101 Great Ideas for Growing Healthy Churches. John Nelson
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Название: 101 Great Ideas for Growing Healthy Churches
Автор: John Nelson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9781848255050
isbn:
Undergirding this lies an openness to the Holy Spirit and a willingness to be led in new directions, building on the way in which the Spirit has led God’s people over many centuries. Churches have not always modelled best practice in terms of either attentiveness to the Spirit or to the human needs and concerns revealed in different generations. This book is a contribution to the development of healthy churches. It offers snapshots of good practice and a range of thoughts and practical suggestions to aid the Christian people in a local community to develop and grow their life.
The Church in Western Europe has seen many challenges in the post-Enlightenment period. The social and philosophical emphasis on human autonomy, with the rise of the focus on the individual, has led to a diminishment of the authority of many traditional institutions. The positive aspect of this has been a greater sense of personal freedom and a growing challenge to corrupt and abusive practices within any institution. At the same time, this has brought about a challenge to traditional patterns of organizational life and a diminishment of the sense of shared responsibility. Women and men involved in leadership and management need to wrestle more vigorously with both the external pressures on an organization and the internal practices which help the organization to be healthy and to grow. This book offers snippets of support to help leaders and managers to be more visionary and effective.
I am grateful to the three editors of this book, John Nelson, Anton Müller and Michael Lofthouse, for the time, effort and creative energy they have put into bringing this book into being. MODEM as an organization is committed to developing new thinking in the areas of leadership and management and to drawing together networks of practitioners who are seeking to share insights as part of a learning community.
I pray that this book will offer a contribution to the ferment of ideas and practices that abound with regard to leadership and management, in a way that offers practical application in the setting of the local church, helping churches to be healthy and faith-filled organizations, to the glory of God.
Introduction to 101 Great Ideas for Growing Healthy Churches
JOHN NELSON
Perhaps it is an age thing. I remember the days when you could lift a car bonnet and see the engine. You could access the nuts and bolts, clean the distributor cap, change the water pump, those things that made up the heart of the car and made it go. With the help of a good maintenance manual you could get stuck in and fix it. Today I lift the bonnet and all I see is a sheet of moulded plastic and a port for somebody else to plug in a computer. Only experts can now fix it!
I sometimes think this is what we have done to leadership and management in the Church. It has been encased in a sheet of expert moulded plastic. What should be a practical and accessible job has been made so complex that it is almost impossible for us to get our management hands dirty. Experts reign and there are not too many easy to follow manuals out there to encourage you not to rely on others; to help you get beneath the plastic; to help you get your management hands dirty.
This book is your church leadership and management manual. Like a good car manual you will be able access the book to give you ideas and instructions on how to start to engage and use those management spanners. Arranged alphabetically this is not bedtime reading but a manual that you can refer to at any time. After all, if you have a problem with the suspension you do not need to be wading through pages and pages dealing with the fuel injection system. And like a good car manual each topic is written by a proven practitioner; somebody who has had to fix it and make it work. An eclectic mix of instructions, case studies, quotes and diagnostic exercises all selected to help you to engage and address that leadership or management issue.
Most contributions are supported by a Bible reference offered by the author or suggested by the editorial team. The editorial team also selected a Top Tip drawn from or inferred by the topic under discussion. Alongside contributions the editorial team have placed a Business Perspective. It is important to note that these represent part of the editorial process in an attempt to bring an equivalent secular context into consideration.
At the heart of this book are the many contributions which aim to deal with the how and why of church management and leadership. Finally there is a self-reflective diagnostic exercise. Like all good manuals it can be read and shared by others in your team: designed for you to be able to pull off the shelf when required and presented concisely to allow you quickly to apply that management spanner. No moulded plastic formed of management jargon, no port for somebody else to fix. This is a practical manual to help you engage.
I am grateful to all those practitioners who contributed and to Michael Lofthouse and Anton Müller who have so expertly edited the book.
A Spiritual Reflection on 101 Great Ideas for Growing Healthy Churches
ANTON MÜLLER
All of us, in whatever walk of life, need to be able to manage. Often we may hear someone say to another ‘How are you managing?’ Rarely do we hear the answer.
During my time as the spiritual care co-ordinator for a hospice I learned that enabling people to manage their terminal or life-limiting illness was something which required much more than the administering of pain-relieving drugs. In the face of terminal or long-term illness what was needed for each patient was an internal strategy for facing and coping with the world that was not only changing dramatically but seemed to be moving on without them. Of some patients it would be said, ‘they have turned their face to the wall’.
Once in that frame of mind it was very hard to enable a patient to turn back and proceed with their journey through the world. Unless there is a strategy for facing this most important of journeys then to turn and face the wall is often the only option.
It is fundamental to our Christian theology that the fullness of life takes us through the journey of death. It cannot be avoided or ignored. The purpose of administering pain-relieving drugs in modern hospice care is to give each patient the opportunity to live until they die. To live life in all its fullness, with dignity and with quality.
Too often I see churches that have turned their faces to the wall and have cut themselves off from the world. They are stuck on the pain-relieving drugs of the past. They look to their past glories and past achievements rather than looking where they are in the now and where they are called to go in the future.
All churches have a past, a present and a future. For some that future may mean a closure, an ending, a death, while for others it may mean living in a new way. This is the way ahead for every church. Both scenarios require careful management and a strategy for dealing with the different kinds of closures ahead. Both scenarios have the possibilities for a new way of being.
If this were not so for a church then that church has not been living its life according to the theology which underpins our Christian faith. I recently heard about how the closure of one struggling church gave new life and growth to other churches around it. The death of one church gave new hope and being for the remnant of that church who found new life and ministry in the way forward. That church is growing.
A healthy church is one that understands that its life is based upon God’s greatest idea – that of death and resurrection.
Every contribution in this book is a pointer to living a forward-thinking life. There are no contributions that talk about maintaining the status quo. Every contribution is offered as a strategy for managing the abundance of life to which God is calling every Christian and every church.
Given the opportunity to write a short quote of my own, it would be this: ‘Managing the status quo of the church is called juggling. Managing the forward movement of the church is called СКАЧАТЬ