Courageous Leadership

Countries disintegrate, place of worship and corporation fail, people become dysfunctional, descendants lose their direction, and mankind drift from God on behalf of one distracting reason; insufficiency of leadership. These disappointments are often for the reason that of the deficiency of instruction, appropriate leadership, and misperception on what Christian leadership subsists and exactly how that leadership is pertinent to every component of professional and personal life. From a Christian worldview perspective, Psalm 112:5 explains, “A good man deals graciously and lends; He will guide his affairs with discretion” (NKJ). A Christian manager should always keep in mind that bounteousness and admiration for God, demonstrates that one has placed trust in Him, and not our material possessions.

A church whose pastor and others in leadership have failed to put in place a proactive plan for discipleship for Believers is usually a “growing” church — growing stagnant, growing cold, growing spiritually immature Christians, and eventually, many growing closed. Patte said, “There is much at stake in accepting or rejecting the challenge of discipleship…” When a pastor or a church makes a conscious decision to make discipleship of Believers a primary focus in their

Let’s see what a spiritual leader can do and how Kotter’s theory of change can be applied at the Church Organization level. One important starting point in dealing with a

These systems historically have been fragmented and inadequate—causing program ineffectiveness and personal stress among pastors. The degree to which the African American pastors are effective is crucial to the health of the church. Pastors with strong support systems based upon sound theology, spiritual disciplines, management training, insurance systems, and outplacement services, have a better chance of producing strong effective ministries, as compared to unhealthy leaders producing unhealthy, ineffective leadership. Not only can ineffective leadership cause by certain types of stress and stressors produce poor ministries, but it can also produce unhealthy people living unhealthy doctrines. These issues have a spiritual effect on the pastors. These choices may lead to stress and, ultimately,

It was the first time that I felt God’s presence at an annual conference. As odd as it may sound, it is true. Bishop Chow tipped off the conference with an open dialogue about the state of the church. Of course I debated with the young man next to me that it was our inability to attract and keep youth. I argued that our traditional structure has built a fence too high for millennials and screenagers (Generation Z) to climb; making them feel boxed in and unwelcomed. But Bishop Chow quickly proved us wrong. His diagnosis was that the Holy Spirit had left the church. Because we’ve become so entangled with who we are, the Holy Spirit cannot move within the church. He asserted that new programs and initiatives cannot fix a dead church; that we must loosen the chains that we’ve given ourselves so that we can fully praise God. Only then, will his people draw near. I could feel God move amidst the hearts of the conference.

According to the authors, Rainer and Geiger, “simple churches” or dynamic churches, experience a steady increase in the number of members that join their church each year. Churches that experience this annual growth in membership are more likely to have established programs and events that effectively share the gospel with the unsaved and aid in the progression of the church’s congregants’ spiritual development. Paradoxically, churches who do not experience this growth are likely to be “complex churches,” which have ineffective ministries that fail to evangelize and aid in the progressive of congregants’ spiritual development. Rainer and Geiger offer the church leader a

In the book, “Breaking the Missional Code,” Ed Stetzer and David Putman lay a foundation for church leaders and pastors to break the missional code that has caused so many churches today to decline or worse, shut their doors. It is not easy to grow a church because there are many factors that have to be dealt with when dealing with people. This book does a great job to connect the dots in showing how churches can achieve their mission to connect the message of the gospel with the community at large. It is also evident that others are equally frustrated, following the exact same model for outreach but with lesser results. The authors go to great detail to show that just because a missional breakthrough occurs in one place that does not mean

My current organizational context is represented by the House LA Church, where I am temporary assisting its leadership team in further church development. This young church primarily consists of Millennials with Asian and Latino backgrounds. While the majority of the church members are single, there are also several couples with small kids and some older adults. The main missional focus of the House LA Church is to facilitate spiritual transformation among young adults from diverse cultural backgrounds, mostly 2nd generation immigrants who currently live in Los Angeles. My responsibilities in this organization include designing leadership development process and coordinating the Alpha Course

Robert Morris writes a book about the essentials of Church growth and it's development. Having made that statement, the book achieves its own manner of possessing small nuggets of wisdom. Although, that pill was extremely hard to want to swallow as Robert Morris' book is comprised of the typical attitude of mega church pastors even down to the organizational community approach needed to guide a church, all of this is exceedingly evident in part three. The premise of this book is good that we would want our church's to be blessed and be a blessing. Though the premise was good and had good intention, he tends to have shortsighted view based upon the way he envisions church versus the holistic view of what church should be as a whole.

We are also challenged by the failing of institutions. People are not joining organizations like they used to from Boy Scouts to the Rotary Club to the church membership is down. This is especially challenging in the church when we are dependent on the giving of our membership to continue our ministry. With commitments down how do we continue to reach out and how do we prevent ourselves from slipping into survival mode which becomes very inward

At the time of the attempted change, the church followed the model of many successful “Boomer” churches of the 80s – personality driven, weekend service centric, and largely dependent upon disjointed programs for discipleship and leadership development (Rainier, October 5, 2015). While some attempts had been made to bring the staff and departments into alignment, cohesive vision was surface level at best and a focused unified leadership pipeline remained elusive. The staff team was made up of mainly leaders under 50, with the bulk in their 20s and 30s, and just a few older staff. There existed a strong desire to shift the church culture to a more generationally relevant model. However, at the time, the congregation was dominated by older members (above 50), and didn’t retain young families. Finally, while evangelism had always played a key role in the life of the church, there was very little evidence of a

Steinke addressed four core issues that leadership need to be addressed on a regular basis that includes: “1) Goals/missions; 2) Strength and Resources; 3) Anxiety and how to manage it's; and 4) Wholesomeness and to maintain it; and 5) Goals and applicable actions”. In this situation, the author feels that the church of attendance is at a stagnant state and that strongly relates to the core issues of anxiety and how to manage it along with wholeness and how to maintain it from dying. Here, the anxiety lies in watching the church membership rapidly decrease due to church leadership holding onto traditions and the refusal to make changes in the worship service and ministry leadership. In addition, wholesome and how to maintain its goal has deteriorated because the main system of leadership is unhealthy, in that, leadership is not open to understanding and with its form of spiritual dictatorship refuse to address concerns of its disease state of death. In addition, Peter L. Steinke stated that if congregation leader “struggle ineffective with one or more of the four core conditions, this can put the congregations in receipt of at-risk conditions for congregations”. Here, this author feels the main system should address its core issue by seeking god for wisdom and discernment to break this process of unhealthiness within that impacting its

A sentiment common to almost any organization is that the one fact that remains constant is change. As society changes, and human understanding grows, any organization that maintains a static posture, assures its demise. Churches and Christian organizations are no exception. The gospel may remain the same, but the method for communicating it must speak to the audience to assure understanding. The Christian leader must be prepared to meet this challenge by incorporating an effective model for change into his theology of leadership in order to keep the ministry relevant and effective. Searching for such a change agent can prove to be challenging as well. To aid in this search, four

I don’t think our vision need to be changed. I think we need to recommit to the vision. There is a passivity that is taking place. This passivity permits the church to run amok. If we continue down this road, we will never church growth. There has to be action taken and it has to be aggressive. Once leaders are trained they would have to take on more teaching responsibilities. Leaders should be producing other leaders, in turn; more programs could be initiated as new members joined the church. The organization and professionalism that the trained leaders operate in will attract others.

The New Testament leaders are an example of how church leaders of today should also behave and work[8]. They ought to be able to teach, guide the believers in the way of God and nurture their spiritual gifts. The New Testament leaders had to boldly defend the word of God in case of any false teaching. Basing on this New Testament leadership, it is important to make sure that any believer appointed to the leadership office has the laid down qualifications[9].