Gospel.com Blog

The latest Online Pulpit essay is up, and asks an unusual question: if you’re in a leadership position in your church, do you have a mentor?

Most of us might assume that our pastors and leaders “have it together” and don’t need spiritual guidance—but the pressures of leadership mean that your pastor might need a trustworthy mentor or accountability partner even more than the rest of us do:

As pastors and Christ followers…. we know we never outgrow the need for mentors. In every stage of life mentors are vital. Children, young adults, parents, married couples—individuals in literally every stage of life benefit from having a guide along the way. As I have been focusing on this important aspect of ministry the last few months, I have been asking myself the question, How are we ministers and the church doing?

If you’re a pastor who doesn’t have a trustworthy mentor to turn to, read this latest essay by Joan E. Tyvoll and consider the ways such a person might strengthen your ministry.

Yesterday we talked about several good youth ministry leadership resources. Here are three more good essays to add to that list, courtesy of Youth Specialties:

• Are you a “side-door leader”? You don’t need to be a member of the church staff to be an effective leader in your congregation. Kent Clayton talks about the importance of “unofficial” leadership:

  Side-door leaders are people who have influence in ministry settings without (necessarily) having an official role as leader; real leaders are those who wield power, regardless of position. Leadership is changing—in the postmodern milieu, people value following those worth being followed over pursuing those with the right titles. Structures and systems no longer hold the validity they once did. Sometimes, the real authority lies with the parents, the long-term youth volunteers, and even the students who shape the culture of a ministry’s leadership. Paid staff and youth coordinators aren’t necessarily part of that mix. In the real world, leaders are recognized, not appointed. Side-door leaders know how to weave influence without storming the main gates of a board, committee, session, or staff hierarchy.

• Youth leaders, have you given up on the prospect of getting your middle-school students to be spiritual leaders for their peers? Cliff Olson writes about the difficult but not impossible tasks of cultivating middle-school leaders.
• Does your ministry have a single leader directing all of its operations? The last several decades have shown that by organizing your youth or church ministry into gift-based leadership teams, rather than following the traditional hierarchical model of leadership, you can expand your reach.

Take a read through and see if any of these ideas are applicable to your ministry!

This week, we’re focusing on the topic of leadership. You can find a lot of leadership resources on our Leadership topic page; but we’ll also be highlighting a few good resources in more detail here on the blog.

So where to begin? “Leadership” is a pretty broad topic—in a Christian context, it can cover a wide variety of roles. There’s “official” church leadership—pastors, worship leaders, and other church staff. You can also lead a small group or a Bible study. And you can be a Christian leader outside the church grounds: you might have a leadership role in your community or your business, or you might just be someone that other people look to for advice and direction.

To kick things off this week, one ministry with a special focus on leadership is Officers’ Christian Fellowship. Many of OCF’s resources use a bit of military-specific language (it is a military ministry, after all), but I think you’ll agree that their leadership guidance is applicable to just about anyone. Here’s a quick tour of some of their free resources for leaders:

• Leading Effective Small Groups is one of the best primers I’ve seen on managing a successful Bible study group. It includes a great list of 20 ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s for a Bible study, and even a section on a touchy subject: how to deal with disruptive people in your Bible study. (It’s also available as a PDF download.)
• The 100 Days Bible Study is a great resource for Bible study leaders. It’s a 70-page document with short Bible study topics and discussion points covering dozens of topics. It’d be very useful for an impromptu Bible study, or for use when your small group needs something to talk about.
• Follow Me is a short essay that looks at the type of leadership that Jesus demonstrated, and offers ideas for emulating him.
• Eleven Bible studies about leadership, thoroughly addressing each of the traits that makes for a good Christian leader, from your attitude to your role to your vision for your group. There’s also an essay about Leading a Bible study which is essentially a shorter version of the longer essay we mentioned above.
• And if that’s not enough, OCF has many more articles on the topic of leadership.

If you’re a leader in your church community—officially or otherwise—take a look at these materials!

Last month, the Andy Unedited blog offered some useful tips for mastering your fear of public speaking—worth reading before you’re next called to speak in front of an audience or congregation. There’s a new post up about another aspect of the same topic: using humor effectively in a speech. Take his advice, and don’t ruin any more of your sermons with poorly-delivered jokes!

Does the idea of standing in front of an audience—or congregation—scare you to death? You’re not alone; public speaking ranks high on most people’s lists of scary situations. But if you’ve been called to speak in front of an audience (perhaps as a reader or worship leader at your church), a recent post at the Andy Unedited blog can help, with six practical tips to help you survive your public speaking experience. Great advice for anyone called unexpectedly to speak in front of others—and even the most eloquent pastor could probably stand to brush up on his sermon delivery skills every now and then.

The December episode of the Youth Specialties podcast is online—this month features an interview with Mark Matlock about the importance of teaching wisdom to students and young people. What is Biblical wisdom, and how can you teach teenagers to practice it? It’s a good discussion about an area of youth ministry that is often overlooked.

If you haven’t listened to the YS podcast before, be sure to also check out the podcast archives—past issues have touched on subjects ranging from evangelism to running successful youth group events to gender issues in youth ministry.

With all of the different programs and ministries vying for attention—and funding—in your church, is there anybody stepping forward to champion mission work? Whether you’re an official missions director or just a member of the congregation with a passion for missions, an article at Arab World Ministries is well worth reading: Serving as Missions Champion in Your Church.

The article interviews three veterans of missions leadership about what it means to champion mission work, what mistakes to avoid, and how current cultural issues affect the way we should champion missions. Whether your church is large or small, traditional or contemporary, there’s a place for a missions champion in your community—read the article and see if that person might be you!

update: while you’re thinking about missions, head over to WorldMap.org and take a look at their new mission map of the month—this December, it’s a map showing the state of evangelism in Europe.

We’ve been talking about discipleship all week here on the Gospel.com blog. Discipleship encompasses a lot of different things, and is something that all Christians should be practicing in their lives. But what about those for whom discipleship is not just a good spiritual idea, but part of their actual job description?

I’m referring to church leaders—pastors, small group leaders, youth ministers, worship directors, volunteer coordinators, and everybody else who has a leadership role in their church or community. How does one be an effective leader of others? Here’s a sampling of articles that address different aspects of leadership in the church today.

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When’s the last time you heard a sermon preached about the book of Revelation? Despite its popularity as a source of end-times speculation and plot material for countless Christian novels, Revelation can be an extremely difficult book to preach about in church. The latest Online Pulpit post looks at some of the reasons that Revelation doesn’t show up in many sermons today.

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Why would you want to outline the Bible? Does the very thought give you unpleasant flashbacks to high school grammar class?

Well, for pastors and teachers, choosing a Biblical topic or passage and creating an outline of it can be an excellent way to organize your thoughts and the Bible’s teachings. Into Thy Word has a thorough article explaining how to outline Scripture, complete with full examples of different types of outline. Outlining is a practice that will be most helpful to pastors, teachers, and writers, but could also be useful to anybody who wants to delve deeply into a specific passage of the Bible. And if you’re not a pastor, learning to outline will give you a glimpse at the in-depth study and preparation that goes into the writing of a sermon.