Stuck in a Funk?

by Tony Morgan

Stuck in a Funk? is Tony Morgan’s well-crafted new book explaining how leaders can reinvigorate their churches and congregations while making a bigger impact in their ministry. Morgan’s work is simple and is filled with practical, useful insights. The author seeks to help church pastors and other leaders to “get unstuck,” and remove any and all forms of clutter that might be blocking a new and better path for their ministry and congregation. The book is especially designed for the church that has been stuck for decades and is facing decline, or the church that has had a degree of success and strong impact in the recent past, yet somehow finds itself plateaued. Throughout the pages of Stuck in a Funk?, Morgan shares his desire to help churches to have a bigger, more effective impact on people's lives, as well as in the communities they serve. Morgan’s maverick, insightful strategies are not simply theory. Rather, they are time-tested ideas and methods that have been proven from his work with churches during his successful pastoral and consulting career. Additionally, the book has been designed to assist church leaders in their quest to engage with their own staff and volunteers. In terms of a broad, overarching theme that defines the author’s tactics for enhancing the quality of church leadership, Morgan prompts the reader to rethink their systems and strategies. He believes that one cannot hope to get different results without engaging a different approach. Of course, change can be frightening to some people and may even produce fear and anger. Yet, like an old friend, changing approaches and paradigms often yields fruit and helps people and organizations to escape a dead end, and to find new beginnings. Morgan does this by providing essential wisdom and application to help churches take their next steps. Based on four previously released e-books in the Leisure Suit series, Stuck in a Funk? examines why churches get “stuck,” how a church can move forward under a new vision, how leaders can best enact change, and how to communicate when change is needed. Since management is not leadership in Morgan’s view, he has organized the book to include guided self-assessment and a template for establishing an action plan. Stuck in a Funk? is designed to be read and discussed with a leadership team who can work together to enact positive change. Morgan uses the analogy of the leisure suit, which was popular in the 1970s, as a metaphor for the problems experienced by many churches these days. Just as the leisure suit, though popular at one time, eventually faded into obscurity as new, more fashionable alternatives grew to replace it, some church’s methods of reaching its congregation have lost their effect, but these churches are all too often unwilling to adapt to new societal needs of outreach. Or as Morgan writes, “Some churches are still wearing their leisure suits.” Through Stuck in a Funk?, church leaders will be able to meet the challenge of redefining their approaches to building and increasing the impact of their vital work.

Genres: Leadership

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2013

About the author

Tony is the Founder and Lead Strategist of The Unstuck Group. Started in 2009, The Unstuck Group has served more than 500 churches throughout the United States, Canada and several more countries around the world.

Previously, Tony served on the senior leadership teams of three rapidly growing churches including NewSpring Church in South Carolina. He has five published books including, The Unstuck Church, and, with Amy Anderson, he hosts The Unstuck Church Podcast which has thousands of listeners each week.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Tony Morgan's church management books. This is another good one. These are ebooks bound together. They compare stuck churches to people who still wear their polyester leisure suit. We all love our leisure suit, but we don't still wear it. Yet the church sticks to practices that are archaic. Now Morgan is not talking about musical choices. He's talking about organization and the church as a system.

If your church feels stuck this is an easy read for church sessions, boards and pastors to read together, with discussion questions in the back.