This practical "how-to" manual helps pastors and key leaders develop their leadership competencies by cultivating new understandings and practices. It focuses on the foundational principles for developing leadership on a mission field. "If you are a local church pastor--anywhere--you are on a mission field," according to Callahan. Rather than prescribing one specific blueprint for leadership, he explores the basic principles that underpin effective leadership--leadership that is proactive, relational, intentional, and focused on the mission of God in the world. And he helps pastors and key leaders build on their creativity and imagination in order to revitalize their local churches and advance their missions.
Each generation must carve out an understanding of ministry that matches its time. The churched culture that existed in the late 1940s and 1950s is gone. The institutional understanding of top-down leadership no longer works. Leadership in today's church must begin in the mission fields--the local community--at the grass roots. It must address more than those persons who are already participating in current local churches. Rather, it must begin with the unchurched. Leadership on the local mission field must bring in persons new to the Christian life, forming a renewed congregation founded on community, not committees. The way forward depends on this new model of leadership. "The day of the missionary pastor has come." Less
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