Something I am so grateful for is the leadership experience I received growing up in the church. From a young age, I got involved in worship teams. I led small groups. I developed skills. I was put on stages I had no business being on. Church wasn’t just a weekly service we attended. It was a leadership incubator.

L. Michelle Smith has written a new book called Call And Response: 10 Leadership Lessons From the Black Church. In it she discusses how the Black Church has historically developed high level business leaders. The book borrows from culture, neuroscience, and positive psychology to describe the power of the Black Church and why it has produced so many high level leaders .

Whether you’ve grown up in the Black Church or have never even visited, we all have something to learn here.

Because if the church stops developing leaders in favor of merely hiring out a professional, performative workforce, we could be in some trouble.

This is David Santistevan. You can reach me anytime at david@beyondsundayworship.com As always, thank you for listening.

Topics Covered:

Why the history of Call and Response in the Black Church matters to us today
Leadership development in the local church
Leadership lessons learned in the Black Church
What it’s like being a successful Black women in corporate America
Why The Black Church is seen as inferior in both white and black spaces

Resources Mentioned:

Show Sponsor: Planning Center
Call And Response: 10 Leadership Lessons From The Black Church by L. Michelle Smith
The Black Church: This Is Our Story This Is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Show Sponsor:

This episode is sponsored by Planning Center, an all-in-one church management software made to help churches help people. You can organize your ministries and keep everyone on your team communicating and aligned around what’s going on.

As a worship leader, good communication is key to building a strong worship team. You can cultivate relationships while ensuring everyone has what they need to successfully prep for your services.

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Built right into the Services mobile app—which, by the way, you should totally download if you haven’t already—chat helps you coordinate all the service details with your team. Plus, you can have fun while doing it!

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The really cool part about chatting with your teams? Team members are dynamically added or removed from conversations as availability changes!

So if your original bass player suddenly declines (why is it so hard to find a bass player, anyway?), your newly scheduled bass player is automatically added to the chat conversation.

All of your chat conversations stay in sync. No more outdated group threads or irrelevant messages! So what are you waiting for? Download the Services app and start chatting!

The post #384: Leadership Lessons For All From The History Of The Black Church with L. Michelle Smith appeared first on Beyond Sunday Worship.