The first time I had lunch with the Rev. Loren Mead was in late 2013, just hours after I had left a presidential search interview with the Alban Institute board. He counseled me not to take the job.

Loren, who died May 5, founded the institute in 1974 and served as its CEO for 20 years.

He had retired in 1994 and stayed busy writing, speaking and consulting. He had been living in a retirement community and caring for his ailing wife up until early 2013, when she died.  He had had little contact with the institute's leadership since retirement.

I was stunned that he would advise me not to take up his work.

As Loren talked about the institute, it became clear that although he had had several partners in developing Alban -- including Speed Leas and Roy Oswald -- he himself had felt a heavy burden to sustain the organization during his 20-year tenure. Loren had concluded that Alban was not financially sustainable. He did not think anyone should take the job.

Before that lunch, I hadn't known Loren personally, but he had articulated insights and developed resources that had guided me at every stage of my ministry. When I graduated from seminary, a friend counseled me that Alban was the best resource for a new pastor. I paid for a membership and started reading the newsletter, Action Information, from cover to cover. I bought Alban books and attended several Alban seminars.

I learned about how a congregation's size influences how it behaves. I learned skills in managing conflict and leading planning processes. When Loren retired, there were 8,500 people like me who paid for memberships to receive practical guidance in how congregations work. Later, I led one of a handful of regional consulting and training organizations that provided Alban-style services. Our organization was not part of Alban, but we depended on Alban's consultants and books for training and inspiration.

As the era of rapid church growth wound down at the end of the 1960s, Loren Mead was one of the first to see that the church was losing not just numbers but a privileged position in the culture. In response, he was determined to use human and organizational sciences to help leaders understand the church as an organization and to become more effective. In the process, Mead built the Alban Institute -- an interfaith community of clergy, lay leaders, consultants, researchers and writers -- who saw that many of the challenges for congregations crossed lines of theology and polity, and so did many of the most helpful solutions.