Being a life-learner is characteristic of strong leaders. The following is a sampling of my personal reading library. Many of the classic business books have concepts that translate well into effective church management and provide explanations of complex business principles. Enjoy the read!
At Your Best, is a book that outlines a detailed, proven strategy on how to get time, energy, and priorities working in your favor.
It’s designed to help leaders move past being constantly overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overworked and reclaim margin in their lives. These simple steps can help your church staff avoid burnout!
Get a better understanding of U.S. tax laws as they relate to pastors and churches with the Church & Clergy Tax Guide.
Learn how tax laws apply to you, how to correctly report your federal income taxes and social security taxes, understand relevant exemptions, and reduce your tax liability as much as possible.
You’ll also find easy-to-understand charts and real-life illustrations.
This annual reference guide continues to be one of the few resources offering tax and financial advice to churches and nonprofit organizations.
Issues of financial accountability, receiving and maintaining tax-exempt status, accounting for charitable gifts, and other crucial topics receive careful and full discussion.
Anyone who works for a ministry understands the unique challenges that come with managing church employees.
However, when employers manage with fairness and objectivity, the employees will feel more engaged with the church and go out of their way to create a positive experience for those people (employees, members and volunteers) they serve.
Managing a church office has lots of the same challenges as managing any other business and requires many of the same systems and processes to be successful.
Smart Church Management offers tips on the successful operation of a church which requires a strong decision making model, problem solving tools, positive employee management, structured volunteer oversight, systematic budgeting process, strategized customer focus as well as public relations and emergency management preparation!
Smart Volunteer Management – A Volunteer Coordinator’s Handbook for Engaging, Motivating and Developing Volunteers, 1st Edition, is perfect for anyone who manages volunteers.
With easy to understand examples, this book provides a simplistic approach to managing volunteers and running the day-to-day operation of a volunteer program.
Deep and Wide provides church leaders with an in-depth look into North Point Community Church and its strategy for creating churches unchurched people absolutely love to attend.
Andy writes, ‘Our goal is to create weekend experiences so compelling and helpful that even the most skeptical individuals in our community would walk away with every intention of returning the following week…with a friend!’
Rick Warren shares a proven five-part strategy that will enable your church to grow * warmer through fellowship * deeper through discipleship * stronger through worship * broader through ministry * larger through evangelism
The Purpose Driven Church shifts the focus away from church building programs to emphasizing a people-building process. Warren says, ‘If you will concentrate on building people, God will build the church.’
The management of quality crosses all functions of an organization requiring a comprehensive understanding of organizations as systems and an understanding of the ever increasing range of tools and technologies that quality professionals use.
This handbook is a must for every manager’s bookshelf and deals with every aspect of management and is the preparatory handbook for the Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence exam.
This book provides fascinating research of more than 6,000 team members and team leaders from a wide variety of industries, both public and private trying to determine what conditions contribute to a team’s ability to achieve goals.
Whether you oversee a team of employees or a team of volunteers this is an enlightening read.
Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently.
With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level.
This classic management book by Jim Collins offers some amazing insight into how leading companies manage to make the leap to a higher level.
It describes what the leaders of these organizations look like and basic management principles that they operate by. This is a must read for anyone desiring to take an organization to the next level.
Managing people is challenging at best but if done right can be one of the most rewarding experiences a person can have.
This book takes complex concepts and provides practical tips on all aspects of managing others.
This book answers the question of why some ideas thrive and others die and what can improve the chances of worthy ideas.
Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions and reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier.
This book is written with the general manager in mind and provides a base of key organizational behavior material on why employees behave as they do and how to promote behavior required to implement a focused business strategy using staffing, development and reward systems.
