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Together We Lead: Integrating Church Leadership and Administration for Ministry Success
Ministry & Administration—Unlocking The Key to Health Managing volunteers, finances, and facilities can be a daunting task in a changing ministry culture. Together We Lead will empower you to design a ministry model that integrates a biblical standard for leadership while managing the overall work of the church. You will be encouraged to consider your calling to ministry and how to lead in relationship with others. This resource is designed not only to be informative for anyone who serves through the local church but also to be a tool to train and equip laypeople in these areas. In the shifting landscape of ministry, you can be the navigator for your church, leading and administering the work by using a holistic system for church health.
248 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2021
6 people are currently reading
7 people want to read
About the author
Adam Hughes
524 books48 followersAdam Hughes is an American comic book artist and illustrator who has worked for companies such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Lucasfilm, Warner Bros. Pictures, Playboy magazine, Joss Whedon's Mutant Enemy Productions and Sideshow Collectibles.[4]
He is best known to American comic book readers for his renderings of pinup-style female characters, and his cover work on titles such as Wonder Woman and Catwoman.
He is best known to American comic book readers for his renderings of pinup-style female characters, and his cover work on titles such as Wonder Woman and Catwoman.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 18, 2025
This book was written to accompany a course on "Church Leadership and Administration," birthed out of the lectures of the class's two co-teachers. What resulted from this work feels like a vague, disorganized, unedited, unauthoritative overview.
•••
Vague. Leadership and administration were approached in very abstract terms throughout the book. While it's hard to write in a way that applies to everyone's situation, their compromise ended up being too shallow. For instance, the chapter on risk management discussed the liability surrounding the people, property, and events of ministry. However, the only advice the whole chapter could offer was to not forget risks and your need to manage them. There was no real advice on how to do it, apart from a recommendation for MinistrySafe and some church insurance agencies.
Disorganized. The book has one chapter for every week of class, but they vary on structure. Some chapters present "seven steps" for this or that, one chapter had a self-assessment quiz, while others had no subdivisions whatsoever. There was even one chapter which had a "step one" and then had no step two. There is a rambling nature to the whole book, as though certain paragraphs were written with no goal in mind other than filling the pages.
Unedited. Worse than a "step one" without a "step two," the book contained multiple grammatical and formatting errors — run-on sentences, an italicized line ending with a bolded letter, and other mistakes I noticed on a cursory reading. Furthermore, this is a book with two authors that contains multiple first-person anecdotes, but only once was the "I" of the story identified. I know the book was edited, but it's still very rough around the edges.
Unauthoritative. While I have faith the authors of this book to be fine Christian men with growing ministries, they do little to ground their rambling thoughts. Multiple subsections are pulled out of their other textbook (Being Leaders, by Aubrey Mulphurs), and few sections are guided directly by Scripture. This book uses Scripture, but mostly as prooftexts. The obvious passages regarding leadership, such as the qualifications for elders in Timothy and Titus, are not discussed. The few full expositions of Scripture are a little off-the-wall. I feel compelled to share an example:
To discuss the "biblical foundation for the necessity of change in ministry leadership," Adam and Hughes turn to Revelation 2-3. First, five pages are used to discuss each church's problems and corrections in order to demonstrate a "biblical precedent for change." Then, four pages are used to discuss the debated identity of the "angels" of each church to whom the letters were addressed, eventually siding with the view that they were pastors. All this work was done just to make the point that God expects pastors to facilitate change in their churches. This section is followed by "an eight-step strategy for facilitating change in ministry leadership," which lacks any biblical citation. I cite this example mostly to point out that they go on multiple rabbit trails to "prove" points nobody disagrees with, then they give much of their advice apart from real biblical foundations.
•••
In the final analysis, this book is not harmful, it even contains some good advice, but it ultimately lacked substance. Much of the book felt like secondhand wisdom, taken from other books that also weren't as biblically-based as they should be. Again, I have faith that these are faithful men who do good work, but this book is not very helpful for people to replicate their successes. I would not recommend anyone read it. Surely there are better resources out there, perhaps more specific to either the role of the pastor or the details of administration.
•••
Vague. Leadership and administration were approached in very abstract terms throughout the book. While it's hard to write in a way that applies to everyone's situation, their compromise ended up being too shallow. For instance, the chapter on risk management discussed the liability surrounding the people, property, and events of ministry. However, the only advice the whole chapter could offer was to not forget risks and your need to manage them. There was no real advice on how to do it, apart from a recommendation for MinistrySafe and some church insurance agencies.
Disorganized. The book has one chapter for every week of class, but they vary on structure. Some chapters present "seven steps" for this or that, one chapter had a self-assessment quiz, while others had no subdivisions whatsoever. There was even one chapter which had a "step one" and then had no step two. There is a rambling nature to the whole book, as though certain paragraphs were written with no goal in mind other than filling the pages.
Unedited. Worse than a "step one" without a "step two," the book contained multiple grammatical and formatting errors — run-on sentences, an italicized line ending with a bolded letter, and other mistakes I noticed on a cursory reading. Furthermore, this is a book with two authors that contains multiple first-person anecdotes, but only once was the "I" of the story identified. I know the book was edited, but it's still very rough around the edges.
Unauthoritative. While I have faith the authors of this book to be fine Christian men with growing ministries, they do little to ground their rambling thoughts. Multiple subsections are pulled out of their other textbook (Being Leaders, by Aubrey Mulphurs), and few sections are guided directly by Scripture. This book uses Scripture, but mostly as prooftexts. The obvious passages regarding leadership, such as the qualifications for elders in Timothy and Titus, are not discussed. The few full expositions of Scripture are a little off-the-wall. I feel compelled to share an example:
To discuss the "biblical foundation for the necessity of change in ministry leadership," Adam and Hughes turn to Revelation 2-3. First, five pages are used to discuss each church's problems and corrections in order to demonstrate a "biblical precedent for change." Then, four pages are used to discuss the debated identity of the "angels" of each church to whom the letters were addressed, eventually siding with the view that they were pastors. All this work was done just to make the point that God expects pastors to facilitate change in their churches. This section is followed by "an eight-step strategy for facilitating change in ministry leadership," which lacks any biblical citation. I cite this example mostly to point out that they go on multiple rabbit trails to "prove" points nobody disagrees with, then they give much of their advice apart from real biblical foundations.
•••
In the final analysis, this book is not harmful, it even contains some good advice, but it ultimately lacked substance. Much of the book felt like secondhand wisdom, taken from other books that also weren't as biblically-based as they should be. Again, I have faith that these are faithful men who do good work, but this book is not very helpful for people to replicate their successes. I would not recommend anyone read it. Surely there are better resources out there, perhaps more specific to either the role of the pastor or the details of administration.
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