Crisis Leadership: Personal Accounts From Leaders Who Found Their Way and Thrived

Scott Barfoot and David Fletcher

Crisis Leadership takes a fresh and compelling look inside the hearts, minds and personal stories of nine remarkable leaders who battle challenging crises in the frontlines of life and ministry. This short read is packed full of vital wisdom, hope and encouragement to help you be even more effective in your own place of leadership. Chances are if you are reading these words there are three remarkable things true about you.

First, you are a leader. Not just any kind of leader, but a growing leader that recognizes and values the collective wisdom gleaned from those have gone before you. Second, you are a leader engaged on the front lines of ministry marred by conflict, complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Third, you are courageous! You will find a wealth of treasured insight shared in each of the chapters.

Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life

Henry Cloud and John Townsend

Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives. Often, Christians focus so much on being loving and unselfish that they forget their own limits and limitations. Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend offer biblically-based answers to tough questions, showing us how to set healthy boundaries with our parents, spouses, children, friends, co-workers, and even ourselves.  —Amazon

How People Grow: What the Bible Reveals About Personal Growth

Henry Cloud and John Townsend

All growth is spiritual growth. Authors Drs. Cloud and Townsend unlock age-old keys to growth from Scripture to help people resolve issues of relationships, maturity, emotional problems, and overall spiritual growth. They shatter popular misconceptions about how God operates and show that growth is not about self-actualization, but about God’s sanctification. In this theological foundation to their best-selling book Boundaries, they discuss:

• What the essential processes are that make people grow.
• How those processes fit into a biblical understanding of spiritual growth and theology.
• How spiritual growth and real-life issues are one and the same.
• What the responsibilities are of pastors, counselors, and others who assist people in growing—and what your own responsibilities are in your personal growth.

A Call to Resurgence:  Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future?

Mark Driscoll

In this book, Mark Driscoll delivers a wake-up call for every believer: We are living in a post-Christian culture—a culture fundamentally at odds with faith in Jesus. This is good and bad news. The good news is that God is still working, redeeming people from this spiritual wasteland and inspiring a resurgence of faithful believers. The bad news is that many believers just don’t get it. They continue to gather exclusively into insular tribes, lobbing e-bombs at each other in cyberspace.

Mark’s book is a clarion call for Christians. It’s time to get to work. We can only do this if we unite around Jesus and the essentials found in his Word, while at the same time, appreciating the distinctives within each Christian tribe. Mark shows us how to do just that. This isn’t the time to wait or debate. Join the resurgence.

Death by Church: Finding Our Way Back to Jesus

Mike Erre

The church is Jesus’ hands and feet today. But critics see it as hypocritical, irrelevant, and unloving. Materialism and consumerism abound. Mike Erre, teaching pastor and author of Jesus of Suburbia and Why Guys Need God, reveals how this has happened and how Christians can more effectively demonstrate Christ’s presence by again becoming…

• Incarnational—allowing Jesus to live in and through His people.
• Eucharistic—reenacting the ministry and sacrifice of Jesus to the world.
• Baptismal—dying to old ways of thinking and presenting the resurrection of Jesus as the beginning of the renewal of all things.
• Communal—correcting an overly individualistic spirituality by living as the community of God.
• Eschatological—presenting a more helpful and hopeful interpretation of the end of our story.

Readers will discover how the church can cooperate with Jesus in the world in which they live.

People Patterns—Discovering Giftedness in the Sunlight and Shadow of Relationships

David Fletcher

We all have Sunlight and Shadow in our lives. Artists and great authors have painted pictures with oils and words to show the light and dark in human relationships. Rembrandt van Rijn, the great Dutch artist, often painted using a strong light source, creating deep shadows on his subject. Some of the uniqueness that is you is easy to see. Another part of you is much harder to understand. If we make light and shadow into a metaphor, we can better understand what is easy and challenging to see about ourselves. In the sunlight we show our strengths for all to see. The parts of us that are much harder to see are in shadows. Our Shadow contains our weaknesses and limitations, things that are awkward or harder for us to do. In the bright sunlight we see our strengths and in the shadows we see our limitations. Sunlight and Shadow form the People Pattern.

Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

Will Mancini

Written by church consultant Will Mancini, expert on a new kind of visioning process to help churches develop a stunningly unique model of ministry that leads to redemptive movement. He guides churches away from an internal focus to emphasize participation in their community and surrounding culture. In this important book, Mancini offers an approach for rethinking what it means to lead with clarity as a visionary. Mancini explains that each church has a culture that reflects its particular values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions and shows how church leaders can unlock their church’s individual DNA and unleash their congregation’s one-of-a-kind potential.

Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

Will Mancini

Everyone is talking about discipleship, but too many churches stick to business as usual. Sunday comes and Sunday goes. The preacher preaches, the band worships, money gets put in the plate and people get back to their busy, unaffected lives. Hasn’t God called us to more? Will Mancini thinks so, and that’s what Innovating Discipleship is all about. Innovating Discipleship is for church leaders who have growing discontent for “best practicing” and “fast following.” Is God calling you to re-dream and re-invent beyond the ministry models that were handed to you? If so, this short read will bolster your courage and stoke your imagination. In this potent book, Mancini uncovers the primary obstacle in the minds of pastors that keeps discipleship stuck—revealed through thousands of hours of coaching with church leaders.

The Vision Deck: Companion Tool for Church Unique

Will Mancini

These cards are a companion tool for Will Mancini’s book Church Unique.

The Real Win: A Man’s Quest for Authentic Success

Colt McCoy and Matt Carter

Every man wants to succeed. But for so many, life seems to get in the way. We all have friends—good men, followers of Christ even—who start out well but before long, they’re failing at relationships, bending ethical standards, or driving
themselves so hard at work they’re losing the hearts of their wife and kids.

In The Real Win, Colt McCoy and Matt Carter wrestle deeply and personally with this challenge, then deliver down-to-earth, biblical answers. Based on their personal experiences and a close study of Scripture, McCoy and Carter show men:

• Why so much depends on who you trust and who you serve.
• Why every man is called to lead and why every man can.
• How to man up to temptation—and conquer it.
• How to find the “win” even in your biggest failure.

Innovation’s Dirty Little Secret: Why Serial Innovators Succeed Where Others Fail

Larry Osborne

Most books on innovation make it sound as if successful innovation is the end result of a carefully followed recipe. But the simple fact is that when it comes to any new venture, failure is the surest horse to bet on. Respected pastor and author, Larry Osborne, explains how understanding this dirty little secret behind innovation can bring both stability and creativity to organizations, especially those with teams of people that focus on innovation, creativity, new ideas and problem-solving. Using the wisdom and principles found in this book, you will be free to lead dynamically without causing uncertainty or insecurity in your organization.

Amplified Leadership

Dan Reiland

If you want your ministry to reach its maximum potential, all that God wants for you, it is essential that you develop strong leaders. In Amplified Leadership, “pastor’s coach” Dan Reiland gives you a proven process for developing new leaders that are established spiritually and trained practically.

Not just a checklist of things you should do, Amplified Leadershipprovides an intentional development process that starts with your relationships and ends with empowered leaders who are ready to make an impact. With personal examples and proven advice, Reiland gives you the tools you need to: Establish relationships; Engage followers; Embrace and equip team members; Coach your apprentices; Mentor new leaders.

The ability to develop leaders is a life-changing gift. When you successfully empower and release people to leadership, you give them the opportunity to fulfill their potential and advance the mission of the church.

Beyond Boundaries: Learning to Trust Again in Relationships

John Townsend

How do you know you’re ready to trust again … and what does it take to be ready? Painful relationships violate our trust, causing us to close our hearts. But to experience the freedom and love God designed us for, we eventually have to take another risk. In this breakthrough book, bestselling author Dr. John Townsend takes you beyond the pain of the past to discover how to re-enter a life of intimate relationships. Whether you’re trying to restore a current relationship or begin a new one, Townsend gives practical tools for establishing trust and finding the intimacy you long for. —Amazon

Invest: Your Gifts for His Mission

Sutton Turner

This book will challenge you to invest your life in the greatest cause of all—the kingdom of God. Sutton describes with great transparency, the journey God led him on from being a successful entrepreneur to discovering significance in living and serving for a higher purpose. This is also one of the few books that offer practical insight into the role of the executive serving their local church. When I served as an executive pastor, there was no training manual or guidebook to help me. It’s no surprise knowing Sutton, that he will dedicate this book to help current executive pastors, and those who will one day find themselves in this role.  —David Branker, Pastor

If 7:14: An Urgent Call for Revival … It’s Time

Bob Vander Plaats

If 7:14 focuses the passage in Scripture of 2 Chronicles 7:14 which offers believers a template and glimpse into God’s heart for revival.  If 7:14 unpacks 2 Chronicles 7:14, phrase by phrase, and makes the case for why there is an urgent need for revival.

Bob Vander Plaats says, “It’s more important now than ever to educate and inspire pro-family patriots who are willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the benefit of the current and future generations.  Our families, our marriages, our communities, our nation, and our world is in great need of revival.  Our only hope in turning things around spiritually fiscally, morally, locally, internationally, and personally is … revival.”

The final section of the book reveals a call to action—to pray two times per day at 7:14 am and 7:14 pm for personal revival, revival in our marriages, our families, our churches, our communities, our countries, and our world.