Everyone struggles with change, especially churches. Pastors and church leaders need to know how to lead through change as they follow the Lord of the church. 
Here are three book resources that might help you make a change that builds up the church and moves it forward in loving God, loving others, and making disciples. They are all business leadership books that deal with organizational change, but you may discover that what they say also applies to churches and ministry organizations. As always, "test everything; hold fast what is good." (1 Thes. 5:21)
Leading Change by John P. Kotter offers a process of stages in making organizational change. Here are the stages for achieving positive change in order of their application:
Establishing a sense of urgency
Creating the guiding coalition
Developing a vision and strategy
Communicating the change vision
Empowering broad-based action
Generating short-term wins
Consolidating gains and producing more change
Anchoring new approaches in the culture
Another book written by John Kotter is A Sense of Urgency. This is an expansion of the first stage in leading organizational change. Kotter suggests the following steps in creating a sense of urgency:
Deeply understand its opposites: complacency and false urgency
Develop a strategy and tactics for increasing true urgency
Employ the tactics for generating a sense of urgency
Tactic #1 – bring the outside in using emotionally compelling data, people, and presentations
Tactic #2 – behave with urgency every day and personally demonstrate that urgency in all that you do
Tactic #3 – find opportunity in crises and make them your friend in destroying complacency
Tactic #4 – deal with the NoNos or those who would kill urgency and create complacency
Keep the sense of urgency up by re-creating it over and over again
Begin today
The third resource I recommend is Who Killed Change by Ken Blanchard and John Britt. This short fable creatively introduces you to 13 aspects of organizational life that affect change. Most or all of the following aspects exist in the church as well as in business or ministry organizations:
Culture
Commitment
Sponsorship
Change Leadership Team
Communication
Urgency
Vision
Plan
Budget
Trainer
Incentive
Performance Management
Accountability
What resource for facilitating positive change in your church or ministry would you add and why?
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash