As an adjunct to the Best Practices in Church Management Series, Creativity in Church Management covers a number of topics that, while important, do not warrant their own volumes in the series. Topics include co-responsibility, managing parish diversity, and issues surrounding parish reconfiguration and consolidation.

How many parishes do you know of that are truly great?In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins makes the point that good is the enemy of great. What does a great parish look like? Obviously it nurtures the spirituality of its parishioners, but it must do more than that. To be truly great, a parish must also have the temporal side in order. It must be a welcoming, community building place where people want to be. And it must be well-managed.Let''s be very clear. The C...

“I love you more than you can ever know, and I long for you to search for Me with all your heart. I want to be found, and I want to give you purpose, understanding and freedom! There is so much I have waiting for you if you will come after Me. My desire is to be your All!”All Scripture, from Genesis through Revelation, is an incredible, hope-filled invitation from the very heart of God to come to know Him. Every word in the Bible is His heart expressed; it is Him! It is the reveali...

It was in 1888, four short years after he first came to Fresno County to farm wheat, that Thomas Law Reed made a deal with the Southern Pacific Railroad. In exchange for a half-interest in 360 acres of Reed's farmland, the railroad would build a depot along its east side branch and help develop a townsite. The town was Reedley. See what happened when settlers arrived. Watch as homes are built, as businesses are started, and as schools and churches are founded. Witness farmers cultivate the...

Becoming a Pastoral Parish Council is a basic primer on how a parish council can be set up and organized, and what roles it can play.

A practical, accessible guide to help church leaders through the steps needed to ensure an effective, accountable, and transparent financial process in a parish.

The present book develops the mathematical and numerical analysis of linear, elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) with coefficients whose logarithms are modelled as Gaussian random fields (GRFs), in polygonal and polyhedral physical domains. Both, forward and Bayesian inverse PDE problems subject to GRF priors are considered.Adopting a pathwise, affine-parametric representation of the GRFs, turns the random PDEs into equivalent, countably-parametric, determi...

The past two decades have seen an intense, interdisciplinary interest in the border areas between states—inhabited territories located on the margins of a power center or between power centers. This timely and highly original collection of essays edited by noted scholar I. William Zartman is an attempt “to begin to understand both these areas and the interactions that occur within and across them”—that is, to understand how borders affect the groups living along them and the natur...

This Open Access book examines many of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic through the distinctive lens of civility. The idea of civility appears often in both public and academic debates, and a polarized political climate frequently leads to allegations of uncivil speech and behaviour. Norms of civility are always contested, even more so in moments of crisis such as a global pandemic. A focus on civility provides crucial insight and guidance on how to navigate the social and pol...

Reality TV, ghosts, and a vengeful psychic medium—Bethany's life is about to get weird.After years of small-town stagnation, Bethany James is haunted by her grandmother's ghost, who will not rest until Bethany finally pursues her dreams of adventure. Her ticket out? Paranormal For Realz, a new reality TV show where ghost-hunting meets celebrity chaos. The show is seeking permanent hosts, and five hilariously mismatched teams are competing for the coveted s...

This book describes and comprehensively illustrates the soils of the world in accordance with the worldwide WRB classification. The structure of the book follows the ecozone concept. For every ecozone, location, climate and vegetation as well as soil formation and distribution are presented. All soils representative of the corresponding ecozone are then described in detail: definition, properties, distribution, use, classification, genesis. Over 260 photographs illustrate soil profiles, so...

A seminal moment in the study of U.S. Catholic parish life came in the 1980s with the publication of a series of reports from the ground-breaking Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life. These reports are now badly outdated, as Catholic dioceses grapple with new challenges that didn't exist in the 80s. Topics that were not considered then, like greater Catholic mobility, increased cultural diversity, and structural re-organization as well as the rise of lay leadership, have attained new s...