Concise advice on key church leadership issues

If you feel stuck in your ministry, you might want to stop looking at your frontline staff, volunteers and general membership, and spend a little more time evaluating the health of your senior leadership team, according to Tony Morgan in his book Take the Lid Off Your Church: 6 Steps to Building a Healthy Senior Leadership Team. The senior leadership team needs to consist of people who have demonstrated spiritual maturity and leadership capacity.

So what are the critical things that the senior leadership team needs to do? The author suggests that there are seven roles which should not be delegated:

• Modelling team-based ministry
• Selecting and applying strategies to accomplish the vision
• Leading staff and volunteers
• Making sure people are focused on the vision and aligned with organisational priorities
• Identifying threats and opportunities for the church, and responding to them
• Facilitating communications within the church
• Monitoring the church’s health and taking appropriate corrective action

The book describes how you can identify who should be on the senior leadership team, strategies which can be used to empower leaders, traps to avoid when selecting leaders for the team, and actions which you can take and tough conversations which you should have in order to improve the effectiveness of your team.

This is a short book, written in a concise manner, and capable of being read in about half an hour, but it contains a lot of helpful advice on a topic which is often not given sufficient attention. All too often church leaders evaluate the performance of others but fail to consider how effective they themselves might be. The book ends with a number of discussion questions which should stimulate several hours of vigorous debate for any church leadership team.