Books published by Alban Institute, Inc

Facing Feelings in Faith Communities is based on a simple premise: We have emotions because we need them. God created us as affectively competent beings, William Kondrath argues, to help us understand our world and to give appropriate signals to people around us about what we are experiencing. Facing Feelings in Faith Communities helps us restore our emotional systems to their original state, or at least invites us to imagine how we would live differently if our emotional expressions were more nearly congruent with the situations and events we encounter. Kondrath invites us to explore six feelings-fear, anger, sadness, peace, power, and joy-through poetry, meditation on an evocative drawing, as well as through his own analysis of each feeling.

Pastors say goodbye to congregations. Sometimes their goodbyes are timely and sweet; sometimes they are jarring and painful. But as they leave, they face a unique journey of grief, one shaped by their role. They face both the outward grief of leaving people behind and the inward grief of leaving an identity behind. In The Graceful Exit, Lutheran pastor Mary Lindberg shares insights from her experience of ending her service to a congregation, as well as wisdom from other pastors who have changed their life work. Lindberg invites readers to pull apart the strands of self and role, individual and community; confront regrets, confusion, and dislocation; and figure out where and who God is at this juncture in their lives. She offers the book she wishes someone had handed her about finding a new church home, about getting a life, about relating to the colleagues who stayed. She reflects on how to be a pastor in a non-pastoral role, how to find community, and how to be graceful in the midst of the awkward unknown. Lindberg acknowledges that as pastors leave congregations, they have to discern how to wrap up their ministry and get out the door without regrets. She recognizes that most pastors will struggle with the spiritual themes of fulfillment, surrender, community, legacy, and separation. But she also believes pastors can face these challenges together. The Graceful Exit invites them into a community of healing and shows them that God walks with them to a new place, even as God keeps on loving the place they have left.

What is God's mission? Simply put, says theologian and field educator Cameron Harder, God's mission is to form communities that reflect and embody the life of the Trinity. Discovering the Other is an introduction to two tools that community builders have found helpful: appreciative inquiry and asset mapping. These tools help congregations see that all of life is saturated by the sacred and give them energy to begin living as if it were so.

Listeners do love their pastors and they agree with the sermon content they hear,' Lori Carrell once explained to a group of pastors, 'but most sermons don't ask for change, and most listeners don't experience spiritual growth as a result of the sermon.' A participant responded: 'Let's get practical. I want my preaching to make a difference. What changes are worth making, and how do I make them?' In Preaching that Matters, Lori Carrell shares answers to that question, drawing on the experiences of thousands of people-preachers and their listeners-whose effort she has studied over many years. In each chapter of this book, she offers research revelations about high impact preaching that will encourage and challenge readers to continue to grow as preachers.

Amid the widespread discussion about 'the future of the church,' an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow's church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead. George Mason's Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place. The book highlights an exciting development in the training of pastors: pastoral residency programs and mentoring. Mason demonstrates that these programs work best when the congregations themselves, not just leadership or staff, are an active participant in the training. In this way, churches begin to reclaim their rightful role in the formation of the ministers that will serve them. And, at the same time, they become healthier and more effective churches. Mason gives us the analogy of physician training. Medical school produces graduates with extensive knowledge of the body, but a practicing doctor will require several more years of internship and residency. Similarly, our seminaries and divinity schools produce men and women with good biblical knowledge, but they might not prepare a graduate for the task of helping a bereaved parishioner cope with the sudden loss of a loved one. Moreover, such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Mason shows that congregation-based mentoring and residency are excellent ways to bridge this gap.

In today's synagogue, the overall mission of the congregation is not necessarily a given. Tomorrow's Synagogue Today offers creative scenarios to stretch the imagination about how more synagogues could become vibrant centers of Jewish life and how congregational leaders can begin to chart a course toward achieving that goal.

Bible study, research, and fieldwork merge in this book of practical principles for decision making by spiritual discernment. The step-by-step approach can be used to help any size group learn a new way to make decisions--a way that is interactive, spiritual, and rooted in faith practices and community. Small groups, committees, church boards, church leaders at all levels, and seminary professors will find this book valuable. This is a revised and updated version of the book, originally published in 1997. This new version inclused revised and updated material, as well as a new introduction by Charles Olsen.

In Scattering Seeds: Cultivating Church Vitality, Stephen Chapin Garner and Jerry Thornell share the story of their home congregation, the United Church of Christ in Norwell, MA. This average congregation has approached congregational life in a not-so-average way. Each congregant is seen as a minister, bringing the good news of Christ to the community; the church has moved away from boards and committees, instead utilizing the people to form ministry teams; and they have revitalized the way they approach and practice worship and education. Garner and Thornell don't claim to have the secret to church growth and vitality, but in sharing the story of their simple church in New England, they give hope and innovative ideas to congregations in regions all over the country.

Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion is a new publication by noted religion writer Mark I. Pinsky. Pinsky has gathered stories from churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples across the country, "stories of people with disabilities and the congregations where they have found welcome." He has taken special care to include the widest range of disabilities, including non-apparent disabilities like lupus, chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, depression, and mental illness. There were 54 million American with disabilities as of 2000, and that number is now being swelled by wounded warriors from the Afghan and Iraq wars and an aging population. he author emphasizes that his purpose is to not to write a resource manual on accessibility and inclusion. Rather, Pinsky seeks to share stories of how people with disabilities have experienced their faith in the context of their disability, and how congregations have gained when they value the gifts that people with disabilities bring along. "This book," notes the author, "is for congregational leaders and others who may have no expertise or personal experience with disability, but who make the congregational decisions about accessibility and inclusion."

Every community of faith journeys through periods of transition. In Grace for the Journey: Practices and Possibilities for In-Between Times, authors Beverly and George Thompson invite congregations to open themselves to the grace-filled possibilities that accompany these in-between periods. Drawing on biblical examples and contemporary experience, the authors invite the community of faith to see transitional times as an opportunity to develop deeper spiritual awareness of God's call on its communal life-a call that open up fresh potential even as it calls us to consider what familiar things may need to change. As pastors and teachers with experience in congregations across the country, the Thompsons serve as your travel guides, accompanying you and your congregation as you walk through the wilderness of transitional times to the hope-filled possibilities on the horizon.

For five years, Alban Institute senior consultant Susan Beaumont has been giving voice to the organizational and leadership demands of large congregations. Through her work, she has identified five basic leadership systems that need to stay in alignment for the large church to function well for its size: clergy leadership roles, staff team design and function, governance and board function, acculturation and the role of laity, and forming and executing strategy. She has also learned that these five systems operate with some important but subtle distinctions in what Beaumont calls the professional church (400-800 in worship attendance), the strategic church (800-1,200), and the matrix church (1,200-2,000). Often, she has discovered, problems in a large congregation are related to the fact that one or more of the five systems is inappropriately structured for the size of the congregation. In other words, the church isn't acting its size. Beaumont is invested in helping large congregations 'rightsize' their leadership systems to better serve their ministry context. This book articulates why size matters and how it matters in the world of large congregations. It is written for anyone who wants to better understand the leadership and organizational dynamics of the large church anyone seeking to understand the challenges of leading from inside the large congregation.

Open source software makes the basic program instructions available for anyone to see and edit. An 'open source church,' likewise, is one in which the basic functions of mission and ministry are open to anyone. Members feel free to pursue their callings from God that are consistent with what God has called the congregation to be and do. But what does 'open source church' look like? In Open Source Church: Making Room for the Wisdom of All, Landon Whitsitt argues that Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can see and edit, might be the most instructive model available to help congregations develop leaders and structures that can meet the challenges presented by our changing world. Its success depends, he demonstrates, not on the views of select experts but on the collective wisdom of crowds. Then, turning to the work of James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, he explores the idea that the body of Christ itself--when it is intentionally diverse, encourages independence of thought, values decentralization, and effectively captures and aggregates the group's collective wisdom--is an open source church. Together, these phenomena show us what an 'open source church' looks like. It is the body of Christ at its best.

Field education is an opportunity for students to develop ministry skills, practice ministerial reflection, discern their call, experience professional collegiality, and undergo personal transformation. Field education offers them a place to practice ministry and a space to reflect on it, to integrate theory and practice, and grow towards competency. In Welcome to Theological Field Education! eleven directors of field education in seminaries and divinity schools across North America pass on their wisdom to both students and their supervisors. Edited by Matthew Floding, director of field education at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, this volume covers critical topics such as the art of supervision and formation, the use of case studies and peer reflection groups, self-care and ministerial ethics, and assessment. Formation for ministry is especially challenging at this time in the church's life. First, the explosion of knowledge, pluralism, and consumerism and a host of other complicating factors make huge demands on what a minister must know to be effective in ministry. Second, with the erosion of thick religious subcultures, the novice minister has fewer sources of practical wisdom to draw upon. The next generation of ministers, if they are to be more fully formed for ministry, depends on skilled mentoring alongside wise supervisors. This book is the tool to help them make the most of their field education experience.

Vibrant worship services, argues creative and provocative author Graham Standish, are those in which the congregation obviously asks questions such as: Does our worship help people experience God? Does our worship open people to the presence of Christ? Does our worship encourage people to become available to the Holy Spirit? Unfortunately, he observes, too many worship services are perfunctory, suggesting that most churches don't think much about how to connect people with God. In God's Presence makes the case that congregations must restore intentionality and authenticity to worship in a way that will open people to the Holy. Intentionality, he says, reflects a deep understanding of what tradition has attempted to do, what contemporary people are hungry for, what is going on in our culture, and how to connect the three. Standish advocates what he calls an 'integrated' approach to worship, one that maintains the distinctiveness of each element of worship as a counterpoint to other elements. He first explores the problem of worship in the current church. Then he looks at ways to reconceive worship with an emphasis on restoring the Holy to worship. Finally, he looks at ways to lead a congregation to consider new ways of worshiping. This book is about how to open people to an encounter with the Holy in worship, how to follow God in this pursuit, and how to lead those who have no interest in the Holy.

Pastors are called to be not only leaders with vision, but also managers of congregational systems, says John Wimberly in The Business of the Church. Drawing on his thirty-six years in ordained ministry, Wimberly weaves the realities of congregational dynamics and faith-centered purpose together with practical, proven approaches to business management. A student and friend of Rabbi Edwin Friedman, Wimberly builds on Friedman's systems theory as he helps readers avoid common pitfalls and put into practice effective techniques of congregational management. The book begins with a foundational discussion of how a systems approach helps congregational managers identify areas of dysfunction and effective solutions. Managing the critical 'inputs' of people, facilities, and finances has a direct bearing on the desired 'outputs' of proclamation, pastoral care, and mission. A strategic plan, through which a congregation sets its goals and identifies and prioritizes resources, is an essential management tool for both pastors and lay leaders. The author's conversational writing style and many real-life examples make a seemingly complicated, mysterious topic for some an engaging and easily applicable read.

We resist change less when we associate it with mission and fortify it with hope. So argues longtime congregational consultant Peter Steinke in his fourth book, A Door Set Open, as he explores the relationship between the challenges of change and our own responses to new ideas and experiences. Steinke builds on a seldom-explored principle posited by the late Rabbi Edwin Friedman: the 'hostility of the environment' is proportionate to the 'response of the organism.' The key, Steinke says, is not the number or strength of the stressors in the system--anxiety, poor conditions, deteriorating values--but the response of the individual or organization to 'what is there.' Drawing on Bowen system theory and a theology of hope, as well as his experience working with more than two hundred congregations, Steinke makes the case that the church has entered an era of great opportunity. Theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch said the church had closed down the office of eschatology. Steinke reopens it and draws our attention to God's future, to a vision of hope for the people of God. The door is set open for exploration and new creation.

Most churches have sought out a new pastor many times, yet search committees often feel as though they are inventing the process from scratch. In The Pastoral Search Journey, John Vonhof provides detailed guidance for search committees to ensure a good match between pastor and congregation. This is Vonhof's third book about the pastoral search -- but the first to discuss interim pastors, transitions between pastors, and the use of the Internet and digital media. Vonhof advises congregational leaders on establishing the search committee; ensuring the congregation is cared for during the pastoral vacancy; conducting the congregational self-study and creating an information packet; finding, communicating with, and interviewing candidates; determining selection criteria as well as evaluating and recommending candidates; managing call negotiations; and finally welcoming the congregation s new pastor. Sample letters, forms, and other tools are provided.

What does the church look like if we take the ministry of the baptized the priesthood of all believers seriously? How are congregations transformed when the church supports and affirms the ministry of all the baptized, particularly in small congregations without the means to hire a seminary-trained pastor? And what ecclesial structures and educational models need to emerge in the next decades to assist these small congregations in the recovery of baptismal living and their own vitality? Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook and Fredrica Harris Thompsett explore these questons as well as the variety of ways people in small congregations many with no more than fifty members are living out their baptism and the impact their actions are having on their congregations, judicatories, and communities, and the institutions that educate clergy. The authors argue that just because a community cannot pay a seminary-trained minister, a growing problem in remote regions, it does not mean that there is no ministry there. It does mean that we need to look at ministry and the church in a more expansive way. The stories of the congregations revealed in this book serve to inspire us about what is possible when we live intentionally as the reconciling presence of the body of Christ in the world. They also educate us about what will be needed in the years to come to lift up still more small congregations for their work in the larger community.

Many churches have active worship committees or planning teams, and an abundance of books and resources guide pastors and laity. Encounters with the Holy offers a conversational model of worship planning that was developed to train practitioners to be more reflective in their planning of worship experiences. The model planning, ordering, worshiping, reflecting is a flexible, fluid pattern. It provides a more circular, spiraling practice of imaginative planning, preparing the leaders and the space, and reflecting theologically to understand more fully the experience of worship. It has been tested in congregations, seminaries, and campus ministries amid a wide range of denominational and cultural styles. An underlying theological assumption of this approach is that we are engaged in holy work when we plan and prepare for worship. Leaders study, preparation, and training are themselves an encounter with the Holy. Therefore, we are called to become more informed and better prepared liturgical leaders. The language and encouraging style of the book is accessible to student pastors, pastors, and lay people interested in learning to think more deeply about worship.

The Sounds of Our Offerings is good news about the music of the church. It recounts what has been learned from studying nine congregations where music promotes the full, active, conscious participation of the worshipers and where it has done so consistently and coherently for many years. Pastors and musicians reflect on their work together and offer rich insights about what works and what does not. Lay musicians and members of the congregation also share their experiences with music in worship. Though no site was without its struggles, and at times difficult choices had to be made, for the most part, we see unremarkable, week to week, year to year, faithful rendering of music for prayer and praise. We see that sometimes the nature of the music took a slightly different turn, one that built upon the foundations of the past. The music choices in these churches are not restricted to one particular era or style, but rather reflect the broader church's music repertoire, including the best recently written music. These are the stories of churches with a reputation for their fine music programs, churches that, with their leaders and congregations, have worked out these programs in consistent, coherent ways. In most cases, the programs span multiple priests/pastors and musicians. The Sounds of Our Offerings is about excellent music and how it has found its way into the life and faith practices of these congregations.

Much has been written about the changing landscape the church finds itself in, and even more about the church's waning influence in our culture. From her vantage point as an under-40 pastor, Carol Howard Merritt, author of Tribal Church, moves away from the handwringing toward a discovery of what ministry in, with, and by a new generation might look like. What does the substance of hope look like right now? What does hope look like when it is framed in a new generation? Motivated by these questions, Merritt writes Reframing Hope with the understanding that we are not creating from nothing the vital ministry of the next generation. Instead, we are working through what we have, sorting out the best parts, acknowledging and healing from the worst, and reframing it all.

Many congregations are experiencing significant change both within and beyond their walls, and both members and leaders feel a sense of loss in the midst of these changes. In the midst of change, loss, and grief, congregations yearn for leadership--typically with differing expectations of what constitutes effective leadership in response to their needs, hopes, and priorities. At the same time, congregations resist leadership. After all, leadership assumes those who follow will be open to more change. Strategic Leadership for a Change provides congregational leaders with new insights and tools for understanding the relationships among change, attachment, loss, and grief. It also helps to facilitate the process of grieving, comprehend the centrality of vision, and demonstrate theological reflection in the midst of change, loss, grief, and attaching anew. All this occurs as the congregation aligns its vision with God's and understands processes of change as processes of fulfillment.

Tending to the Holy: The Practice of the Presence of God in Ministry invites pastors to embody their deepest beliefs in the routine and surprising tasks of ministry. Inspired by Brother Lawrence's classic text in spirituality, Tending to the Holy integrates the wisdom and practices of the Christian spiritual tradition with the commonplace practices of pastoral ministry. Bruce and Katherine Epperly utilize a variety of spiritual disciplines especially Benedictine, Celtic, Ignatian, Rhineland, and process spiritualities to provide a framework for helping clergy nurture the awareness of God, creative imagination, and personal well-being in every aspect of their ministerial lives. Practicing God's presence in the ordinary tasks of ministry inspires wholeness, spiritual transformation, vision, imagination, endurance, and healthy self-differentiation in ministry. Commitment to joining spiritual practices with the routine and repetitive tasks of ministry provides an important antidote to unhealthy stress, burnout, and loss of vision in ministry. By seeing their congregational leadership in terms of spiritual transformation, imaginative practice, and relational interdependence, ordinary ministerial practices can become ways pastors can deepen their relationship with God. Growing out of their work with pastors at every season of ministry, as well as combined ministerial experience of nearly sixty years, Bruce and Katherine Epperly invite pastoral leaders to complement and expand on their understanding of spiritual leadership, pastoral excellence, and self-care, integrating traditional and contemporary spiritual practices with the concrete arts of ministry.

Knowing your story is an essential component of effective leadership, but finding your story among the myriad narratives that fill your life isn't a simple task. Richard L. Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones have offered a path to finding your own story amid the powerful family and cultural narratives that may be obscuring your vision. The aim of this book is to show leaders how to explore their story of reality, tell it to other group members, and consider how it can be used as a resource for leadership. This narrative perspective holds that because there's always more than one story about a situation, we have choices about which story we will embrace. After more than six years working with groups of clergy, the authors have woven these stories together to create the fabric that is the backdrop of narrative clergy leadership. The book is an account of their pilgrimage. As you read you will have a sense that this is your pilgrimage, and it will encourage you into narrative ventures of your own.

Nobody likes scutwork, the unwanted dregs of the working day. Pastors are no exception to this, often dreading the endless e-mails and phone calls, having no heart for putting together one more bulletin or attending one more meeting, all of which feels like so much distraction from the "true" pastoral work to which they have been called. Louis Weeks challenges that paradigm and lifts up scutwork as an integral part of pastoral care and leadership. How can we administer congregations in ways most likely to increase the measure of pastoral care? How can our service, in menial and glorious work alike, build up the Body of Christ? How can all the work and worship in this congregation help God's work in the world? Preparation, organization, and other administrative duties are crucial for effective programs and mission in a congregation as elsewhere in society. Preaching, teaching, and pastoral care--three indispensable parts of congregational life--all depend upon competent congregational administration. It is through focused attention to the details of scutwork that pastors are able to build solid relationships within the congregation, and without the trust that comes from these relationships, no true pastoral care and leadership is possible. All for God's Glory explores ways in which churches are engaged and can engage in practices of administration that deepen care and build a healthy congregational community.

Helping a community of faith 're-vision' its personal and collective narratives is one of the greatest leadership challenges of the age. In Finding Our Story, Larry Golemon, lead researcher of the Alban Institute's Narrative Leadership in Ministry project, has assembled essays by congregational consultants who use the power of story to help congregations heal, strengthen, and reinvent themselves. These consultants describe how narrative therapy works, explore its promise and its challenges, and share the practical wisdom of their own experiences along with their favorite models of narrative change to show how congregations can be transformed by reauthoring the operative stories they live by

For Lutheran pastor John Berntsen, the cross is about more than the crucifixion on Good Friday. It is shorthand for the whole drama of salvation--God's decisive act of reconciling the world to God's own self. The cross is dying and rising with Christ, but at a deeper level it is the story of the world's resistance to grace. Those who lead are subject to the cross no less than others. In contrast with the current fashion for "visionary" or "purpose-driven" leaders, cross-shaped leaders are not primarily the providers of master plans, nor are they master builders. Cross-shaped leadership is provisional, contextual, and fallible--open-ended ministry that has the character of a pilot project. It is always under construction and revision. Our moment-by-moment functioning in ministry is subject to countless deaths and resurrections, few of which are heroic or glorious. But Berntsen offers good news within this potentially dismal perspective. He writes, "Once we've accepted the truth that ministry is hard, even impossible--once we've stopped living in denial of this reality, or perhaps whining about it--it becomes the truth that sets us free. We cease being gloomy servants, weighed down by our resentful conviction that we are all alone in our work--the closet atheism born of the worry, 'If I don t do it, nobody will'--and instead become joyful coworkers of a strong, wise, and consoling Lord." With optimism, humor, and deep empathy, Berntsen's Cross-Shaped Leadership offers hope and challenge in the midst of the rough and tumble of parish practice.

No pastor can lead a congregation to renewal alone. it requires a complete change of heart for the whole congregation. Congregational renewal occurs when people engage communally in a transition in their very understanding of the nature and purpose of their church. This goes far beyond a simple retooling of the mission statement or addition of a few programs. Authors Mary Sellon and Daniel Smith lead congregations through this process of renewal, breaking down into understandable components what is happening in the people themselves that makes renewal efforts successful. Pathway to Renewal offers pastors and congregational leaders a framework for understanding and addressing the deep cultural shift facing the people of a congregation during congregational renewal. This book will help leaders make sense of where their congregation could get stuck and guide them in thinking through what needs to be addressed next as a congregation seeks renewal. The realigning of a congregation's heart and sense of purpose can be a long process, but one that ultimately all congregations must experience in order to fully live out the world-transforming mission that God has given them to do.

Called for Life reflects on our calling to serve God and neighbor in the context of retirement. People facing retirement ask a variety of questions, each framed by a different perspective. "Will I ever be interested in retiring?" some baby boomers ask. "Who am I now?" newly retired clergy ask. "What, if anything, is God calling me to do and be after retirement?" all inquire. This book is built on the assumption that most people don't want to spend the last third of their lives doing nothing. What they want is a life that is worth living, an occupation that will help others, and a retirement in which they can continue to exercise their calling. Clayton uses examples from his own experience and from others, laity and clergy, to explore retirement and the three components of our calling: our identity, our gifts, and our occupation. He also examines the role of community in our calling and retirement, the challenges of the transition into retirement, options for meaningful activity, the importance of identifying our purpose, doing and being in retirement, and the final call to death. Readers will be encouraged to see retirement as an opportunity to do what they have always wanted to do and to become the kind of person they have wanted to be.