Church executives are responsible for launching new programs, making new hires and setting new budgets. This requires the stewardship of our personal time, energy, intellectual capital, and creative assets — and this extends to our personnel and congregations.

Daniel Henderson stepped into three megachurch settings as the new senior pastor at high-risk moments — two of them following moral failures of their previous pastors. “I guess you could say that on two occasions [of moral failures] I was left holding the ‘black box’ after a leadership crash,” he says in a new book that uses examples from flight training and piloting an airplane.

A part of any planning process is some form of environmental analysis to provide the data-driven foundation on which to craft a plan. This was much easier to do in times of relative stability when one could extend trend lines with some degree of confidence. Today we find ourselves in an environment of pervasive uncertainty as social values shift, the economy is in turmoil, and public policy processes are polarized.