BOOK REVIEWS
Hopefully our personal reviews of these books we have read will inspire you to get your copy and keep growing yourself, your team, and your church.
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This book inspired us to know and lead what we are FOR instead of pushing what we are not. To quote from page 49, "When what you want to be known FOR is actually what you are known FOR, customers become a sales force for free by telling others about you." There are helpful references and examples for churches, too.
We recommend this book for an executive or associate pastor. It will help you understand your subordinate role and also navigate going from first to second chariot if your role changed at a different church.
Juli was given this book at an Executive Assistant conference Jenni Catron spoke at. We recommend this book to new leaders to help them not hide in the organization and understand their influential purpose.
To quote chapter 1, "Culture - not vision or strategy - is the most powerful factor in any organization." So why is it so hard for churches to embrace change and set the culture? This book helps you see strengths or growth areas to reach your goals.
This book transformed how we set and achieved wildly important goals. It gives you the power to transform your culture and your leadership results.
Stop having bad meetings. This book is "nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams and create environments of engagement and passion."
Amazon describes this book best: "Learn the secrets to building and maintaining a healthy, productive, and unified ministry team that sticks together for the long haul."
To quote page 128, "One of your primary roles is to equip and empower those you lead." This book has a fascinating approach to leading others with lessons from the Builders of the Panama Canal.
This book helps you learn how to develop leaders. The introduction includes the statement: “Grow a leader - grow the organization. A company cannot grow throughout until its leaders grow within.”
This book helps anyone from pastors to team members learn how to communicate ideas. The 6 principles of SUCCESs are: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories.
To quote from page 118, “A leader is a person who is dissatisfied with the way things are.” This books helps you not just be a great leader now, but how to have a legacy that lasts for the next leader.
If there is a hidden offense in your heart or in your team, Satan will use that to get believers out of the will of God. We recommend starting with this book to help shape your church staff culture and even going through the DVD series together.
Since "The Armorbearers of today will be the leader of tomorrow," it's important for your church staff to get off the sidelines and into the action once they understand their role as Armorbearers.
This book helped unlock growth areas in our leadership: our heart for relational leadership, our soul for spiritual leadership, our mind for managerial leadership, and our strength for visionary leadership.
Deep down, do you know what a life-giving culture should look and feel like, but you just don't know how to do it? This book will help you create, re-create, or shift your church's culture from the inside.
This book helped us make some tough, but much needed decisions. Sometimes you need to end something before you start the next right thing, and this book gives you the courage to have those endings.
Most leaders are extraverts, but introverts bring value, too. This book can help leaders understand the "quiet" personality type on their team and how to lead them better.
Every church leader should ask themselves: is my soul emotionally healthy and spiritually sound? This book will help you transform your inner life as the foundation of being a better leader.
The two biggest takeaways we had from this book = 1. Change doesn't always have to be drastic to be effective. 2. Change is necessary for you to reach your capacity.
This book is about Disney's hospitality, but we have used a lot of these ideas to transform both church and business cultures by thinking about a better 5-star experience.
This book helps anyone from pastors to team members learn how to communicate ideas. The 6 principles of SUCCESs are: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories.
This book helped us see how building your digital community as a church is just as important as building in-person community. There are people to reach and disciple everywhere.
Everyone in authority should be under authority. To quote from chapter 11, "When we are not submissive to our delegated authorities, we resist God's authority because they are appointed by Him!" This is great book to go through with a church staff team.
Loyalty is a value that should be demonstrated in your teams. This book is good to do as a staff small group study with discussion questions offered at the end of each chapter.
Kadi Cole specifically gives church leaders tools on how to develop and leverage females to become leaders. We also recommend this book to female staff to spark conversations with their boss/pastor.
Let's be honest: churches need volunteers, but working with non-paid essential workers can be frustrating. This book helps you recruit, train, and maintain key leaders that can help you grow your ministry.
We have never fought so hard for someone else's vision until we finished this book. Be Mean About The Vision should be read by all church staff to keep the vision alive.
This book helps you cultivate a culture that builds improved staff engagement and empower your team. It also helps you overcome personal failures in love.
Although this book is geared more toward business, it helps you understand that a church staff health is just as important as your ministries. It will assist you in defining your leadership team and bring clarity to your church’s mission and culture.
This book helped us understand relational leadership. Page 7 explains two skills needed in developing new leaders is, "the ability to connect and the ability to appreciate people for who they are."
With a practical understanding that the pain we experience in ministry is often a greater lesson from God, this book completely prepared us for what was to come in church leadership.
The tagline for this book is where healthy meets high performance. We particularly like that chapter 15 isn’t titled Work Ethic, but Stewardship Ethic. Keep that in mind as you build a well functioning team.
The Amazon review says, "The church doesn’t have a message problem. The church is facing a message delivery problem." This book helped us better understand church communication.
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