Ministry Books

Sticky Church (Leadership Network Innovation Series)

Larry Osborne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A GOOD BOOK ON SMALL GROUPS 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is a book that begins good with principles of retaining people. However, early into the book, the author narrows the rest of it to small group ministry...sunday sermon based groups to be exact. As a pastor who already uses a similar method, I still got a lot out of it. However, I belive that anyone considering this book should know that its enfasis is small groups...especially his method. So if you want a small group book on sunday sermon based methodolgy, this is for you; but if you are expecting a book that os broader on the subject of people retention, keep looking. Bottom line, a good book...IF you are interested in small groups.

Editorial Review:

The greatest challenge facing most churches today isn’t getting people through the front door—it’s keeping them from leaving through the back door. In his new book, Larry Osborne reveals what it takes to cultivate a “sticky” church and reveals the strategy of sermon-based small groups to retain members while leading your church into even deeper levels of discipleship.

It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It

Craig Groeschel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderful book! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is a great resource and should be a must read for all pastors. I would encourage the pastoral staff to read it together and go through the study questions. It can really challenge the team to go to the next level!

IT 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the #1 Leadership book on my shelf at the moment. Fresh, real, and to the point. I encourage every leader to pick this book up for a inspiring challenge to their personal relationship with Christ and their organization's comittment to pursuing God's presence.

Fabulous 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I highly recomend this book to anyone in church leadership. I picked it up at a conference and loved it so much that our church staff if now doing it as a group book study. Craig Groeschel is a kingdom oriented leader that we can all learn from.

Editorial Review:

Craig Groeschel, founder of LifeChurch.tv (Edmond, OK), witnessed a powerful presence from God that he calls It at work in many churches. What is this transformational force? How can you and your ministry get—and keep—It? Combining in-your-face honesty with off-the-wall humor, this lively book tells how any believer can obtain It.

Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs

Bill Hybels

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Speed of the Leader, Speed of the Team 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Bill Hybels revs up in chapter one--and the good stuff is still kicking in chapter 68, "Read All You Can." He writes, "I have little patience with leaders who get themselves into leadership binds and then confess that they haven't read a leadership book in years. If you're a serious-minded leader, you will read." In the book's foreword, Henry Cloud writes, "Great leaders do their homework so that weariness and unsteadiness are kept at bay."

Amen to that vote for lifelong learning, also affirmed in the "Book Bucket" one of 20 buckets in my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit. Consequently, I was eager to read the latest book from Bill Hybels, one of the most gifted leaders I've ever met. Axiom, with 76 pithy leadership proverbs, doesn't disappoint.

"Speed of the leader, speed of the team," was and is one of Bill's oft-mentioned axioms. Few leaders make this pronouncement because the camera immediately focuses in on them. As the first president of Willow Creek Association, I watched Hybels up close and he always shared that core value confidently, yet humbly. His walk and his talk backed it up. He writes, "If you cannot say, `Follow me,' to your followers--and mean it--then you've got a problem, a big one."

He elaborates. "Follow my values. Follow my integrity. Follow my work ethic, my commitment, and my communication patterns. Fight as I fight. Focus as I focus. Sacrifice as I sacrifice. Love as I love. Repent as I repent. Admit wrong as I admit wrong. Endure hardship as I endure hardship." Then he concludes this one-page proverb with the whole point of it. "When requisite actions back them up, these are the words that set followers' hearts soaring."

Scan the 76 mini-chapter titles and you'll be pulled into the street-smart, God-smart wisdom. They include: Language Matters, Make the Big Ask, Hire Tens, The Dangers of Incrementalism, Never Say Someone's No for Them, The Tunnel of Chaos (a key idea in my Culture Bucket), Disagree Without Drawing Blood, Admit Mistakes and Your Stock Goes Up, and Arrive Early or Not at All.

Warning! Don't carelessly toss these axioms into your repertoire without understanding the biblical and leadership context. In my days at Willow, "Don't Screw Up" was a common benediction at meetings--but it created anxiety, not blessing. The leader knew how to communicate it, but the lieutenants didn't.

Editorial Review:

Winning leaders have winning points of view—succinct, practical, portable leadership proverbs that help them arbitrate decisions and rouse troops to action. In Axiom: The Language of Leadership, Bill Hybels reveals eighty God-given, from-the-gut truths that continue to raise his game and his vision, thirty-plus years into his local-church leadership experience.

Victory Over the Darkness: Realizing the Power of Your Identity in Christ

Neil T. Anderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 52 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

America needs 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I wish more books like this would just make the number one NY sellers list. Americans need to read this type of material.

The power of indentity 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I really want to give this book more than three stars because it is a necessary corrective to many church's teachings that we are all wretched sinners. Anderson uses the scriptures to show us that this is not how God sees us. It is this false conception of ourselves which restrains our Christian growth. However after that good start, this book lacks the practical steps of how to build-up an accurate self-identity. Anderson makes it sound very simple - you simply choose to change your view of yourself and it happens. In reality, this is a process. There is no mention in this book of how fellowship in small groups or accountability partners can be a part of this process. Also, the chapters on unforgivness and marital relationships were off the topic.

Editorial Review:

Ten years ago a breakthrough book launched a ministry that has helped more than one million people overcome this world and win the battle for their hearts and minds. Now Neil Anderson has revised and expanded Victory over the Darkness for a new generation of readers, outlining practical and more productive ways to Christian growth based on Christ's promise: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." Victory Over the Darkness emphasizes the importance of believing and internalizing the cardinal truths of Scripture as a base from which to renew the mind and fend off Satan's relentless attempt to convince us that we are less than Christ empowers us to be.

Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups

Nelson Searcy, Kerrick Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Outstanding Practical Book on Small Groups Ministry 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Searcy and Thomas have written an outstanding book on starting or developing a small groups program within the local church. The material presented demonstrates a depth of insight that only comes from experience - it's easy to see how Journey Church in New York City went from a handful of people to over 1100 in worship attendance and over 1200 people in almost 100 small groups in just a few years. The book is easy to read, very well organized, very practical, yet gives the important `why' behind each of the main ideas presented. (I would characterize his other book Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church in the same way.) The material is covered in several sections within two parts: the Activate Mindset, and the Activate System. The first half talks about several novel principles and shares some solid insight in sidebars and examples. The second half is really nuts-and-bolts on how to apply this approach not just as a set of disconnected ideas, but as a complete system that can be put in place. It doesn't tell the reader what needs to be covered or try to set an agenda for the groups, so there is still a lot of freedom for application and customization of the system to best match the needs of the church.

Part One: The Activate Mindset
* Rethinking Small Group Methodology
- Think Inside Out... Not Outside In
- Think Larger... Not Smaller
- Think Friendship... Not Intimacy
* Rethinking Small Group Structure
- Think Short-Term... Not Long-Term
- Think Promotion Months... Not Ongoing Sign-ups
- Think Church of small groups... Not with small groups
* Rethinking Small Group Strategy
- Think Easy... Not Hard
- Think Ahead... Not Behind
- Think Full Staff Participation... Not Staff Specialist
* Rethinking Small-Group Leadership
- Think Apprentice... Not Expert
- Think Decentralization... Not Staff Control
- Think Leader Multiplication... Not Group Multiplication

Part Two: The Activate System
* Focusing Your Groups (with 5 Focus steps)
* Forming Your Groups (with 3 Forming steps)
* Filling Your Groups (with 11 Fill factors)
* Facilitating Your Groups (with 5 Principles)

Some may be put off by the subtitle `An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups'. That type of marketing line seems to be best left for readers and reviewers to decide, but the material in the book is not as self-promotional as the title. I had previously read several books by Donahue and others stressing being a Church of Small Groups (not with). What I particularly liked about Activate was that several foundational principles were in common with these other books, while several aspects of the approach were quite different - and Searcy and Thomas discuss the reasons why. (For example, the approach to sign-ups and promotion is different in the Activate system, but with a good rationale.)

I would strongly recommend that pastors and/or those responsible for starting or growing a small groups ministry read `Activate' in addition to the excellent books from other successful practitioners in small group ministry (e.g. Bill Donahue and Andy Stanley, including Building a Church of Small Groups: A Place Where Nobody Stands Alone and Creating Community: Five Keys to Building a Small Group Culture).

Editorial Review:

Church leaders want to know how to make small groups work for their church communities, yet a quick look around shows that while small groups are all the rage, much of the time they create more problems than they solve. Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas, founding pastors of The Journey Church in the heart of New York City, suggest that this failure is due to widely held beliefs about small groups that just aren’t true—and they aim to debunk the myths and set the record straight! Drawing from the startling success of small groups at The Journey Church (which has had over 100-percent participation in small groups for more than 4 years) Searcy and Thomas show how church leaders can implement a life-changing small-group ministry that gets the maximum number of people involved and solves many of the important (yet irritating) problems facing churches of all sizes.

The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society

Henri Nouwen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Wounded Healer is a hope-filled and profoundly simple book that speaks directly to those men and women who want to be of service in their church or community, but have found the traditional ways often threatening and ineffective. In this book, Henri Nouwen combines creative case studies of ministry with stories from diverse cultures and religious traditions in preparing a new model for ministry. Weaving keen cultural analysis with his psychological and religious insights, Nouwen has come up with a balanced and creative theology of service that begins with the realization of fundamental woundedness in human nature. Emphasizing that which is in humanity common to both minister and believer, this woundedness can serve as a source of strength and healing when counseling others. Nouwen proceeds to develop his approach to ministry with an analysis of sufferings -- a suffering world, a suffering generation, a suffering person, and a suffering minister. It is his contention that ministers are called to recognize the sufferings of their time in their own hearts and make that recognition the starting point of their service. For Nouwen, ministers must be willing to go beyond their professional role and leave themselves open as fellow human beings with the same wounds and suffering -- in the image of Christ. In other words, we heal from our own wounds. Filled with examples from everyday experience, The Wounded Healer is a thoughtful and insightful guide that will be welcomed by anyone engaged in the service of others.

The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission

Rick Warren

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 125 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sudy Book 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I purchased these for my Graceful Ladies Bible Study group, at their request. We haven't begun, yet, but we are anxious to get started.

Editorial Review:

The thesis of The Purpose Driven Church is that when churches think first about their health, growth is sure to follow. "If your church is healthy," writes Rick Warren, "growth will occur naturally. Healthy, consistent growth is the result of balancing the five biblical purposes of the church." These five purposes are to "Love the Lord with all your heart," "Love your neighbor as yourself," "Go and make disciples," "[Baptize] them," and "[Teach] them to obey." And those purposes can only be accomplished, argues Warren, when church leaders stop thinking about church-building programs and shift their focus to a "people-building process" involving fellowship, discipleship, worship, and evangelism. Warren, the founder of the fastest-growing Baptist church in American history, has taught seminars to thousands of pastors from all over the world, many of whom have successfully implemented his techniques.

In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership

Henri J. M. Nouwen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Quick Read 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is a well written personal narrative about a Harvard Professor that experiences a renewal of faith when he leaves the academic world. As he gives up that which has given him security he remembers where real security comes from.

His experiences aren't profound; however, they do offer some simple reminders about the important parts of life.

Editorial Review:

Henri Nouwen was a spiritual thinker with an unusual capacity to write about the life of Jesus and the love of God in ways that have inspired countless people to trust life more fully. Most widely read among the over 40 books Father Nouwen wrote is In the Name of Jesus. For a society that measures successful leadership in terms of the effectiveness of the individual, Father Nouwen offers a counter definition that is witnessed by a "communal and mutual experience." For Nouwen, leadership cannot function apart from the community. His wisdom is grounded in the foundation that we are a people "called." This beautiful guide to Christian Leadership is the rich fruit of Henri Nouwen's own journey as one of the most influential spirtiual leaders of the 20th century.

Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit)

Tim Chester, Steve Timmis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Two pastors outline and apply a pair of overarching biblical principles that call the current body of Christ to a deep restructuring of its life and mission.

“Church is not a meeting you attend or a place you enter,” write pastors Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. “It’s an identity that is ours in Christ. An identity that shapes the whole of life so that life and mission become ‘total church.’” With that as their premise, they emphasize two overarching principles to govern the practice of church and mission: being gospel-centered and being community-centered. When these principles take precedence, say the authors, the truth of the Word is upheld, the mission of the gospel is carried out, and the priority of relationships is practiced in radical ways. The church becomes not just another commitment to juggle but a 24/7 lifestyle where programs, big events, and teaching from one person take a backseat to sharing lives, reaching out, and learning about God together.

In Total Church, Chester and Timmis first outline the biblical case for making gospel and community central and then apply this dual focus to evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world missions, discipleship, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, apologetics, youth and children’s work. As this insightful book calls the body of Christ to rethink its perspective and practice of church, it charts a middle path between the emerging church movement and conservative evangelicalism that all believers will find helpful.

Essential Church?: Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts

Thom S. Rainer, Sam S. Rainer

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why do so many young adults (18 to 22) leave the church, and what will it take to bring them back? This important question is examined and duly answered in Essential Church?, a follow-up to Thom S. Rainer’s best-selling Simple Church cowritten this time with his son, research expert Sam Rainer.

The book is based on a study of one-thousand so-called "church dropouts" who were interviewed about why they left. Their answers are quite surprising, having less to do with "losing their religion" and more about the desire for a community that isn’t made stale by simply maintaining the status quo.

In turn, the Rainers offer churches four concrete solutions toward making their worship community an essential part these young people’s lives again:

Simplify - develop a clear structure and process for making disciples.

Deepen - provide strong biblical teaching and preaching.

Expect - let members know the need for commitment to the congregation.

Multiply - emphasize evangelism, outward focus, and starting new churches.