Gil Rendle has spent four decades working with issues of change and leadership in the United Methodist Church as a pastor and consultant.
Rendle is a senior vice president of TMF (originally known as the Texas Methodist Foundation) and previously served 12 years with the Alban Institute (now Alban at Duke Divinity School) as an author, seminar leader and senior consultant.
As he prepares to retire from his current role, Rendle reflects on his career helping Christian leaders in congregations and denominations.
One of the biggest changes is that he no longer thinks it's useful to develop basic principles for all congregations to follow, he said. In this cultural moment, leaders don't take people from Point A to Point B.
Instead, everything is fluid, in flux, and today's leaders need the courage to face change alongside -- and in conversation with -- those whom they lead.
"Every day you get up, your situation has changed from the way it was before. And so how do you lead when everything doesn't hold still?" he said.
An ordained United Methodist minister, Rendle has served as senior pastor of two urban congregations in Pennsylvania and as a denominational consultant for the United Methodist Church. He has a Ph.D. in organizational development from Temple University and a Th.M. from Boston University.
He is the author of eight books, including "Journey in the Wilderness: New Life for Mainline Churches," "Back to Zero: The Search to Rediscover the Methodist Movement" and "Doing the Math of Mission."
Read the interview with Gil Rendle »
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| IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CONGREGATIONAL LEADERSHIP
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Efforts to lead change are often defeated or sabotaged, not by open and honest disagreement, but by inappropriate, unhelpful, or indirect behaviors. In his work with with congregations that have been experiencing such behavioral barriers to effective leadership and decision making, Gil Rendle has learned to recommend the development of a "covenant of leadership" to uphold.
Read more from Gil Rendle »
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Working inside large organizations has made a former journalist lose his cynicism about those in authority. Here are three lessons he's learned about leadership.
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The pastor of a thriving Lutheran church near Copenhagen encourages Christians to engage their current culture without being afraid.
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Over the past ten years, the North American mission field has experienced dramatic changes, which in turn have required congregations, middle judicatories, and denominations to adapt. Among these adaptations is an expectation for clear goals and quantified progress towards those goals. Church leaders who have never needed to measure their goals and progress with metrics may find this change daunting. The use of metrics-denominational and middle judicatory dashboards, and the tracking of congregational trends-has become an uncomfortable and misunderstood practice in this search for accountability.
Doing the Math of Mission offers theory, models, and new tools for using metrics in ministry. This book also shows where metrics and accountability fit into the discernment, goal setting, and strategies of ministry.
Learn more and order the book »
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Many books have been written about leadership and change, but until now none has focused on the kind of change that tears at a community's very fabric.
Former Alban senior consultant Gil Rendle provides a respectful context for understanding change, especially the experiences and resistances that people feel. Rendle pulls together theory, research, and his work with churches facing change to provide leaders with practical diagnostic models and tools. In a time when change is the norm, this book helps to "lead change" in a spiritual and healthy way.
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