Building Leaders: Blueprints for Developing Leadership at Every Level of Your Church

This is an amazing resource on leadership development. I bought so many books on leadership, but none are so marked up and highlighted as this one.The authors define Leadership Development as: "the intentional process of helping established and emerging leaders at every level of ministry to assess and develop their Christian character and to acquire, reinforce, and refine their ministry knowledge and skills.""The Quality of Leadership Affects the Quality of the Ministry"Some of the valuable topics covered:1. The 5 Steps in Leadership Development (Discovering, Launching, Developing, Evaluating, and Rewarding)2. Top 5 Leadership Traits (Influence, Character, People Skills, Drive, and Intelligence)3. Leadership Configuration (how to grow leaders from members of teams all the way to leaders of an entire purpose or age group ministry)4. Events that Develop Leaders (Retreats, Seminars, Trainings, Appreciations, Conference, Vision Nights)5. Processes that Develop Leaders (Apprenticing, Huddles, One-on-ones)6. Task Skills and Relational Skills Inventory7. 16 Training Venues Comparison Chart (comparing the 4 leader competencies, 4 training types, and 12 characteristics)If you're looking to begin a leadership development program/system at your church or organization, this book will help you design a process that will help you exactly where you're at. Start implementing the next steps found in this book immediately and watch the process become a part of your new culture of how you grow your people.

Have you ever looked around the congregation and realized that no one is stepping up to lead. This creates disappointment. But the first step is not blaming the members, but pointing the finger back to yourself. What have you done to develop leaders around you? This builds provides a ton of structure on how to accomplish this task. It is congregation based, in which a church can create a process to develop leaders. The book provides a ton of great insights into the art of coaching leadership. The structure that it builds is probably more intense than most congregation can handle at a church size level of 1000. It is creating mostly a whole school for leadership development. This would be hard to do in a middle size church. But some of the principles and some of the steps would be helpful in a smaller church. It has the elements of better selection of leaders, how to accomplish the leadership process of growth, using small groups to mentor, providing resources. The best part is the beginning chapters on how Jesus developed leaders. He used metaphor to create context. He exposed them to ministry. There is a selection on the early churches process in creating leaders. In this book, you probably will not read it and start a leadership training school, but you will use a lot of the insights to improve your ability to develop leaders around you. This is a good book that all leaders in the church should read.

I read my first book by Aubrey Malphurs while completing a doctorate in ministry eight years ago. Recently it has become my goal to read everything he has written, because his insights for church ministry in the 21st century are simply unparalleled. This title is the second in a three-part series on leadership. Here he continues where he ended in his first work, "Becoming Leaders." The third title, "Leading Leaders" is due to be released in the near future.This book, for all its merits, is not an easy-read. Malphurs is extremely detailed and thorough as he examines the leadership building process for the local church. Still, any pastor serious about developing leaders in his congregation should not be without it.

I read this book as a text for a seminary class in an MDiv program. I found it to hold many useful insights for building a leadership culture in a church setting. It is not an easy read, as it very thorough. I had to read several of the chapters over a second time to understand them, but I found it did help me grasp some of the leadership concepts for my class.

Awesome book on leadership development. It shows a clear process. Buy it, read it and give it away to your staff.

Their approach to developing leaders is highly structured and programmatic. To some degree, it seems to me that they make it more complicated that it needs to be.Their main thesis or philosophy is that churches and ministers must be deliberate about recruiting, equipping, and empowering leaders at every level of leadership in the church. These different levels require different competencies and call for different types of training.This book is valuable because (I think) most churches assume that regular attendance makes leaders. They also often establish a high bar and level of scrutiny for some leaders (e.g., deacons or elders) that discourages people from accepting the challenge, while have terribly low standards for other positions that are possibly even more crucial to the life and future of the church (anyone who will is welcome to teach the junior high boys!).If you've never thought about the importance and mechanics of developing leaders, this is a great book for you. If you have thought about it and have some experience in leadership development, you will gain a lot from the book, but probably think it's twice as long as it needs to be :)

As with many other books by Malphurs this is an extremely practical and well written manual for anyone in a position to lead a congregation into a organized and efficient plan for development of their leaders.

Has great information, but too much of it hides the actual gems, making it impractical. The book gets bogged down in repetitive concepts and ideas. Ok as a reference aid that you can check from time to time...but a lot of filler in these pages. Could have used way tighter editing.