Confident that seminary equipped them with the tools they need for the journey ahead, they find themselves discouraged when the realities of their first call don't line up with what they came to expect from assigned readings and classroom discussions. This book, with contributions from fifteen veteran pastors, including Daniel L. Akin, Juan Sanchez, Phil A. Newton, Scott Sauls, offers real-world advice about the joys and challenges of the first five years of pastoral ministry--bridging the gap between seminary training and life in a local church. Armed with wisdom from those who have gone before them, young pastors will find encouragement to stand firm in the thick of the realities and rigors of pastoral ministry.

    Clergy and church leaders will find the evidence and answers in this book provocative, eye-opening and actionable.What if members of your congregation were 13 times more likely to have invited someone to participate in your church in the past month? Three times as satisfied with their lives? Spent more than two hours per week serving and helping others in their community? And tripled their giving to your church? What would your church — your parish — look like? And how would you go about creating this kind of change? One thing is certain: Church leaders are never going to inspire more people to be actively and passionately involved in their congregations by doing the same things over and over again. Pastors and lay leaders need something fresh. Something new. The last thing they need is “just another program” or to set up a laundry list of new activities for members. In this compelling and insightful book, Al Winseman — who has led thriving churches, including one he built from the ground up — explores how churches and parishes can dramatically increase members’ participation, service to the community, giving and even life satisfaction. But the solutions Winseman offers are not the “magic pill” many leaders have come to expect. Rather, he shows leaders how to reach and inspire the hearts, minds and imaginations of their people. Based on solid research by Gallup, Growing an Engaged Church will appeal to Protestant and Catholic clergy and lay leaders who are looking for a way to be the Church instead of just “doing church.”

    The clock is every pastor’s nemesis. Between meetings, administration, counseling, and other duties, it’s hard to find enough time for sermon prep.Unless you change the process.8 Hours Or Less will show preachers how to write the same sermons they’ve been writing, but in half the time. Author Ryan Huguley reveals:The biggest time-wasters in sermon prepThe five marks of a faithful sermonA day-by-day plan for writing sermonsTips for preparing your mind, heart, and notes for preachingCommon pitfalls in ending a sermonAnd moreHuguley is a pastor and the host of a podcast featuring leaders like Matt Chandler, Doug Wilson, and Nancy Ortberg. What he shares in 8 Hours or Less is a process he’s been refining for six years, and it has radically improved both his preaching and experience in ministry.  Why work harder when you can work smarter? 8 Hours or Less brings relief to the time crunch and helps pastors be healthier, more balanced, and more effective—all without making their sermons suffer for it.

    Great falls from ministry don't just happen either. A complex mix of factors both internal and external test the limits of your ability to minister wholeheartedly over the long haul. Senior pastor Brad Hoffmann and licensed professional counselor Michael Todd Wilson work with pastors removed from their place of service. The common experiences of these pastors revealed patterns that consistently contributed to burnout, ineffectiveness and moral failure. If such patterns can be predicted, the authors reasoned, can they be prevented?Preventing Ministry Failure is a personal guidebook for pastors and other caregivers to prepare them to withstand common pressures and to flourish in the ministry God has called them to. Work through the exercises and reflections individually or in conversation with your peers, and you'll find yourself better equipped for the challenges of vocational ministry, and more conscious of the presence of God leading you on and restoring your soul.

    In this essential classic the Archbishop offers counsel on ordination and ministry in the life of the church.

    While serving as mentors, counselors, advisors, and even cheerleaders, women carry numerous responsibilities. Lori Wilhite and Brandi Wilson know about this first-hand as the wives of two well-known pastors in America. Everyone has an image in their mind of what they think a pastor's wife should be. The trouble with this picture is that it has never been and never will be accurate. Ministry wives and female ministry leaders face the same real-life struggles as their church members, but have the added stress of sharing in everyone's burdens as well. They are held to impossible standards by those they serve, and the more this ideal of women in leadership is expected, the more we turn up the intensity in the pressure cooker that is life in ministry. In Leading and Loving It, Lori Wilhite and Brandi Wilson offer a support system to help women make connections to get the encouragement that sustains them and become equipped for the ministry God has called them to pursue. They give readers tools for understanding that external pressures and expectations are only important if they fall in line with what God intends for your life and ministry and they give answers for how to deal with criticism, isolation, finding your personal calling, and what happens when you reach a place of burn-out, and more.

    Kent Edwards recalls a story that late pastor J. Vernon McGee told about seeing children in South Africa playing a game of marbles in the dust with real diamonds. The precious stones were being handled with no regard for their true worth. Edwards fears the same thing happens today when preachers offer Scriptural truth to listeners without being completely overwhelmed by its greatness themselves in the process.Deep Preaching is his call to "rethink" preaching. Edwards helps preachers learn to preach the word in ways that will powerfully change the lives of hearers. He contends that sermons "need not settle comfortably on the lives of the listeners like dust on a coffee table." He encourages preachers to join him in casting off the lines that moor their ministries to the status-quo and make every effort to steer their preaching out of the "comfortable shallows." He urges them to preach deep sermons rather than superficial ones, moving "beyond the yawn-inspiring to the awe-inspiring, from the trite to the transforming."

    Pastors are often pulled in multiple directions and must "become all things to all people" (1 Cor. 9:22). What does the New Testament say (or not say) about the pastoral calling? And what can we learn about it from the apostle Paul?According to popular New Testament scholar Scot McKnight, pastoring must begin first and foremost with spiritual formation, which plays a vital role in the life and ministry of the pastor. As leaders, pastors both create and nurture culture in a church. The biblical vision for that culture is Christoformity, or Christlikeness. Grounding pastoral ministry in the pastoral praxis of the apostle Paul, McKnight shows that nurturing Christoformity was at the heart of the Pauline mission. The pastor's central calling, then, is to mediate Christ in everything. McKnight explores seven dimensions that illustrate this concept--friendship, siblings, generosity, storytelling, witness, subverting the world, and wisdom--as he calls pastors to be conformed to Christ and to nurture a culture of Christoformity in their churches.

    Why did we have to shut our doors after only three years? I was at my breaking point. Then I got the news that our nine-year-old daughter had leukemia. I would have quit ministry forever, but I had no other employable skills. False accusations were made against me and my family, wrecking our reputation permanently and forcing us to leave not only the church, but move out of the area. I've served my church for the past 27 years and I've grown that church from 150 to 24 people. What do we do when we've failed? Some ministries are shipwrecked by moral failures like affairs or embezzlement. But for most of us, the sense of failure is more ordinary: disillusionment, inadequacy, declining budgets, poor decisions, opposition, depression, burnout. Many pastors are deeply broken and wounded, and we come to doubt that God has any use for us. J.R. Briggs, founder of the Epic Fail Pastors Conference, knows what failure feels like. He has listened to pastors who were busted in a prostitution sting or found themselves homeless when ejected from ministry. With candid vulnerability, Briggs explores the landscape of failure, how it devastates us and how it transforms us. Without offering pat answers or quick fixes, he challenges our cultural expectations of success and gives us permission to grieve our losses. Somehow, in the midst of our pain, we are better positioned to receive the grace of healing and restoration.

    In the culture of today’s church, successful leadership is often judged by what works, while persistent faithfulness takes a back seat. If a ministry doesn’t produce results, it is dropped. If people don’t respond, we move on. This pursuit of “greatness” exerts a crushing pressure on the local church and creates a consuming anxiety in its leaders. In their pursuit of this warped vision of greatness, church leaders end up embracing a leadership narrative that runs counter to the sacrificial call of the gospel story.When church leaders focus on faithfulness to God and the gospel, however, it’s always a kingdom-win—regardless of the visible results of their ministry. John the Baptist modeled this kind of leadership. As John’s disciples crossed the Jordan River to follow after Jesus, John freely released them to a greater calling than following him. Speaking of Jesus, John said: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Joyfully satisfied to have been faithful to his calling, John knew that the size and scope of his ministry would be determined by the will of the Father, not his own will. Following the example of John the Baptist and with a careful look at the teaching of Scripture, Tim Suttle dares church leaders to risk failure by chasing the vision God has given them—no matter how small it might seem—instead of pursuing the broad path of pragmatism that leads to fame and numerical success.

    Fun is still allowed, by all means, but the ultimate emphasis on maturing faith is simply essential.The anecdotal comparisons are current and on-target (Starbucks’ well-publicized decision to retrain baristas in coffee making introduces the idea that youth leaders might also be wise to revisit the gospel essence of their ministry). And case study data gleaned from small to mega churches and parachurch ministries will give every youth leader a relatable reference point from which to begin the successful metamorphosis to Simple.

    Sharing inspiring stories from his own experiences as a prayer circle maker, Batterson will help readers uncover their heart's deepest desires and God-given dreams and unleash them through the kind of audacious prayer that God delights to answer.

    The personal restlessness and the continuous search of why the Lord chose twelve men to disciple revealed to Pastor Cesar Castellanos the model of the Government of twelve, which in this book is explained in detail. Also, this publication will be of great help in breaking schemes and will place your church, the leadership and all its ministry in a new dimension of power.

    Through this powerful, thought-provoking volume, ministers both in the congregation and on staff will discover how to expand the church one soul at a time. Making disciples is the crux of the Church Is a Team Sport message. The plan works. Caring for people, following up on stray sheep, and teaching what it means to love God and obey him. That's how Church Is a Team Sport transforms Christians from Monday-morning quarterbacks into dynamic players.

    But too often the things of our past--fear, anger, bitterness, worry and doubt--hold us back. Rather than focusing on the reality of who Christ is and what he has done for us, we allow ourselves to be identified by all the things we aren't. But we are not who our past says we are, and we are not who the enemy says we are. We are who God and his Word say that we are.Pastor Perry Noble challenges all followers of Christ to make a bold move by fully embracing the exciting adventure God has called us to. Are you ready to unleash all the life he has created you to live? Join Perry on this journey as he digs into the major barriers holding people back and shows how Jesus calls and equips his followers to experience a life most of us never dreamed possible.