What is the best and most biblical way to define a “healthy” church?

Should a church be considered “healthy” when it is doing well financially or when large crowds of people are coming to the meetings? Perhaps a church is “healthy” when the majority of its growth is from new converts, or when it has a strong foreign missions program? Is an effective children’s ministry or youth program the key element for “health”; or perhaps the fact that the church engages well with the culture? Clearly, there are many different things we could focus on. Continue Reading »

When Geert Hofstede, a Dutch sociologist, published his seminal research on dimensions of culture in 1980, he found that Americans were characterized by a high level of individualism – in fact, they were rated the most individualistic people in the world. Continue Reading »

As have seen in previous Letters, our leadership development efforts must not be conducted apart from a living community of people in which the emerging leaders function and participate. Continue Reading »

In most Western organizations today, we love specialization and compartmentali­zation. Consequently, as we have already mentioned, it is common for us to entirely delegate the task of leadership development to some “specialist” person or group – whether inside or outside the organization itself. We identify the emerging leader who needs to be developed and then send him to the “experts” to “do it” for us. Continue Reading »

In our last Letter we looked at the traditional approach to building Christian leaders: the local church sends its emerging leaders to a specialized, independent, external entity (the “factory”) that takes responsibility for training them and then sending them back. Continue Reading »

An ancient African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Similarly, it takes a spiritual community or family to build a leader. Continue Reading »

The Christian life is personal union and fellowship with Jesus (John 17:3). Church life is knowing God together. Moreover, together – in the context of the community of believers – we can know God in His fullness. Continue Reading »

All leaders can improve in their leadership. In our previous Letter, we saw that we can help our leaders improve by overcoming the barrier between leaders and followers, by being realistic in our expectations of them, and by striving to understand them. Continue Reading »

At some point, most followers complain about their leaders. Some of the most common complaints are:

Everything does not depend upon the leader. If our churches and Christian ministries are to be healthy, every member must take responsibility for the whole, functioning actively and thoughtfully. Continue Reading »