Program Readings

Below are the core readings for the leadership academy. 

Articles

Moving from Solitude to Community to Ministry (1995) by Henri Nouwen

Leading from Within: Reflection on Spirituality and Leadership (2000) by Parker J. Palmer

The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations (1990) by Peter Senge

Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges- Two Page Overview (2007) by Otto Scharmer

Towards A Compelling Theology of Lay Ministry (2007) by Ann Michel

Reconstructing Our Idea of Leadership (2008) by Peter Block

Books

Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character, Civility and Community (2009) by Walter Fluker

We live in a leadership crisis. “In an age when incompatible worlds collide and when scandals rock formerly stable institutions,” says Walter Fluker, “what counts most is ethical leadership and the qualities of personal integrity, spiritual discipline, intellectual openness, and moral anchoring.” Fluker finds these characteristics exemplified in the work and thought of black-church giants Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman.

Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt (2000) by Renita Weems

The book is a collection of prayers, journal entries, and meditations that discuss Weem’s initial anger at God’s absence in her life and her gradual willingness to “[accept] the silence as a new way of communicating with the divine and [learn] to perceive God in her life in new, amusing, laughable, glorious ways.” This book is further distinguished by Weems’s frank observation that, as a wife and mother, she couldn’t just up and meditate for an hour a day, or go on extended retreat. “If God was going to speak to me,” Weems writes, “God would just have to do it amidst the clutter of family, the noise of pots and pans…and the hassles of the workplace.” 

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward and Undivided Life (2004) by Parker Palmer

Palmer (The Courage to Teach) seeks to help us “rejoin soul and role,” so that individuals and communities can be healed from the ravages of consumerism, injustice and violence.  He argues that “the soul is real and powerful” and is “safe only in relationships with certain qualities,” ones that “protect, border and salute” the time it takes to hear our “inner teacher.” 

Good to Great and the Social Sectors (2005) by Jim Collins

We must reject the idea-well-intentioned, but dead wrong-that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business.” Most businesses-like most of anything else in life-fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors? 

Congregations as Learning Communities: Tools for Shaping Your Future (2000) by Dennis Campbell

In our rapidly evolving religious scene, congregations that are open to continuous learning and willing to respond to external and internal change, will be the ones that achieve new vitality and health. Dennis Campbell describes what those congregations will look like and provides four tools to help a congregation shape its community into what God would have it be. Systems thinking, congregational culture, appreciative inquiry, and scenario planning are illustrated and readers will be shown how to apply the principles to their setting.

Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008) by Peter Block

Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities–businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government–do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.