Hill Country Bible Church (HCBC) of Austin, TX is about making the name of Jesus famous, whatever it takes. In a culture of cleverly written strategies and tried and true models, they’ll try whatever works. In the words of John Herrington, the director of Church Planting in the Hill Country Association, “We started with great intentions of reaching the city; our strategy was to use a model, but a model reaches a certain type of people. So we asked the question, ‘How do we create churches that make sense to the people to whom we’re being sent?’”

“To an outsider, the actions of Mr. Watts during church might have appeared eccentric at worst, the ludicrous yet harmless actions of someone who wasn’t right in the head. But to those who knew the man, it was evident that Mr. Watts wasn’t a changed man. He still paced at night. He still glared at us with a smoldering disdain that, like hot lava, would inevitably surface. Somewhere, somehow, he’d strike again. It was just a matter of time,” writes Rebecca Nichols Alonzo, author of The Devil in Pew Number Seven.

Ever have a good idea — well you thought it was — shot down in a meeting with your colleagues that left you thinking, “What happened?” It happens on management teams every day, and on church staffs too.

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.

Amy Hanson was 23 years old when she was offered a new job at megachurch Central Christian Church in Las Vegas — to head up the active adult (50-plus) ministries of that congregation. She served in the role for five years before moving to Nebraska to complete her doctorate in gerontology.

There are some emerging patterns in churches with momentum, that are worth paying attention to. After more than seven years of working with church leadership teams, as well as doing focus groups with attendees, here are three values that seem to be responsible for much of the growth and magnetic force we see.

We’ve all had the experience at least once in our lives where we’ve sat down with a good friend and found ourselves halfway through the conversation saying, “I never knew that about you.” As individuals, we are all blessed with unique compositions and stories. The way we see and experience the world varies greatly, but most of the time, when we run across acquaintances and even friends, we find ourselves only knowing the surface story — mom and school teacher; father and CEO; student and athlete. Rarely do we mine the true story of who they really are.