CURATED ARTICLES
Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church
Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church by Carol Howard Merritt An effective plan to help those suffering from wounds inflicted by the church find spiritual healing and a renewed sense of faith. Raised as a...
Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations – By Martin Homan
Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations Gil Rendle and Alice Mann The Alban Institute, 2003. xxvi & 289 pages. The authors provide the Intentional Interim Pastor with an extremely useful book filled with numerous tools....
Don’t Wait until the Pastor Leaves – By Alan Mead
Don’t Wait until the Pastor Leaves Planning for Ministerial Transition Helps Ensure that One Successful Minister Follows Another Written by Michael Durall Book Review by Rev. Alan Mead Although it doesn’t appear by the title to be a book of interest to interim...
Making Connections: Transitional and Multicultural Ministry
Making Connections: Transitional and Multicultural Ministry By Dr. Mark Smutny Attending the Annual Conference of the IMN Annual Conference for the first time was like being invited to a sumptuous Thanksgiving Day feast. The two keynoters were like Grandpa and Grandma...
Congregational Closure – By Rev. Dennis Alger
Be prepared for the work ahead by going to your nearby worker-friendly retailer and purchasing sufficient quantities of facial tissue; there will be tears. It is a factor of our time. Mainline congregations are experiencing decline; many of us find that faithfulness...
Discovering the Other: Asset-Based Approached to Building Community Together – by Martin Homan
October 10, 2014 Cameron Harder. Discovering the Other: Asset-Based Approached to Building Community Together. Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2013 (Kindle edition). Review by Martin Homan Cameron Harder writes this book to assist the reader to find the other –...
Doing the Math of Mission: Fruits, Faithfulness, and Metrics – By Martin Homan
August 25, 2015 Doing the Math of Mission: Fruits, Faithfulness, and Metrics By Martin Homan I was pleasantly surprised to discover this new book by Gil Rendle on Doing the Math of Mission. Gil has always been on the cutting edge of change and what it will look like...
Embracing the Strategic Value of Small Church Ministry: Why Bigger Is No Longer Better – by Brandon J. O’Brien
When it comes to assessing ministry trends and strategies, American clergy are concerned primarily with two questions. The first is one of principle: is it true? Like all good shepherds, we want to lead our people toward the pastures that give life, not illusions of...
Do More with Less – by Eric Law
When I was young my family always had guests for dinner. On any given day, there might be twelve to fifteen people at the dinner table. Dinner was a time of joyful sharing of food and stories. I thought we were quite wealthy, feeding so many people every night. Only...
Currency of Relationship – by Eric Law
A church was facing a mid-year $10,000 budget shortfall. This was not because the church had not been doing missional ministries. In fact, they were serving the neighborhood with many innovative projects. During the coffee hour that Sunday, the pastor asked those...