Publisher: Alban Institute
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Raising Small Church Esteem
Small churches trying to live up to ‘big church’ standards frequently suffer from low self-esteem. Steven Burt, educator, consultant, and former small church pastor (UCC/UMC), and Hazel Roper, an American Baptist judicatory executive and former small church pastor, team up to provide clergy, lay leaders, denominational leaders, and seminary educators associated with small churches a…
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So You’re On The Search Committee
So You’re on the Search Committee focuses on the experience of pastoral search committees and the unique role that laity in most denominations play in this crucial process. Because a change of pastors is, as Alban Institute founder Loren Mead puts it, a “critical moment of ministry,” participation as a member of a search committee is…
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Transforming Church Boards
Olsen presents a bold vision of leadership – one that offers church board work as an integral part of congregational leaders’ faith experience and development. Discover inspiring, practical ways your board can make its meetings become opportunities for deepening faith, developing leadership, and ultimately renewing your church.
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Discover Your Spiritual Type
From Urban T. Holmes’s spiritual typology and her own experience as a spiritual director and pastoral counselor, Ware provides a framework for people to name and understand their spiritual experience-in much the same way the Myers-Briggs typology provides a framework for understanding personality types. Readers explore four spiritual types–head, heart, mystic, and Kingdom–and exercises allow…
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User Friendly Evaluation
Each congregation must evaluate itself in light of its own mix of gifts, backgrounds, talents, and opportunities. Presenting the best of evaluation theory past and present, Woods shows clergy and lay leaders how to engage in mutual evaluation-not judgment-of ministry, mission, and community as a shared responsibility. The goal is building up the congregation. A…
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Behavioral Covenants In Congregations
This down-to-earth workbook gets to the heart of modern congregational life: how to live creatively together despite differences of age, race, culture, opinion, gender, theological or political position. Alban Senior Consultant Gil Rendle explains how to grow by valuing our differences rather than trying to ignore or blend them. He describes a method of establishing behavioral…
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Critical Moment Of Ministry: A Change Of Pastors
Based on extensive learning from the Alban Institute, this book emphasizes the opportunities for change presented during a pastoral transition. ‘In this invaluable resource for congregations and pastors, Loren Mead has demonstrated again his uniqu ability to see the power and potential in commonplace events in the life of the church. Teo decades of experience,…
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The Once And Future Church
Mead takes a broad look at past and present changes in the church, and postulates a future to which those changes are calling us. Denominations, once structured to deliver resources to far-off lands of foreign mission, now encounter the mission field in the layperson’s workplace and the community surrounding the local congregation. Thus, the church…
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More Than Numbers
Mead explores what church growth and evangelism really mean in a time when it is mathematically impossible for every congregation to achieve significant numerical growth. He argues provocatively that spiritual, organizational, and missional growth are just as important as numerical growth, and that all four are needed for a truly healthy and growing church. Case…
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Faith Goes To Work
‘The marketplace is not a place to be avoided [by Christians]; rather it is our assignment!’ So states this remarkable new book exploring how churches must help today’s Christians experience the God of their faith in the new realities and stresses of contemporary work. The authors, representing a wide range of vocations, provacatively challenge readers…
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Transforming Congregations For The Future
In this third volume of the Once and Future Church series and sequel to his book The Once and Future Church, Loren Mead picks up where he left off. If God is calling the church to reshape itself, where do we begin? On what basis should we build? The declining numbers of denominational membership and recent…
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Spiritual Awakening
John Ackerman, parish pastor, spiritual director, and consultant on spiritual formation, provides an excellent guide for clergy desiring a congregation-wide approach to developing spirituality rooted in the life of the congregation. A six-week program focuses on developing individuals’ spirituality in small groups and includes leader training and course plans. Practical suggestions assist in developing the…