Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Christian Church - Administration

This basic, fully illustrated manual for congregational leaders explains how to prepare the sanctuary and its furnishings for the celebration of worship and sacraments throughout the Christian year. This practical, informative guide is an indispensable companion for worship committees, altar guilds, or individuals whose responsible for these vital tasks in their church.

United Methodist Altars includes: care, cleaning, and storage instructions for all vestments and appointments; a calendar of the Christian year, with appropriate colors for each season; responsibilities and...

By reading Mapping Christian Education

- Seminarians will learn the...

During the last two decades, American law has undergone some startling developments that will affect all church leaders and religious organizations, regardless of denomination. Reacting to events allegedly occurring in the church counseling office or board room, the American public is suing its religious leaders and organizations at an unprecedented rate.

7 Deadly Lawsuits is about preventing lawsuits against clergy, religious professionals, churches, and religious organizations. The book, however, is not about "how to fight back." Thomas Taylor leaves this to the lawyers,...

By looking at the wide variety of Hispanic Christian worship that exists within the Hispanic community, Alabadle highlights the cultural, generational, and denominational elements that comprise the spectrum of Hispanic worship.

Justo L. Gonzalez and seven other contributors provide an insightful look into the variety of worship styles that exist among numerous church traditions including Assemblies of God, United Methodist, Catholic, American Baptist, Presbyterian, and Disciples of Christ. And yet, in the midst of this variety, is a common thread of excitement - about...

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon return with spirited offensive strategies for feisty resident aliens. A resident alien knows who the enemy is, and here is a guide to the Christian initiation, practice, and discipline that is required for a people at war with the world.

Some Christian liberals think that resident aliens are sectarian, and that they wish to withdraw from engagement with the world. God forbid The book is thus full of stories of resident aliens who have been baptized, trained, and conditioned -- like Marines in boot camp -- to be new citizens and find a new...

God gave Moses the vision to build a tabernacle, but Moses did not build it by himself. Church leaders engage in a similar endeavor. They a) see what is inside other potential leaders, b) use leadership, discernment, and management skills to bring the potential out, and c) avoid standing in front of the future leaders once that skill becomes obvious.

Body Building is about creating a networked ministry team from within a congregation by identifying and matching spiritual gifts with the core purposes of the church. Brian Kelley Bauknight describes the processes for...

A self-directed teacher training resource offering four courses of study for both experienced teachers and beginners.

For many churches teacher training is a once-a year event, or even a budget casualty. 32 Ways to Become a Great Sunday School Teacher uses self-study sessions to help teachers design individualized programs that assist them in learning how to teach. New teachers will learn the basics of teaching (how faith develops; the ages and stages of learning); veterans will find ways to enrich their prayer lives and incorporate different teaching styles in a lesson....

Learn how to work for genuine and effective change in your church without trying to throw out everything that has gone before.

Pastors and other congregational leaders are eager to institute meaningful and effective change in their congregations. They know that old attitudes and perspectives prevent the church from fulfilling its mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Yet too often church advocates insist that if genuine change is to occur in the church, then everything must change. The board must be wiped clean, and new technologies, new worship styles, and even new theologies...

Most pastors are comfortable with the role of leader. Inspiring people and helping them discover and make use of their own gifts are tasks to which ministers generally feel called. Too many pastors and church leaders, however, forget that along with skills at leadership must come at least some acquaintance with the work of managing staff (whether it be paid or voluntary) and resources. What are the chief qualities and functions of a leader? Why are management skills necessary for an effective leader? Most important, how can pastors and other church leaders adapt these insights to their...

You love your work. You love the people--most of the time. They respect you, most of the time. You work together with colleagues, staff, and laity, with energy and enthusiasm, most of the time. But then something goes wrong: a word spoken in anger, a misunderstanding, and things turn sour. What do you do? How do you deal with conflict, whether it be long or short-term, low or high intensity?

Conflict is a part of the human predicament, yet it need not define or control your ministry. This book is designed to help the reader ask certain key questions about the nature and scope of...

Preaching: it sounds like such a easy thing to do. All you have to do is step into the pulpit and talk for 20 minutes, right? Anyone who's ever stepped into that pulpit knows that preaching is anything but easy. Speaking a word from God that is grounded in the biblical witness, theologically responsible, and true to contemporary experience is one of the most difficult things one can do. Advice on how to do this is as old as preaching itself, and there are as many opinions on preaching as there are preachers. Where do those who have been called to the ministry of proclamation begin? What...

Churches know that if they are to reach people raised in an electronic culture, they must use the tools that this culture makes available. For people accustomed to checking their e-mail hourly, surfing the Internet daily, and receiving most if not all of their information through electronic media, our customary reliance on the printed page and the spoken word will no longer be good enough. Yet, recognizing this, where do you start? How does a congregation with little or no experience in the daunting world of the Web, projection technology, and computer presentations begin? Faced with too...

Leadership from the Heart is a 10-week study resource for small groups, designed to recruit active volunteers to step up and become lay leaders by promoting the concept of "Servant Leadership."

Instead of the secular concept of leadership, which appeals to ego and ambition for power, Leadership from the Heart calls Christians to leadership by appealing to their desire to help others.

Participants are trained to -

• Develop their own spiritual practices
• Care for...

A guide for pastors, church leaders, and all who help African Americans in their search for a meaningful Christian lifestyle.

Forming Christians--leading fallen and flawed human beings into the path of discipleship to a crucified and risen Lord--is one of the central, if not the central, tasks of all Christian churches. It is a difficult enough task anywhere, but for African Americans, beset by racial conflict, personal crises, generational separation, and other concerns, it is especially so. African American churches must work particularly hard to counter the messages their...

It is a familiar experience. A congregation that had been growing in numbers and spiritual vitality reaches a plateau and then begins to decline. Most of the time, the plateau occurs long before the church arrives at the optimum number of members it hoped to attract. What has happened here? Why does growth slow down, stop, and then decline? The real question to ask, says Bob Whitesel, is why the church grew in the first place.

Most of the time young, growing churches make a series of decisions based not upon careful planning and analysis, but rather upon necessity and intuition....

In Worlds Within a Congregation, W. Paul Jones follows up on his previous work Theological Worlds in a most practical way. He argues that many church communities consist of sub-congregations, which have come about not as the result of divisive intentions, but as congregants naturally group themselves according to preferred styles of worship, interaction, stewardship, and so forth. Jones suggests that this struggle with theological diversity in congregations is something to be understood and embraced, rather than fled from as a grounds of division, and shows how--by...