A Creative Church


Book Description

A Creative Church: The Arts and a Century of Renewal




Creative Church Handbook


Book Description

Now is the time for the church to reclaim its role as a center of creativity. Among your members are artists and musicians whose gifts can enhance your worship, inform your theology and impact your community. Christian arts advocate J. Scott McElroy gives a comprehensive vision and manual for unleashing creativity in your congregation.




Creative Church Bulletin Boards


Book Description

Do church bulletin boards have to be dull and boring? Not if you have Creative Church Bulletin Boards in hand! The uplifting, thought-provoking theme messages presented in this practical how-to guide will both educate and entertain your entire congregation. Capturing the attention of media-jaded children - and adults - is much easier when the message of our faith is displayed in eye-catching splashes of color and design, rather than in faded construction paper or dry memos. Packed with unique design ideas that will spark your creativity, Creative Church Bulletin Boards offers plenty of specific advice on shopping for supplies and keeping expenses within a limited budget, as well as detailed directions for using a wide variety of non-conventional tools to mount interesting items. You'll learn how to put together attractive displays that reinforce Christian teachings on subjects such as trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, and caring. Material appropriate for both general use and specific seasons throughout the year is provided, with plenty of possible slogans or phrases for you to choose from. And to help you get started, each grouping includes a thorough discussion of one example along with a picture and explicit step-by-step instructions for assembling the board. Creative Church Bulletin Boards gives you everything you need to put a powerful but often overlooked evangelism tool to work in your church! This book is the launching point for rediscovering the importance of the time-honored, non-electron-based truth that bulletin boards can help us relate God's message in new ways. What hope and joy to enter the church building and find there a bulletin board catching the eye with beauty, humor, and creativity, warming the heart with a sign of God's love and connection. A creative bulletin board may not get people in the building, but it can help keep them coming once they are there. June Stitzinger-Clark Pastor, Christ United Methodist Church Lakewood, New Jersey Disaster Response Coordinator, Greater New Jersey Annual Conference Rosalind M. Townley lives in Wenonah, New Jersey, where she is an active member of Wenonah United Methodist Church. She is a former schoolteacher and a graduate of Lycoming College. About the Author June Stitzinger-Clark Pastor, Christ United Methodist Church Lakewood, New Jersey Disaster Response Coordinator, Greater New Jersey Annual Conference Rosalind M. Townley lives in Wenonah, New Jersey, where she is an active member of Wenonah United Methodist Church. She is a former schoolteacher and a graduate of Lycoming College.




How to Become a Creative Church Leader


Book Description

A companion to the popular Creative Church Leadership, this co-publication with "MODEM" focuses on the practical skills necessary for dynamic leadership in the local church. A wide range of experienced church leaders and management gurus reflect on key components of successful contemporary church leadership including: part one which discusses people, leading a team, choosing and mentoring assistants, leading lay ministers and volunteers, how to delegate, how to resolve conflict; part two which describes organisation, leading churches of different sizes, leading multiple congregations, relating to the local community, initiating and completing projects, how to chair meetings; and, part three which discusses up close and personal, what kind of a leader are you, getting your work/life balance right, thinking strategically, preaching with a purpose, and much more.




Jesus Has Left the Building


Book Description

Author and church benevolent minister Toni Campbell shares the fruit of a decade of planning community outreach events with her team, reaching a large extended population in central New Jersey. Jesus Has Left the Building features the nitty gritty details culled from the experience of hundreds of volunteers and takes the time-consuming guesswork out of church'outreach plans. Step-by-step details and fine-tuning tips ensure that you won't have to reinvent the wheel in outreach efforts, but concentrate on the primary mission to generously share Jesus with people and meet their physical needs through the practical goals of saving time, money, and volunteer effort. Twelve outreach events are outlines in specific detail, plus leadership tips for volunteer team building and follow-up discipleship necessities.




Rethinking the Church


Book Description

An innovative, evangelistic pastor guides local church leaders to rethink their ministry's unique purpose and mission within the community.




Creative Ideas for Wild Church


Book Description

This innovative and imaginative resource offers learning and worship activities and whole service outlines to help churches engage with the outside world and increase connectedness with the communities where they are placed, whether rural or urban. Current trends encourage us to reconnect with nature – schools are building outdoor classrooms, 11,000 organizations belong to the Wild Network which encourages children to get outside, while Forest Church, the Eco-congregation and the rewilding spirituality movements reflect this trend in the church. Definitely not just for energetic outdoorsy types, it creatively blends the Christian year with the natural seasons – such as an all-age Advent outdoor adventure, creating an outdoor Easter garden, kite flying at Ascension, building life-size David and Goliath, going on a prayer pilgrimage, autumn leaves and tree ribbons for remembrance, and much more.




Creative Church Leadership


Book Description

Following "Management and Ministry" and "Leading Managing, Ministering", this third MODEM handbook explores an issue at the very heart of the Church - how can an ancient institution with so many encumbrances remain a living sign of the Kingdom of God?




Tilling the Church


Book Description

Tilling the Church is a theology for the pilgrim church. In this book, Richard Lennan shows how the ecclesial community looks toward the fullness of God’s reign but lives within the flux of history, the site of its relationship to the trinitarian God. In this way, God’s grace “tills” the church, constantly refreshing the tradition of faith and prompting the discipleship that embodies the gospel. Tilling the Church explores the possibilities for a more faithful, just, and creative church, one responsive to the movement of grace. Fruitful engagement with grace requires the church’s conversion, the ongoing formation of a community whose words and actions reflect the hope that grace engenders.




A Creative Minority


Book Description

How should the church engage our culture? The recent political cycle has shattered the lens through which the American church has looked at politics through much of our lifetimes. If we return to the Scriptures, we see Jesus offers us a compelling, alternative vision. His heart was that His followers would be a city on a hill and that people would see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven. This was not dependent on the laws on the books, the rulings of the courts, or the leaders in power. His heart was that we would influence culture through redemptive participation, being not just a faithful, but also a fruitful presence. His vision was that the church functions as a Creative Minority in a dominant culture. A Creative Minority seeks not to propose a way to regain cultural dominance, take back our world for God or revisit an unrealistic and nostalgic past. It humbly proposes that if we take on the posture and identity of a Creative Minority, we may rekindle the light in the bushel, and in so doing, cast a hopeful glimmer on the world. A Creative Minority paints a compelling picture of the way the church is called to participate in these challenging and demanding times - seeking neither to control nor abandon the world, but to love it to new life through redemptive participation.