Church Leadership Resources

Articles for Church Leaders

Our articles encourage, educate, and equip church leaders as they serve Christ at their churches. 

A couple stares at one another and smiles
Dec 5, 2022
Watermark Resources
4 Ways To Care For And Enrich Marriages In Your Church

How to serve marriages in your church It would be impossible to list all the books, retreats, programs, and ministries that exist to serve married couples in the church. It’s appropriate and good that we emphasize this area of care. But the sheer number of options can become overwhelming, and choosing how to best help marriages in each situation takes wisdom and discernment.

Marriage

Church Leadership

How To Be An Excellent Manager image
Nov 19, 2022
Watermark Resources
How To Be An Excellent Manager

3 keys for managers We talk a lot about church leadership, but not enough about management. Sure, there’s a lot of overlap between the two, but there are also some key distinctions. Leaders can rally people with big visions, but they wouldn’t get very far without managers to execute them. A manager’s job boils down to three things:

Church Leadership

Timothy Ateek speaking at Watermark Community Church
Nov 11, 2022
Watermark Resources
Finding Your Voice: How God Has Wired You to Lead and Communicate

Guidelines for finding your voice Inspiring leaders—the ones whose words stay with you—tend to have a good sense of their own communication styles. Whether they’re preaching a sermon, leading a prayer, or just chatting with a colleague, they lean into the ways God has gifted them, and the result is powerful.

Church Leadership

How To Help Marriages In Your Church image
Nov 2, 2022
Watermark Resources
How To Help Marriages In Your Church

You Don’t Need a PhD to Help Marriages in Your Church As believers, we know that healing belongs to the Lord. Yet often we focus on our part as his instruments, leading to feelings of inadequacy. God’s people have struggled with these feelings throughout recorded history, as we see in Exodus 3 and 4 when Moses protests that he isn’t the best man for the job God has commanded him to do.

Marriage

Church Leadership

A couple sits on a couch together
Oct 6, 2022
Watermark Resources
The First Steps To Starting A Marriage Ministry

What we've learned the past 14 years Church marriage ministries offer on-ramps into your church for people who might never otherwise come. They establish an authentic and healthy foundation for families and relationships in your body, and they address an obvious and heartbreaking need, as couples within the church continue to separate and divorce at rates comparable to those outside it. But deciding to serve married couples is the easy part; figuring out how to start a marriage ministry is much more complicated. You don’t need any special credentials to do this work--God equips the people he calls--but it does take wisdom and planning. Based on what we’ve learned over the past 14 years running our own marriage ministry, Re|engage, here are the steps you shouldn’t skip:

Marriage

Church Leadership

A couple speaks from a stage
Dec 20, 2021
John McGee
10 Marriage Ministry Mistakes

Mistakes we've observed When I first started working in marriage ministry nearly 20 years ago, I admittedly did not know what I was doing. I was a young guy at a young church that didn’t even have a marriage ministry before I got there. Experience is a great teacher, and I’ve since learned a lot from mistakes—both mistakes I’ve made myself, and lessons learned from other marriage ministers who have shared their stories with me.

Marriage

Church Leadership

Men standing at the front doors of the church
Jun 13, 2021
Watermark Resources
Sharing The Pastoral Load

You don't have to do it alone One of the privileges of church leadership is that the lost sheep often come to you. You don’t always have to seek out the broken person on the side of the road in order to be a good Samaritan. You get to show God’s love to them.

Discipleship

Church Leadership

A team sitting in a meeting together
May 10, 2021
Watermark Resources
Why Budgeting Isn’t About The Numbers

Budgeting that honors God

Church Leadership

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A woman sits in a work meeting
Mar 29, 2021
Watermark Resources
The Hard Work Of Hiring

A high-stakes game This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership, including how we handle church membership, why we don’t pass an offering plate, and why we have boring annual reviews.

Church Leadership

A man and women sit together in a meeting
Mar 15, 2021
Watermark Resources
Why We Have Boring Annual Reviews

A different perspective on reviews *This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership, including how we handle church membership and why we don’t pass an offering plate.

Church Leadership

A photo of a Watermark Community Church service
Jan 25, 2021
Watermark Resources
Why Church Membership Matters

Membership should mean something This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership. You can read about why we don’t pass an offering plate here.

Discipleship

Church Leadership

Man smiling at a table
Dec 14, 2020
Watermark Resources
More Than Fetching Coffee

Reinvent the internship For most people, the word internship conjures up images of fetching coffee, sorting through filing cabinets, or inputting data into spreadsheets. Even in church circles, internships often amount to nothing more than busy work and the occasional planning meeting. Interns typically fill the role of “doing whatever the full-time staff don’t want to do themselves.” And sadly, opportunities like this often leave both interns and the churches they serve at wanting for more.

Discipleship

Church Leadership

Your Most Important Christmas Ministry image
Dec 7, 2020
John McGee
Your Most Important Christmas Ministry

Prioritize your family For many church leaders, life reaches a fever pitch during the holiday season. You’re probably concerned about making budgets, preparing end-of-year reports, planning the best Christmas Eve service possible—and doing it all with the ongoing challenges of a pandemic. With all of the December activity it can be easy to forget one group: your family.

Marriage

Church Leadership