’s need for Sabbath rest, time away from the…
Read MoreCENTERview: Social Networking and Congregations
A recent YouTube video titled “Social Networking in Plain English” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc) claims networks are only as valuable as the people and connections one can see. If I think about real “friends” and connections in my life this makes perfect sense….
Read MoreMinistering to the Soul of a Community
Congregations are born from a generative spark of interaction between stories of faith and stories of place. Some person or group looks out on a particular landscape and says, “There should be a church—or there should be a congregation of…
Read MoreTaken for Granted? Four Ways to Do Church Better
I am writing this piece on a Sunday morning at 11 a.m. A year ago, and for many years, I would have been in church at worship, but today I am not. I was a pastor for almost 20 years,…
Read MoreBeing Made New: Experiencing the Gifts of Conscious Pastoral Transition
In my mid-fifties, with almost 20 years in parish ministry behind me, I began to think forward to the possibilities inherent in retirement. I was eight years into my ministry as rector of a vigorous and challenging program-sized church when…
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