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Every leader who has ever served God’s kingdom has done so with, at best, mixed motives; by its very nature, church planting requires a belief that a new church can accomplish something better than is currently being done, and that you’re someone who can do it, according to Tom Bennardo in his book The Honest Guide to Church Planting: What No One Ever Tells You about Planting and Leading a New Church.

The author provides quite a sobering array of advice based on his own experience, including:

• Leadership, imperative as it is, is always accompanied by its evil twin—Arrogance.
• The church isn’t an industry, and spiritual transformation can’t be mass-produced.
• You can organize a church to death, but you can’t organize one to life.
• When enticement is established as the foremost basis for church participation, maintaining the same level of stimulation becomes a condition for continued involvement.
• You will be routinely disappointed by your core team.
• If you spoon-feed people by accepting responsibility to ensure they’re contented and won’t threaten to leave, you’ll create an environment where the baby birds simply sit in the nest with their beaks open, waiting for Mama to scout, retrieve, digest, and regurgitate the food, and then drop it into their mouths.
• The mandate to do everything at once and do it all well is built on an unhealthy—and unattainable—foundation.
• Aspiring to lead is like leaning into a right hook. Factor in the additional demands of entrepreneurship required to church plant, and we shouldn’t be surprised that most potential recruits run screaming from the building.

This book probably won’t deter most first-time church planters, but it is still a book that they should read so that they can consider the issues carefully and take appropriate steps to avoid unnecessary risks.

Lifelong learning is critical, especially for church leaders and board members who steward God’s work, according to Dan Busby and John Pearson in their book Lessons from the Church Boardroom: 40 Insights for Exceptional Governance. Highly engaged board chairs and board members know that when they say yes to board service they must continually increase their knowledge and competencies to fulfil this sacred calling.

Rather than offering a systematic overview of the various aspects of church governance, the book provides 40 pithy lessons on topics such as:

• Guarding your pastor’s soul
• Preparing now for the possibility of future accusations and investigations
• Eliminating fuzziness between board and staff roles
• Ways of finding consensus on challenging issues
• The importance of advance preparation in fully addressing complex issues
• Ways to avoid a financial train wreck
• Investing the majority of board effort in future ministry opportunities, rather than rehashing the past

If you’re the sort of church board member who already knew all that was required of a board member before you were elected to the position, this book probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re the sort of board member who is continually searching for ways in which your church can be more effective in fulfilling its mission, then this book has a lot of valuable lessons for your to consider.

Can a church capital campaign ever be something to look forward to, rather than something to dread? According to Greg Gibbs in his book Capital Campaign Playbook, a discipleship-based capital campaign can be a massive greenhouse for growing people’s commitment to Christ and their understanding of a life that is “true life”. The challenge is to aim for a best-case scenario: that faith in God and commitment to the church grow in a special and intense way.

The book answers all the questions you might want to ask about church capital campaigns, including:

• What preparation should occur before launching a campaign?
• How clear and compelling does the vision have to be?
• How much is the campaign likely to raise, relative to the church operating budget?
• What types of campaigns attract the highest levels of giving?
• What proportion of church attenders can be expected to participate?
• How can major donors be identified, and should they be treated differently?
• How can a capital campaign be an opportunity for people to go to a new level in their discipleship?
• What are the major threats to success?
• How should a communication strategy be formulated?
• What role should the senior pastor play?
• What might a person’s giving journey look like?

Before buying this book, I had never heard of the author, although he has the same surname as me. I was amazed at how clearly and thoroughly the author was able to break down each of the aspects of a capital campaign, to help turn what might be a fairly awkward and uncomfortable experience into something which can be very positive both for the church and for the givers. The likely readership is probably fairly small, but the quality of the writing and content is outstanding.

Hospitality is about caring for the emotions of the guest just as much as it is about serving them, according to Jason Young and Jonathan Malm in their book The Comeback Effect: How Hospitality Can Compel Your Church’s Guests to Return. We need to reimagine what it means to be the guest and what it means to add feeling back into it.

Although the book is written from the perspective of a large church in which attracting and retaining guests at weekly services is a major element of the church’s outreach strategy, the principles of hospitality are applicable to any type of church gathering and to many types of businesses and other organisations. A truly hospitable church is one which has made hospitality a defining feature of its culture, an expectation of every member rather than just a job which some people are rostered to do each week. Hospitality involves understanding how the guest is feeling, and taking active steps to make the guest’s experience a positive one.

In my opinion this is an interesting and helpful book. Most churches focus on trying to get the content of the service right, but they often overlook the details of a guest’s experience – any factors which may produce positive or negative emotions – which may often have a greater effect on the guest’s response and willingness to return than the content. This book provides many useful ideas for improving standards of hospitality in a church.

The practice of flipped learning not only holds the promise of making teaching more effective and more fun but also leads naturally to avenues of productivity in scholarship and service, according to Robert Talbert in his book Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. The traditional higher education teaching model presents information in the form of lectures to large groups of students who then go away and undertake by themselves higher-order learning activities involving application, analysis and evaluation. In the flipped model, the students study the information by themselves, and then in group class time they undertake the more cognitively complex learning activities for which access to the teacher’s expertise is much more necessary.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.

What kind of leadership would you need to undertake the largest engineering project ever, where success depends on the use of technologies which have not yet even been invented, and where a well-resourced team of experts had previously failed with massive loss of financial resources and lives? Sam Chand explores the issues in his book Bigger Faster Leadership: Lessons from the Builders of the Panama Canal.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.

You cannot take your church where it needs to be if you can’t identify where it is right now, according to Chris Sonksen in his book When Your Church Feels Stuck: 7 Unavoidable Questions Every Leader Must Answer. The book describes the various “phases” of a church’s life and then poses 7 key questions relating to mission, strategy, values, metrics, team alignment, culture and services.

It is interesting to compare the book with Tony Morgan’s The Unstuck Church, released at almost the same time. Sonksen’s stages of a church’s lifecycle are launch, utopia, whirlwind, increase, merry-go-round, and slow death, whereas Morgan’s stages are launch, momentum growth, strategic growth, sustained health, maintenance, preservation and life support. Sonksen’s book focuses on seven strategic questions which are relevant regardless of which stage of the lifecycle you are in, whereas Morgan’s book describes the different actions a church needs to take at different stages of the lifecycle. In my view there is value in reading both books.

Sonksen’s book is written through the perspective of a series of consultations provided to a pastor named Jeremy and his church. Although this adds some human interest to the content, I frequently found myself wishing that the book had focused more on the content, perhaps supported by more illustrations from actual churches, rather than on the presumably fictitious story.

There are seven phases of a church’s lifecycle, according to Tony Morgan in his book The Unstuck Church: Equipping Churches to Experience Sustained Health. These are: launch, momentum growth, strategic growth, sustained health, maintenance, preservation and life support. The book describes the characteristics which help you diagnose which stage your church is in, and it also provides guidance as to what actions you should take to maximise your church’s mission at each stage.

There are a number of other books available advising church planters on the steps they need to take in the early phases of a church’s life, so I suspect that most of the readers of this book will be most interested in the advice applicable to the “sustained health” and “maintenance” phases of a church’s life. I expect that a lot of church leaders who imagine their churches to be in the “sustained health” phase will be upset to discover that they are actually in the “maintenance” phase, but that is where this book is most useful: in helping you to discover what actions you should be taking before it is too late to do so.

The advice provided by the author includes:

• You should be ruthless about eliminating any division, particularly at the leadership level
• Foolish churches budget by looking at what came in last year, adding a percentage as a faith portion, and then planning to spend it all; wise churches plan to spend less than they receive, giving them the opportunity to be generous
• Churches are typically in the maintenance season for months or even years before they realise it
• Churches in the maintenance phase are often financially healthier than churches experiencing strategic growth, because mature believers give more than unbelievers and new believers
• When giving is strong but the church has become ineffective at its mission, it is not unusual for them to live in denial
• The primary barrier to health for an inward-focused church is creating environments designed to reach people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus

In my view this is a very helpful book, and I highly recommend it. There is a companion assessment tool on the Unstuck Church website which provides further assistance to church leaders in diagnosing the life stage of their church.

As a church leader or member, you must pay close attention to the message the children and young adults of your church and community are sending to you. The way the next generation tells you that your church has lost touch with them is simple—they stop coming, according to Lee Kricher in his book For a New Generation: A Practical Guide for Revitalizing Your Church.

The book tells the story of how Amplify Church, the author’s church, changed from a dying church into a growing church, and the author details five strategies which were key to the turnaround success: Adopt a New Mindset, Identify the Essentials, Reduce the Distractions, Elevate Your Standards, and Build a Mentoring Culture.

While those five strategies were obviously crucial to the turnaround, they do not in themselves explain what it is that made the church so attractive for children and young people. A crucial preliminary step seems to have been locating one or more other churches which are successfully reaching children and young people, and identifying key elements which can be copied or adapted to the local context. This preliminary step seems to have been vital both to giving the church’s leadership confidence that a turnaround was possible and to providing inspiration for creating environments which are compelling for children and young people.

There is absolutely no reason upstart digital companies have to supplant established firms. There is no reason new businesses have to be the only engines of innovation. The problem, according to David Rogers in his book The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age, is that—in many cases—management simply doesn’t have a playbook to follow to understand and then address the competitive challenges of digitization. This book aims to fulfil that role, helping you understand, strategize for, and compete on the digital playing field.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.