Picture your church as a place where the priesthood of believers finds its expression in creative and powerful ways. Picture leaders and staff equipping and unleashing people to minister in ways consistent with how God designed them. Think of the effectiveness, vitality, and contentment that come when the body of Christ nurtures itself through the healthy give-and-take of each member. In The Equipping Church, Sue Mallory describes the benefits, the structure, and the culture of an equipping church and shows how your congregation can become one. This book is about limitless possibilities. Think "vision." What might your church look like if its members became vital, fully empowered partners in ministry? How can you help them discover and release their full potential? How would their roles change--and yours? AN EQUIPPING CHURCH IS A CHURCH WHERE: * pastors and leaders enable church members to share in ministry * people’s gifts, talents, and life callings are matched with areas of service * ministry opportunities are recognized and developed * the culture encourages the growth of a broad array of ministries *a well-designed system addresses needs of every kind, both individual and corporate *the pastor doesn’t have to be all things to all people Unpacking insights and principles uncovered by Leadership Training Network over the last several years, Mallory helps you customize an equipping system and culture in your church. You’ll proceed from preparation (what you need to know), to foundations (what you need to change), to construction (what you need to do). In the process, Mallory takes you inside the story of her own church, Brentwood Presbyterian, to observe the different stages of their trial-and-error journey and how it has transformed their approach to "doing church." See how they dealt with various concerns that arose along the way, and meet men and women whose lives have been changed because Brentwood took the ministry road less traveled. Each chapter includes a section of "Equipping Principles," questions for discussion and reflection, and a summary of different equipping churches from around the country. With the accompanying Equipping Church Guidebook, this book will be a mile marker in your church--and the gateway to a more effective and biblical approach to ministry.

Missiologist and church planter JR Woodward offers a blueprint for the missional church--not small adjustments around the periphery of the infrastructure but a radical revisioning of how a church ought to look that entails changing how we think about leadership and what we expect out of discipleship.

Acclaimed church leader, blogger, founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan unpacks the lifecycle of a typical church, identifies characteristics of each phase, and provides practical next steps a church can take to move towards sustained health. Think about your church for a moment. Is it growing? Is it diminishing? Is it somewhere in between? Acclaimed church leader, blogger, and founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan has identified the seven stages of a church's lifecycle that range from the hopeful and optimistic days of launch, to the stagnating last stages of life support. Regardless of the stage in which you find your church, it carries with it the world's greatest mission—to "go and make disciples of all the nations . . ." With eternity at stake the Church should be doing most everything within its power to see lives changed forever. The Church should strive for the pinnacle of the lifecycle, where they are continually making new disciples and experiencing what Morgan refers to as "sustained health." In The Unstuck Church, Morgan unpacks each phase of the church lifecycle, and offers specific and strategic next steps the church leader can take to find it's way to sustained health . . . and finally become unstuck. The Unstuck Church is a call for honest an assessment of where your church sits on the lifecycle, and a challenge to move beyond it.

Experts on congregational life tell us that ministry in the next century will depend more on called, trained, and committed lay leadership than it has since the days of the early church. But how will congregations recruit these lay leaders? How will they develop new models for training and equipping them for all the ministries of the church? What will the role of clergy be in adopting this new partnership that Leonard Sweet calls "ancient-future ministry"? Equipping the Saints seeks to help congregational leaders answer these and other questions related to mobilizing lay ministry in the years ahead. The chapters include: "Shall We Abolish the Clergy or the Laity?" by Michael Christensen; "Team Building Through Spiritual Gifts" by Brian Bauknight; "The Loss and Recovery of the Biblical Basis for Ministry" by Russell Moy; "Out of the Pew, Into the World" by Jessica Moffat; "The Seeker Service in the Mainline Church" by Eric Park; "Circuit Riding in the 21st Century" by Rob Duncan; and, "Life Together: Reclaiming the Ministry of Small Groups" by Christine Anderson. Key Features: - Responds to emerging trends that promise to be determinative of the shape of ministry in the next century - Addresses an important practical need in congregations - Offers help in formulating new models for congregational ministry Key Benefits: - Readers will understand the important emerging need for called, trained, and committed laypersons to engage in ministry - Readers will learn how to recruit and train lay leaders - Readers will identify a new model of clergy/lay ministry partnership

The 4E Ministry Training Strategy, tested in hundreds of churches already, is a best-practice tool for empowering God s people to make disciples. Here is the 21st-century manual for a Christ-centered, church-based, comprehensive, compassionate, and culturally informed mobilization of the priesthood of all believers, enabling the body of Christ to change lives. --from publisher description.

The biblical model for church leadership is found not only in pastors but also in teams of elders who oversee, shepherd, teach, equip and guide the community into God's mission. In this practical guide, J.R. Briggs and Bob Hyatt unpack the role, character and posture of a mission-oriented elder.

This book is Volume 2 of a three-part series on active/active systems. It describes techniques that can be used today for extending system failure times from years to centuries, often at little or no additional cost. As our daily lives and corporate well-being become more dependent upon computers, system reliability grows increasingly important. No longer are frequent system outages acceptable. In many cases, failure intervals must now be measured in centuries. Starting with a summary of Volume 1, techniques for achieving extraordinary availabilities are reviewed. These techniques use active/active architectures, in which multiple independent nodes using a common distributed database are cooperating in a common application. Should a node fail, all that is required is to switch the users on that node to a surviving node. Equally important to the achievement of high availability is the ability to upgrade the system hardware and software without denying service to the users. The procedures to do this within an active/active system are described. The secret to high availability is to let it fail, but fix it fast. This volume explores the server, database, and network redundancy techniques that allow fast-fix to happen. The cost considerations involved in such redundant architectures are also explored.