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By Nelson Searcy


Top 10 Books Of 2012 For Church Leaders

The year 2012 produced some powerful new reads from some of my favorite authors, including Steve Stroope, Gary L. McIntosh and Patrick Lencioni, plus a handful of new favorites.

You know what I say, "all leaders are readers."  And that's especially true of growing church leaders. With that in mind, here's the Top 10 Books of 2012 for Church Leaders:

Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul

#10:

Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend
by Andy Stanley

With surprising candor and transparency pastor Andy Stanley explains how one of America's largest churches began with a high-profile divorce and a church split. But that's just the beginning... 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!' Later he says, 'I want people to fall in love with the Author of Scripture. And while we can't make anyone fall in love, we can certainly arrange a date.' For the first time, Andy explains his strategy for preaching and programming to 'dual audiences': mature believers and cynical unbelievers. He argues that preaching to dual audiences doesn't require communicators to 'dumb down' the content. According to Stanley, it's all in the approach. You'll be introduced to North Point's spiritual formation model: The Five Faith Catalysts. Leaders responsible for ministry programing and production will no doubt love Andy's discussion of the three essential ingredients for creating irresistible environments. For pastors willing to tackle the challenge of transitioning a local congregation, Andy includes a section entitled: Becoming Deep and Wide. If your team is more concerned with who you are reaching than who you are keeping, Deep andamp; Wide will be more than a book you read; it will be a resource you come back to over and over!

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What They Didn't Teach You in Seminary

#9:

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation's largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

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Move: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth

#8:

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better
by Doug Lemov

We live in a competition loving culture. We love the performance, the big win, the ticking seconds of the clock as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and cheer, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really wanted to see greatness—wanted to cheer for it, see it happen, understand what made it happen—we'd spend our time watching, obsessing on, and maybe even cheering the practices instead. This book puts practice on the front burner of all who seek to instill talent and achievement in others as well as in themselves. This is a journey to understand that practice, not games, makes champions.

In this book, the authors engage the dream of better, both in fields and endeavors where participants know they should practice and also in those where many do not yet recognize the transformative power of practice. And it's not just whether you practice. How you practice may be a true competitive advantage. Deliberately engineered and designed practice can revolutionize our most important endeavors. The clear set of rules presented in Practice Perfect will make us better in virtually every performance of life. The "how-to" rules of practice cover such topics as rethinking practice, modeling excellent practice, using feedback, creating a culture of practice, making new skills stick, and hiring for practice.

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How to Wow Your Church Guests: 101 Ways to Make a Meaningful First Impression

#7:

The Only Way to Win: How Building Character Drives Higher Achievement and Greater Fulfillment in Business and Life
by Jim Loehr

The conditioning begins early in our lives. Great achievements will bring lasting happiness and fulfillment; great achievements form the bedrock of stable self-esteem and strong character; great achievements will become the foundation for a successful life. If these well-intentioned promises are true, why does winning never seem to be enough?

In The Only Way to Win, Jim Loehr draws upon two decades of work with Fortune 500 executives; world-class athletes such as Monica Seles, Dan Jansen, and Eric Lindros; and other high achievers at the Human Performance Institute (HPI) to reveal surprising insights about achievement motivation. Specifically, Loehr finds that the blind pursuit of external achievement often results in emptiness, addiction, and, ironically, poor performance. It's not really about what you achieve, he argues, it's about who you become as a consequence of the chase.

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Outrageous Advertising

#6:

Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success
by Chip Conley

Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life's toughest challenges into manageable facets that readers can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and bestselling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it's an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley's hands. When Conley, dynamic author of the bestselling Peak, suffered a series of tragedies, he began using what he came to call "Emotional Equations" (like Joy = Love – Fear) to help him focus on the variables in life that he could deal with, rather than ruminating on the unchangeable constants he couldn't, like the bad economy, death, and taxes. Now this award-winning entrepreneur shares his amazing new self-help paradigm with the rest of us. Emotional Equations offers an immediately understandable means of identifying the elements in our lives that we can change, those we can't, and how they interact to create the emotions that define us and can help or hurt our progress through life. Equations like "Despair = Suffering – Meaning" and "Happiness = Wanting What You Have/Having What You Want" (Which Chip presented at the prestigious TED conference) have been reviewed for mathematical and psychological accuracy by experts. Conley shows how to solve them through life examples and stories of inspiring people and role models who have worked them through in their own lives. In these turbulent times, when so many are trying to become "superhuman" to deal with our own and the world's problems, Emotional Equations arms readers with effective formulas for becoming super human beings.

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The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE

#5:

Effective Staffing for Vital Churches: The Essential Guide to Finding and Keeping the Right People
by Bill Easum and Bill Tenny-Brittian

Well-staffed churches grow. But how do churches staff for growth in these rapidly changing times when budgets are tight, mission opportunities abound, and there is a growing shortage of qualified pastors, staff members, and church leaders? Two veteran pastors and church growth consultants offer workable solutions that focus on the four core processes vital to church health and growth: bringing people to Christ and the church, retaining them, discipling them, and sending them back out into the world. They also show pastors how to navigate the leadership transitions they must make to become increasingly effective as the church grows. Pastors will learn how to be leaders who multiply leaders and develop a mission-minded staff that does the same. Foreward by Ed Stetzer.

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Everyone Communicates, Few Connect

#4:

Topgrading, 3rd Edition: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance
by Bradford D. Smart

Three huge problems account for the typical poor results in hiring: dishonesty (via deceptive résumés), incomplete information (via shallow interviews), and lack of verifiability (via biased references). Topgrading shows how to solve all three problems. Instead of hir­ing by your gut reactions to résumés and interviews, you can start using a scientifically honed process that compels candidates to be totally honest.

Smart, one of the world's foremost experts on hiring, has personally helped hundreds of compa­nies double, triple, or even quadruple their hiring success rates. His clients have ranged from global giants such as General Electric and Honeywell to midsize and small businesses in every field imagin­able, and to not-for-profits such as the American Heart Association. And hundreds of thousands of readers have applied the lessons and tools of the first two editions of Topgrading.

The Topgrading system makes hiring easier, faster, and more successful than any other process. And it works at every level, from the front lines to senior management.

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Bod 4 God: The Four Keys to Weight Loss

#3:

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
by Patrick Lencioni

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.

Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni's first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation's leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

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Wrestling with Alligators, Prophets and Theologians

#2:

There's Hope for Your Church: First Steps to Restoring Health and Growth
by Gary L. McIntosh

A startling 85% of churches in the US are plateaued or declining, a trend that has been building for the past fifty years. In the face of shrinking attendance and lagging spiritual growth, pastors and church leaders are understandably discouraged and demoralized. But the first step to turning things around is hope. Church health expert Gary McIntosh offers this hope by showing church leaders the first things they need to do to make a new start for their church.

God can and does restore churches to new life, even as he restores individuals. The street-smart ideas and step-by-step instructions found in this book are ones that pastors and church leaders can put to use immediately in their churches to bring about solid growth and renewed hope for the future.

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The Truth about Leadership: The No-fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know

#1:

Tribal Church: Lead Small. Impact Big
by Steve Stroope

God's biggest assignments have always been entrusted to those leading a small tribe. From the twelve families of Israel to early Christians who met in one another's homes, great leaders begin by serving a core group of people who ripple outward for ever-extending social and spiritual impact. They go big by leading small.

Today, leaders don't fail because they lack vision. They fail because they neglect their tribe. It could be a father losing sight of his family, a lead pastor failing to leverage the strengths of his staff, or a small group coordinator ignoring a tiny but important process.

Tribal Church helps pastors recognize the potential and power of various tribes within their congregations—one family, a network of small groups, maybe an entire age group—and then recalibrate ministry efforts to maximize the impact of each. Steve Stroope has spent three decades mastering the art of leading small in a church that has multiplied from dozens to over ten thousand. He explains why big impact does not come from any sort of mega-church ambition. It rather comes by attending to the little details and the smallest tribes.

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What books would you recommend?
Email me your suggestions at Nelson@ChurchLeaderinsights.com.

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