After decades of anti-institutionalism, here is a book that is honest about the importance of congregations and our need for them in our lives. Despite our lack of trust in institutions, we cannot live without them and still hope to live together in communities, let alone a nation. For important reasons our neighborhood institutions of religion (congregations) hold hope not found in other places. Politics and the economy have proven themselves gridlocked and incapable of breaking the narra...

Conflict is endemic to congregational life. Because congregations exist to help us find meaning and purpose, we find it difficult to realize that not everyone shares our understanding or approach. Many of us have cultural backgrounds that teach us that conflict is bad or to be avoided. Conflict Transformation, on the other hand, treats conflict as an opportunity to learn and grow, both individually, and institutionally. Exploring new understandings of how our bodies and minds respond to co...

The changing dynamics of contemporary church life are well-known, but what’s less well-known is how leaders can work most effectively in this new context. In Quietly Courageous, esteemed minister and congregational consultant Gil Rendle offers practical guidance to leaders—both lay and ordained—on leading churches today. Rendle encourages leaders to stop focusing on the past and instead focus relentlessly on their mission and purpose—what is ultimately motivating their work. He al...

The last forty years have seen transitions in mainline churches that feel, for many, like a journey into the wilderness. Yet God is calling us in this moment, not to grieve over the changes we have experienced but to hear the call to a new mission, and a new faithfulness.In Journey in the Wilderness, Gil Rendle draws on decades as a pastor and church consultant to point a way into a hopeful future. The key to embracing the wilderness is to learn new skills in leading chang...

Planning can be challenging in the contemporary congregation, where people share a common faith and values but may have very different preferences and needs. Much of the literature on congregational planning presents it as a technical process: the leader serves as the chief problem solver, and the goal is finding “the solution to the problem.”Popular Alban consultants and authors Gil Rendle and Alice Mann cast planning as a “holy conversation,” a congregational discernment process ...

This down-to-earth workbook gets to the heart of modern congregational life: how to live creatively together despite differences of age, race, culture, opinion, gender, theological or political position. Alban Senior Consultant Gil Rendle explains how to grow by valuing our differences rather than trying to ignore or blend them. He describes a method of establishing behavioral covenants that includes leadership instruction, training tools, resources (visual models, examples of specific cov...

The lifeblood of the United Methodist is passion rather than organizational neatness, entrepreneurial freedom rather than denominational restraint, and agility rather than staid institutional dependence. But if United Methodists want to change and be the church we say we want to be, what must we risk and how can we challenge current practices?At the heart of becoming a spiritual movement once again is the requirement that we develop a new understanding of connection as Christians an...

Over the past ten years, the North American mission field has experienced dramatic changes, which in turn have required congregations, middle judicatories, and denominations to adapt. Among these adaptations is an expectation for clear goals and quantified progress towards those goals. Church leaders who have never needed to measure their goals and progress with metrics may find this change daunting. The use of metrics-denominational and middle judicatory dashboards, and the tracking of co...

With the number of large congregations rising in the U.S., these congregations are increasingly dependent upon a greater number of staff to meet the needs of their diverse collection of members. As leaders of multi-staff teams, senior clergy must play the dual role of both Moses and Aaron--both visionary and detail-oriented leader--in order for their large congregations to thrive. They need to be skilled with the tools of human resource management, while at the same time setting a vision a...

Reggie McNeal's bestseller The Present Future is the definitive work on the "missional movement," i.e., the widespread movement among Protestant churches to be less inwardly focused and more oriented toward the culture and community around them. In that book he asked the tough questions that churches needed to entertain to begin to think about who they are and what they are doing; in Missional Renaissance, he shows them the three significant shifts in their thinking and behavior that they ...

In this provocative book, author, consultant, and church leadership developer Reggie McNeal debunks these and other old assumptions and provides an overall strategy to help church leaders move forward in an entirely different and much more effective way. In The Present Future, McNeal identifies the six most important realities that church leaders must address including: recapturing the spirit of Christianity and replacing "church growth" with a wider vision of kingdom growth; deve...

Youth ministry veteran and bestselling author, Duffy Robbins, offers an updated and revised edition of his book about the important, behind-the-scenes mechaincs of youth ministry. The tasks of budgeting, decision-making, time management, team ministry, staff relationships, conflict resolution, working with parents, and a range of other issues, are the things that keep a ministry together and functioning well. Nobody gets into youth ministry because they want to think about these things; bu...