A Pastor's Toolbox: Management Skills for Parish Leadership

by Paul A. Holmes (Editor)

Today’s parish leaders are expected to be holy and prayerful spiritual guides, great preachers and compassionate confessors, but also to make important decisions in key areas like finance, budgeting, hiring and firing, fundraising, risk management, relationship-building, and more—often with virtually no transition or training. And with all the requisite education in philosophy and theology they must provide future pastors, in addition to formation in priestly spirituality and pastoral care, seminaries can do little to prepare priests to deal with the difficult temporal issues pastors face.            A Pastor’s Toolbox is designed to help fill that void. It is loaded with valuable information, insights, and practical tools that pastors need in order to begin handling the complexities of parish management in the twenty-first century.The book is an outgrowth of The Toolbox for Pastoral Management, a nationally recognized joint project of The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management and Seton Hall University. The Leadership Roundtable is a nonprofit organization of Catholic lay leaders, religious, and clergy working together to promote excellence and best practices in the management, finances, communications, and human resources development of the Catholic Church in the U.S. through the greater incorporation of the expertise of the laity. Learn more at www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org.

Genres: Theology, Reference

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[John Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this wonderful book just in time to begin my administration of Ss. Peter and Paul Parish in Garfield Heights. Written with much practical wisdom, this collection of essays will help any priest govern with sanctity and wholeness. Newly ordained priests ought to read this work so that they can comprehend what they will need to do and what their brother priests are already doing. A must read for priests and those involved with the governance of the Church!

[Adam Zajac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter is written by a different author, addressing a different topic. Overall it was very good, although I didn't have a personal interest in the last few chapters. The focus of the book is to provide basic skills that are needed as a pastor but are not (typically) covered in seminary formation: things like HR management, business finance, developing parish vision and structure, and so on.