Effective Church Leadership: Building on the Twelve Keys

by Kennon L. Callahan

Kennon Callahan shares a new understanding of leadership, and helps missionary pastors grow their leadership by cultivating new understandings and practices in seven key areas. Callahan guides pastors and key leaders in building on their creativity and imagination in order to revitalize their local churches and advance their missions.

Genres: Leadership, Church

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

Reviews

[Herman Najoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kennon Callahan undertakes a helpful effort in providing pastors and key church leaderswith guidelines for effective leadership. Noting that ours is an unchurched culture, the author observes that what’s needed are missionary pastors who are untainted by the credentials of professionalism. Callahan states that many current pastors were trained to focus their work inside the church but have run aground as society has become a wide open mission field in which the focus of leadership should be in the world. Churches and pastors should view their work as a mission outpost whose focus is on winning souls to Christ, not adding members. The author argues that the church is at its best as a mission field with relational and functional characteristics that are person-centered, resources that are centered on the world, and a sense of commonality as God’s missionaries. The author points out that the central theological category important to the current age is mission. In his comprehensive discussion of the nature of leadership, Callahan conceptualizes the components of one’s understanding of leadership and their impact on both wider culture and the church. The leader is seen as being a manager, a boss, an enabler, or a charismatic inspirer. Callahan compares these four perspectives with that of the leader being a missionary pastor stating that life is a search and pilgrimage in which leaders focus on emerging trends through the lens of a theology of mission. He notes that a missionary pastor is proactive, intentional, relational, and embraces a missional theology of the church while a professional pastor embraces an institutional theology. The author explores the four foundational life searches of individuality, community, meaning, and hope; outlines their relationship to emerging trends of power dislocation, cultural heterogeneity, theological pluralism, and societal specialization; and points out an array of consequences from these trends that emerging pastors have to contend with in the mission field. Missionary pastors express their leadership competencies in a leading-caring manner, a supportive-giving spirit, an analytical-diagnostic way, and a relational-motivational spirit. According to the author leaders grow well in an environment that offers authority, continuity, competency, and coaching that facilitates self-evaluation. He provides a strategic process for engaging in consultive evaluation that includes personal assessment, team sharing, mutual agreement, and envisioning of changes to be made. On structure, the author states that leaders must develop structures that match the mission ensuring that these are dynamic, flexible, local, connected, minimal, and effective. He closes by reinforcing the idea that mission makes a congregation grow, along with shepherding, worship, and community. Callahan’s work is well-reasoned and balanced with scriptural support. The focus on a missionary approach to pastoral leadership is exactly what’s needed today. The reader will be riveted from beginning to end with an appreciation of the depth of leadership content.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

When it was originally written, this was an important book with an important message: the day of the navel-gazing, chaplain to society, institutional leader is over. Nowdays, when the missional literature is so pervasive, this work can sound dated. Nonetheless, if you've NEVER encountered the message that the church needs to be outward focused, a "missional" outpost, as it were--then this book is for you. I give it only two starts because the message is not as fresh as it once was.

[Rachael Eggebeen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is perhaps the worst book I have ever read.