Where to Start
Where to Start: A Guide for Faith Leaders on Shifting Ground
We know it has been a long, difficult season. Thank you for the good work you are doing. The world needs your good and beautiful work right now, more than ever.
Where to Start: A Guide for Faith Leaders on Shifting Ground is a free guide for pastors and ministry leaders who are facing a number of crises in mission and ministry and who may not know the next step to take.
This toolkit is for you if you’ve ever wondered:
- How do I serve a faith community when it feels like too much is asked of me?
- When change is the norm, how do I sustain myself and what do I draw upon?
- My faith community has been impacted by systematic injustice. Now what?
- Who are my people and where have they gone?
- How do we mend divides after polarization and political divisions?
- How do I love my institutions when it so often feels like they don’t provide structures of care?
- What do we do about churches that have deferred maintenance, especially after our buildings haven’t been used during or since COVID hit?
The Where to Start toolkit can be used as a guide for individuals or a group. It explores nine different crises (e.g., buildings, polarization, loss, injustice, funding) and identifies a number of questions you and your community may now face. This interactive tool provides links to additional resources and offers guides to three new books that can help you navigate your next steps in mission and ministry. Without offering prescriptive solutions to the complex challenges you face, these books offer stories, illustrations, and conceptual frameworks that can stir new imagination for you and your community.
Here is a sample of three crises with the guide that points to specific book chapters and additional resources that address those particular crises.
Check out the Insights Newsletter from the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving featuring the Where to Start guide. Thanks to their support, we are able to share this FREE resource with you and others.
A multi-institutional collaboration, the Where to Start toolkit was created by The Program for the Future Church at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Lake Institute on Faith & Giving, Vandersall Collective & RootedGood.