Shannon O’Dell’s Transforming Church in Rural America is a must read for anyone in church leadership. This book chronicles the successes and failures of the author as he moved from a mega-church to a rural church with an attendance of less than 50. He lays out the key strategies that he used to grow this tiny church to a multi-campus church with attendance in the thousands as well as providing an ichurch experience attended virtually by people around the world.
The tips provided in this book would be great for any church of any size to review and implement to help grow not only the size of their church, but the depth of their members as well. He lays out the his key strategies of Vision, Attitude, Leadership, Understanding, and Enduring Excellence that help to empower the leadership and volunteers of a church to accomplish the mission of leading others to Christ.
The book is enjoyable to read with a mix of leadership strategies and personal stories of success and failure along the author’s journey. It is also interspersed with web links that can be used to get further information in the form of videos and downloads that can help the leadership implement these strategies in their own church. I can’t wait to begin to implement some of these in our own church in the near future.
(This book was provided to me at no charge for my unbiased review of the content. Links in this post are affiliate links.)