Bill Donahue – författare

Step into your leadership calling with confidence.We are created for community—for connection that nurtures true spiritual growth. But growth doesn’t happen by accident. As a leader, you need practical, trusted guidance to create an environment where the people in your group feel safe to share, grow, and experience God’s grace together. This resource provides the biblically based tools you need to lead transformational groups while deepening your own faith along the way.Whether you’re stepping into a small group leader role for the first time or you’re a seasoned minister, your heart’s desire is the same: you want to see lives transformed. How to Lead a Life-Changing Small Group is your essential companion on this leadership journey.You'll learn how to:Create and cast a biblical vision for your small group.Develop practical leadership skills that guide engaging, meaningful discussions.Shepherd your group members through life’s everyday challenges and joys.Ask for and implement essential feedback to measure progress and make adjustments.Create impactful, life-giving meetings that inspire week after week.Grow other leaders through apprenticing.With these trusted tools, you can cultivate an authentic community where spiritual growth thrives and lives are forever changed.This resource is adapted and expanded from the third edition of the bestselling Leading Life-Changing Small Groups, with more than 250,000 copies in print.

Six Ways to Improve Your Balance as a Group Leader Leading a successful small group is like walking a tightrope. You traverse a taut, exciting line, balancing the dynamic tensions characteristic of every group. Drawing from the concept of “polarity management,” Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson help you understand and deal with six dynamic areas every group leader must manage in order to create genuine, transforming small group community. Your group is in for unprecedented connection and growth when you harness the interplay between • Truth and Life • Care and Discipleship • Friendship and Accountability • Kindness and Confrontation • Task and People • Openness and Intimacy Effective, life-giving small groups learn how to embrace both ends of each continuum. Walking the Small Group Tightrope will strengthen your sense of balance, help you gain confidence as a leader, and show you how to release the untapped creative and relational energy in your group.

Assessment and solution for seven common obstacles to building small groups. It’s one thing to start a small group ministry. It’s another to keep the groups in your church healthy and headed in the same direction. Whatever your church’s approach may be—whether it is a church with groups or of groups— sooner or later, as a leader, you’ll need to do some troubleshooting. That’s when the expert, to-the-point guidance in this book will prove its worth. The beauty of this book lies in its unique diagnostic process. It allows you to assess, diagnose, and correct seven common “deadly sins” that can drain the life from your church’s small group ministry. In The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Group Ministry, what would take you years to learn through trial and error is distilled into some of the most useful information you can find. Drawing on the knowledge they’ve gleaned from working inside Willow Creek Community Church, from consulting with hundreds of churches, and from conducting conferences and seminars worldwide, small group experts Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson furnish you with proven, real-life solutions to the toughest problems in your small group ministry. This is not theory—it is hands-on material you can read and apply today.

Small groups transform churches—and lives. Small group leaders often feel the weight of shepherding their small group members. But who shepherds the shepherd? Small group coaches fill a unique role by providing support and guidance for group leaders. When you’re called to coach a small group leader in your church, your mind may be filled with questions: Am I godly enough? What do I have to offer? How do I begin? Although the challenge seems immense, Bill Donahue and Greg Bowman break down the work of coaching small group leaders into achievable steps. This expanded and updated edition offers field-tested and biblically supported advice on such topics as modeling a surrendered life to those you coach, gaining the tools and wisdom you need for coaching, and helping leaders grow spiritually. This workbook can be used as a stand-alone resource to train coaches, or it can be used with the training videos taught by the authors, available on the Equipping Life-Changing Small Groups DVD (sold separately). For those who want to coach with excellence and truly help small group leaders thrive, this go-to guide offers practical answers and inspiring examples. You’ll find both challenge and promise in these pages as you learn to carry forth your God-given calling with confidence.

Like nothing else, small groups have the power to change lives. They’re the ideal route to discipleship—a place where the rubber of biblical truth meets the road of human relationships. This updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Leading Life-Changing Small Groups handbook helps small group leaders learn the basics of leading a successful small group. Regardless of whether a person is leading for the first time or has been for years, this resource will help a small group leader more effectively facilitate group discussion and encourage and support group members in a way that leads to authentic and lasting life change. The unique, ready-reference format highlights the requirements and responsibilities of a small group leader, gives helpful insight into the process of group formation and answers practical questions about meeting preparation and how to encourage group participation. It includes a model for discipleship within a small group and suggestions for dealing with some of the common roadblocks and struggles that most groups encounter. This workbook can be used as a stand-alone resource to train coaches or partnered with the eight-session training videos taught by the author, available on the Equipping Life-Changing Small Groups DVD (sold separately). For those who want to lead small groups with excellence and truly witness life change in their small groups, this go-to guide offers practical answers and inspiring examples.

Our hearts were made for deep, authentic relationships—for community with others. And like nothing else, small groups provide the kind of life-giving community that builds and empowers the body of Christ and impacts the world. In this book, part of the Groups That Grow series of small group resources, authors Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson provide guidance for the strategic decisions that must be made to establish, develop and grow a thriving small group ministry in the local church. In Building a Life-Changing Small Group Ministry, they answer questions like: • Which approach or model for small group ministry is best for my church? • Who has responsibility for the ministry and how are they supported? • How do I organize the groups and coach the leaders? • Where do I find leaders and what kind of training do they need? • How do I guide people toward community life? What are the pathways and events that move people to become part of a small group? • What kinds of groups should we offer? • How do you multiply groups and launch new groups? • How do we define success in this ministry? As you work through the questions in each chapter you’ll develop a coherent, strategic plan for building and leading the small group ministry at your church. And whether you are establishing a new ministry or transitioning from older models of small group ministry that are no longer effective today, you’ll benefit from the time-tested wisdom of the authors. This workbook can be used as a stand-alone resource or it can be used with the five-session training videos taught by the authors available on the Equipping Life-Changing Small Groups DVD (sold separately).

Whether you’re a new or seasoned group leader, or whether your group is well-established or just getting started, this four-session video-based Bible study (DVD/digital video sold separately) will lead you and your group together to a remarkable new closeness and effectiveness. Designed to foster healthy group interaction and facilitate maximum growth, this innovative approach equips both group leaders and members with essential skills and values for creating and sustaining truly life-changing small groups.Designed for use with the Making Your Small Group Work Video Study (sold separately).

Community is a fundamental life search and one of the key aspects people look for in a congregation. But community can't be forced, controlled, or easily created. The problem, says Joseph R. Myers, is that churches are too focused on developing programs instead of concentrating on environments where community will spontaneously emerge.Organic Community challenges key leaders to become environmentalists--people who create or shape environments. Outlining nine organizational tools for creating a healthy environment, Myers shows readers how to diagnose their current situation and implement patterns that will develop possibilities for healthy communities.

Over the past two decades, small groups have gone from spontaneous gatherings among friends to a major and elaborate phenomenon in the church. Many evangelical churches have some form of small groups ministry in place. But there's just one problem, says Bill Search--what started as a simple get-together has become a complicated process, especially for small group leaders. They are often not sure what is expected of them or what to expect from their groups as a result of their efforts.In Simple Small Groups, Search lays out the three C's of small groups--connecting, changing, and cultivating. This paradigm helps to simplify leading small groups in a way that is helpful, rewarding, and life changing. Unlike many other books geared toward small group leaders, Simple Small Groups does not require a church-wide adoption of an intricately designed system of assimilation, making it useful to any small group leader looking for guidance.

A riveting collection of stories from the world of endurance sportsEndurance athletes know the feeling—that oscillation between pain and delight, the pursuit not so much of beating others but of testing their own limits, the finish that often comes with the recognition of how sweet and big life is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kid trying to break a pogo stick world record or a professional athlete attempting to topple the reigning marathon champion—these endeavors in endurance have a way of fascinating us all.In Unbound: Unforgettable True Stories from the World of Endurance Sports, journalist Bill Donahue has pulled together a captivating collection from his years of reporting on everything from cycling the wilds of Dominica to cross-country skiing in Alaska with the U.S. military. The stories feature the fearless Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis breaking up the “boys club” of exploration, four-year-old Budhia Singh running 37 miles without stopping, a visit to Tour de France contender Nairo Quintana’s Colombian village in the High Andes, and more.Unbound spans across seven countries on five continents, moving from the slums of Bhubaneswar, India, to the windswept tundra of the Alaskan Arctic. Discover diverse cultures and indelible, inspiring characters as you journey with the author along the roads and trails of the world.

Who is Jesus? Is he the blonde-haired, blue-eyed saviour of bad religious art? Or is he just another 'good thing', alongside Buddha and crystals? Or is he a fiction - the product of a bunch of first-century deluded fanatics?Bill Donahue has met the real-life dynamic Jesus who even in the twenty-first century can captivate us and transform our lives. And we can encounter him too. In forty short sections, ideal for daily reading, Donahue introduces us to Jesus as provocative teacher, sacred friend, truthful revealer, extreme forgiver, authentic leader, compassionate healer, relentless lover and supreme conqueror.With guidelines for Bible reading and prayer you will find that you too experience the living, breathing, Son of God.