Look Before You Lead: How to Discern and Shape Your Church Culture

by Aubrey Malphurs

Pastoral ministry is challenging work, especially when a pastor ignores the church's "congregational culture" when seeking to minister to church members or implement changes. Just as a pastor studies to interpret the Scriptures in order to understand and preach the Bible, he or she must interpret the local church culture to better understand and move it toward accomplishing its mission and vision.

In Look Before You Lead , trusted church leadership expert Aubrey Malphurs shows pastors how to read their church's unique local culture, how to change or revitalize it, and even how to combine two cultures when one church adopts another. This unique resource approaches leadership and discernment from a solid, biblical perspective and includes a number of helpful appendixes, such as a behavior, belief, and a values audit, that are key to reading and understanding the culture.

Genres: Leadership, Church

272 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

Reviews

[Cliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource for changing culture in the church. Chapts 10 - 12 were most helpful.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give this 3 and a half stars. Helpful. Lots of good material and some really great resources at the end which is typical of Malphurs' books. There wasn't a ton of new information in here though about the subject material. And there was a lot of material, as is also typical of Malphurs. Sometimes the amount of things he covers in his books takes away from the benefit of maybe going more into depth on it. All in all, good and helpful.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very helpful in finding out the culture and values of a church.