If you've read the book or viewed the course, now lead your church in study with this workbook approach to Alban's Inviting Church materials. Its fifteen sessions are designed to help clergy or lay leaders guide committees or study groups through a dynamic exploration of their congregation's IQ (invitation quotient). Discover how well you invite, welcome, and incorporate new members. As participants uncover the inviting elements of your church, they develop a personal witness style that emerges comfortably from their individual gifts.

Today's rapid, deep, and pervasive changes in North American culture present myriad challenges for faith communities now and in the years ahead. Oswald explores the use of rituals as spiritually healing practices for the home, congregation, and broader community. He teaches congregational leaders how individuals and groups can use familiar new rituals to name, evaluate, live out, celebrate, and grow through change.

Nationally known for his work and teaching on clergy development, Oswald integrates research and experience into a liberating perspective on the pastoral calling. Discover how imbalances in your physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual lives can destroy the very ministry you seek to carry out. Learn what you can do to restore that balance. Packed with self-assessment tools, real-life experiences, and specific self-care strategies.

Combining pastoral and behavioral science expertise, the authors spell out ways type and temperament theory illuminate the clergy role. Learn how to use the sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types to recognize and affirm your gifts, work with your liabilities, and understand and accept those with whom you minister. Includes a Myers-Briggs shortcut instrument to help give readers a sense of their type, and a detailed explanation of how temperaments relate to program, process, context, and identity.

Beginning Ministry Together is about the transition period between the announcement that one pastor is leaving and the time when another pastor is well settled. The message brought by Roy Oswald and colleagues Jim and Ann Heath is that this is not an impossible time to be survived only with a lot of expert help. Rather, even though the task is complex, committed congregational leaders can handle it--with the help of people who have been on this journey before. Oswald describes how clergy and congregations can better end and begin pastorates. He shows them how to say good-bye and discern their...