Why are some churches growing and others declining? I’ve seen the difference leadership makes under some of the most unlikely of places and circumstances.

• The Lima (OH) Community Church is serving over 2,000 members and growing in a declining small-town.
• Brooklyn (NY) Beulah with no off-street parking has two Sunday worship services, expanding compassionate ministries and education in the inner city.
• The Salem Fields Church in Fredericksburg (VA) has grown from a group of fifty with a bi-vocational pastor to become a global church with a wide range of neighborhood ministries.
• First Nazarene in Harrisonburg (VA) overcame its past as a divided, dysfunctional congregation to become a teaching church for others.
• Crossroads Tabernacle in Fort Worth (TX) with a white pastor is attracting African American members.

After combing through data on thousands of churches over several decades I’ve concluded that there is little or no predictable cause and effect between geography, demographics or the age of churches and their prospects for finding and advancing their mission.

In two recent books the authors claim that pastors and denominational churches need to develop the right kind of leadership skills for serving faith communities.

Most surprising is the corrective from Jim Collins in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, subtitled, Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. It’s a brief (35 pages) corrective for church leaders, among others in the social sector who may have been overly enamored with examples of successful corporate leaders in his popular book Good to Great.

On the back cover is a Collins quote: “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” This could apply to both the business and the religious community.

In The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World, Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk – who have organized the Missional Leadership Institute (www.mliweb.net) describe their experiences using techniques common to techniques for executive coaching.

Roxburgh and Romanuk claim that strategic planning and goal-setting – models from the corporate world – produce dysfunctional faith communities already frustrated over their lack of numerical growth in spite of their best efforts. In a time of unpredictable change, congregations need leaders who know how to unite congregations around core missional values where success is defined as faithfulness to a vision inspired by scripture and their own spiritual narrative.

If the CEO business leadership model and the traditional pastor as care-giver model are not helpful – what is? What do pastors need to know and do to be missional leaders?

-Tom Nees