Introduction 

This is a book about planning. A primary responsibility of leaders is to help the congregation understand where it is going, and how to get there. By leaders, we mean not only pastors of rabbis, but also congregational members who hold formal and informal positions of leadership. Leaders need to help people find worthy goals. They need to have a plan to structure work and maximize the resources of the congregation about the plan, so that people are willing to move together toward the goal. 

Planning can be challenging in the contemporary congregation, where people share a common faith and values but may have very different preferences and needs. Some leaders want to reach out to potential members of the congregation while others would prefer to direct resources to support current members. Some desire help for their own spiritual growth, while others would like a congregational initiative to address community issues that might shape or support other people. Some want to emphasize ministry with youth while others hope for help in developing small sharing groups for adults. Some want change. Some want stability. The conversation about what a congregation is to do and where it will direct its resources can be quite complex…

 

“An important and biblical book about our words and our God. Few of us really think about the power, the blessing, the gift, the effect, and the danger of our words. This book will make you think before you speak. Best of all, it will make you think of Him before you speak. Read it. You’ll be glad.” – Steve Brown 

“Filled with searching and realistic and honest illustrations… coupled with large doses of biblical truth… you will be challenged, convicted, enlightened and encouraged in this extremely important dimension of your relationship with God and with other people… A volume to which you will turn again and again.”  -

 

“Paul Tripp does not offer superficial solutions to our failures of communications. He recognizes that the spiritual quality of our words emanates from our hearts. This book is must reading for us all.” – Tremper Longman III 

“If your mouth is your downfall, don’t pass over this book for fear of getting your knuckles wrapped. Author Paul Tripp has blown it too! But he’s learning how to change by God’s grace, and he’s sharing that grace with anyone who will listen.”  - Steve Estes 

“Until our hearts are completely purified by God in heaven, we must set strong guards at the gates of our mouths and fight daily battles to restrain the overflow of our sinful desires. I have never before read such helpful insights and practical tools for this battle. I enthusiastically recommend War of Words.” – Ken Sande

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The bible never discusses midlife, just like it never discusses teenagers. Yet the Bible is able to unpack any of life’s experiences because it was written by the one who made them all. Life on this side of glory is hard. The world is a broken place. You will face things in midlife that beat at the borders of your faith, but you do not have to be lost in the middle of your story. 

You do not have to be paralyzed by regret, defeated by aging, and discouraged by the passing of your dreams. This time of life, which can seem like the end of many things, can actually welcome you to a brand new way of living. As is so often the case in your walk with the Lord, this moment of pain is also a moment of grace. Because of this, we all need to occasionally step back, slow down, and consider where we are going. Lost in the Middle will help you do just that. 

Although this book is targeted at those who are facing the issues of midlife, it has a much broader net than that. Lost in the Middle can help all who are confronted with life in this broken world and have lost their way. The God who seems so distant to you in this moment is actually near and active. Lost in the Middle is written to give you eyes to see him, to see yourself more clearly, and to find the real hope that you need to carry on.

 

“Need people less. Love people more. That’s the author’s challenge… He’s talking about a tendency to hold other people in awe, to be controlled and mastered by them, to depend on them for what God alone can give… [Welch] proposes an antidote: the fear of God… the believer’s response to God’s power, majesty and not least his mercy.”  -

 

“Biblical and practical. The reader does not need a problem with peer pressure or codependency to profit from this book. Opens our eyes and directs us back to God and his Word to overcome the fear of man.” – The Baptist Bulletin 

“Much needed in our own day. User friendly as a resource for Sunday School or home Bible study. Here is a volume that our church libraries and book tables ought to have. Its theme is contemporary. Its answer is thoroughly biblical.” – The Presbyterian Witness 

“…refreshingly biblical… brimming with helpful, readable, practical insight.” – John F. Macarthur Jr. 

“Ed Welch is a good physician of the soul. This book is enlightening, convicting, and encouraging. I highly recommend it.” – Jerry Bridges 

“Readable and refreshing… goes to the heart of an issue immobilizing the church. Exposes and repudiates the trivia of therapeutic theology with wisdom and compassion.” – Susan Hunt

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“I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding” (Jeremiah 3:15). 

Most of the Bible’s pastoral imagery is grounded in two traditions:

 

These traditions provided prototypes for leaders that followed, and formed the background for the ministry of Jesus – the ‘good shepherd’. His disciples were sent as shepherds to feed his sheep – and as sheep among wolves. The pastoral role was central to the ongoing life of local churches in the Christian movement, and today’s pastors are still called to be shepherds after God’s own heart, to lead his people, living on the margins of settled society, to their eternal home. 

In this excellent study, Timothy Laniak draws on a wide range of Old and New Testament texts to develop a biblical theology of ‘shepherd’ imagery, and concludes with some principles and implications for contemporary ‘pastoral’ ministry. 

‘The biblical theology… pushes for a nuances but holistic reading of shepherd imagery as it develops across the canon of Scripture. But… so extensive is this imagery in the domain of Christian leadership that it contributes a great deal to what Christians ought to understand about leadership itself, and how they will practice it’ (D. A. Carson).

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“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Mathew 6:12). “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). “What is Confession? Confession embraces two parts. One is that we confess our sins; the other that we receive absolution, or forgiveness, from the pastor as from God Himself, and in no wise doubt, but firmly believe, that by it our sins are forgiven before God in heaven” (Luther’s Small Catechism). 

In a sinful world, people sin against each other. Christians do too. Even in church, we often give and take offense. How do we handle this? Often with bitterness and grudges. But Christ did not die for us in order that be might live in hostility toward each other. He gives us a better way.  Confession and Forgiveness, which Luther frequently used and sometimes even called a third sacrament, has often been neglected in the everyday ministry of our churches. Even so, many are now rediscovering that essential element which God has given us for our spiritual benefit. In these pages, learn from Scripture, from the Lutheran Confessions, and from powerful contemporary stories, how to recover and employ this blessing in your own life, and become an ambassador of reconciliation. Ted Kober is president of Ambassadors of Reconciliation, a recognized service organization of The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod.

 

Foreword 

Those of us in Leadership today like to think of ourselves as “shepherds”, but we may have created shepherds of our own image. Tim Laniak agrees that, as Christian leaders, we should think of ourselves as shepherds, but he brings to our identity an unsettling biblical and cultural realism. Shepherding a flock in the

 

Almost forty years ago Phillip Keller wrote a soul-opening book, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. The journey in the following pages will take you beyond that devotional classic. With insightful words and splendid photographs, Laniak brings both a scholar’s mind and a pastor’s heart to his writing. Elders and deacons, pastors, parents and seminary presidents are correct in regarding themselves as shepherds. While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks raises our job description to a divine standard. 

 - Dr. Haddon Robinson

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Create Dynamic Leadership Teams – Unleash the Full Potential of Your Ministry.  In Leading the Team – Based

“Just when it seems that all that can be said has been said on the subject of ‘teams’, just when one has tired of the gumming of the label ‘team’ on everything in sight, along comes perhaps the most significant religious book on teams yet published. Cladis juxtaposes the theological and cultural context for team-based ministry in a model presentation of what a conversation between Bible, theology, and culture should look like”. – Leonard Sweet, dean, The Theological School and vice president, Drew

University 

“I really like the way [Cladis] ties the Trinity to teams. His unique approach – explaining the role of teams through the eyes of the Holy Trinity – offers a new way of understanding how teams can function in the church.” – Bill Easum, president, 21^st Century Strategies, Inc., and author, Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers  “Books on leadership tend to run off the road into either the ditch of theory-heavy counsel or the ditch of practice-only ideas. George Cladis avoids both. He stays on the road because he has built successful leadership teams and he has studied church leadership theory. For him, team leadership is the key to a faithful church.” – Terry C. Muck, professor of religion, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

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The Challenge

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness

The Study

For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long term mediocrity or worse into long term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards

Using tough benchmarks, Colllins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the word’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric , and Merck

The Comparisons

The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

             Over five years, the team analysed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness – why some companies make the leap and others don’t.

The Findings

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many leaders and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders: the research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concepts (Simplicity within the Three Cirlces): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of  Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

            Perhaps, but who can afford these findings?

Jim Collins is coauthor of Built to Last, a national bestseller for over five years with a million copies in print. A student of enduring great companies, he serves as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors. Formerly a faculty member at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award, Jim now works from his management research laboratory in

Author’s note

During my first year on the Stanford faculty in 1988, I sought out Professor John Gardner for guidance on how I might become a better teacher.

            It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting,”  he said. Why don’t you invest more time being interested.’

            I don’t know if this monograph will prove interesting to everyone who reads it, but I do know that it results from my growing interest in the social sectors. My interest began for two reasons. First is the surprising reach of our work into the social sectors. I’m generally categorized as  a business author, yet a third or more of my readers come from non-business. Second is the sheer joy of learning something new – in this case, about the challenges facing social sector leaders – and puzzling over questions that arise from applying our work to circumstances quite different from business.

            I originally intended this text to be a new chapter in future additions of Good to Great. But upon refection, I concluded that it would be inappropriate to force my readers to buy a second copy of the book just t get access to this piece – and so we decided to create this independent monograph. That said, while this monograph can certainly be read as a stand-alone piece, I’ve written it to go hand in hand with the book, and the greatest value will accrue to those who read the two together.

            I do not consider myself an expert on the social sectors, but in the spirit of John Gardner, I am a student. Yet I’ve become a passionate student. I’ve come to see that it is simpy not good enough to focus solely on having a great business sector. If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Econcomic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.

Jim Collins