Booklets Supporting Clergy and the Church

This program is designed to help judicatories implement a comprehensive, judicatory-wide initiative that supports healthy ministry and leadership within the church. It provides a clear, two-year plan for nurturing and sustaining healthy spiritual leadership across religious judicatories. It tests the thesis that Healthy Clergy Make Healthy Congregations.

The program offers practical plans for judicatories, churches, and clergy to cultivate six aspects of well-being that are essential to clergy health:

• Physical
• Emotional
• Family
• Financial
• Spiritual
• Vocational

This program is based on insights drawn from the nine-volume series Healthy Clergy Make Healthy Congregations.

This booklet offers a unique way to use technology to build community among your church members and with other churches around the world. Through online surveys, you can deepen the members’ spiritual maturity and renew their vision of what it can mean to be part of the one body of Christ, provided with all necessary spiritual gifts to contribute to the healing of this fractured world. With clear, step-by-step guidance, this resource allows you to engage a church’s membership in a fun connection with other churches across the world.

Using Fiction to Explore Spirituality is a guide on how to use writing fiction to bring order out of chaos, so that meaning and purpose emerge from even the most difficult of challenges. This book shows you how writing fiction enable individuals and groups to explore challenging issues in a way that can build rather than divide communities.

Even if you have never attempted to write fiction, by developing stories, you will open parable-like experiences that give new meaning and purpose to your thoughts and experiences. You will discover new ways to explore difficult issues that empower you to explore new possibilities and take new actions together.

“The world was without form and void (chaos), and then a word was spoken, and light split the darkness. ” (Genesis 1:1f).”

Through creating fictional stories, you can also shed light on the dark chaos that challenges our lives and our world. You don’t have to be a great writer. You only have to be willing to experience the power of story to shape your understanding of life and faith. Through this approach, we can nurture healthy spiritual leadership and provide renewed hope and courage in our anxious society.

Always a New Beginning helps you navigate inevitable losses—not as a limitation of options, but as a hopeful anticipation of new possibilities yet to emerge. This book offers a positive perspective amid tragedy, suffering, and despair It acknowledges life’s frequent setbacks while emphasizing the importance of facing challenges and embracing the potential for healing. Readers are encouraged to move forward with courage and renewed expectation.

When a church experiences the abrupt and painful ending of its relationship with a pastor, the stability of the congregation is ruptured. The two things that the leadership must attend to are the healing needed from the painful dissolution with their previous pastor and how to have a healthy beginning in preparing for the next pastor they will call.

This booklet guides a congregation and former pastor in achieving healthy closure and a fresh start. It helps churches move through difficult endings and prepare for new beginnings, no matter the circumstances.

All congregations want to exhibit a healthy spirituality and seek healthy clergy to guide them. For a healthy church, all participants, members, church leaders, clergy, and staff must accept their responsibility in this dynamic community of faith. This booklet and others in the Healthy Clergy Make Healthy Congregations series offer specific steps and wisdom for achieving that goal.