1. “Reduces stress:  A healthy relationship with your spouse gives you a place to vent and receive support.
2. Multi-tasking:  Family, especially parenting, teaches you to juggle multiple and competing priorities. 
3. Develops perseverance:  Building healthy family relationships requires a lot of daily doing what needs to be done. It cultivates the ability to endure and follow through on difficult or unpleasant tasks.
4. Teaches you coaching, mentoring and leadership development skills:  Being a good listener, encouraging someone, supporting and guiding someone’s growth are core capacities in family and good leadership. 
5. New networks, ideas and perspectives:  Spouses and children have their social networks and perspectives. They expose you to a larger world of people, experiences and ideas than if you were on your own.
6. Resiliency:  Resiliency is the ability to ‘bounce back’ from discouragement or defeat. Family can provide a place of support, a source of confidence and positive self-image. 
7. Crisis management:  Family experiences can teach you to stay patient and make effective decisions in times of crisis or emergency.
8. Negotiation skills:  Family life allows ample opportunities to practice compromise, developing empathy, the ability to listen and identify underlying issues.
9. Conflict-resolution skills:  Family life provides a rich environment for making mistakes, asking for and offering forgiveness, learning to apologize and own your impact and how to value others who see things differently.”

4 Essential Systems for Church Leaders – Sometimes systems seem too corporate or too businesslike for the church.  These 4 systems are ones that God often works through according to Eric Geiger and are necessary for our churches to become more healthy.

Hope: A Trait for Thriving Congregations – The Center for Healthy Congregations is now releasing date from research they have been doing and they are starting with the value of hope.  Congregations are finding hope not in church growth models but by mining a virtuous mixture of the deep wisdom of scripture, the timeless resources of their particular traditions, and their own unique congregational DNA.

The Surprising Key to a Breakout at Your Church –  The key to your church breaking out is for it to come to an honest assessment of where it’s at – or, in the words of this article, a “breakdown.”  Once this happens, our hearts better align with God’s heart.

How Church Leaders Can Effectively Lead Through Today’s Divisive Political Climate – Dan Reiland says that today’s divisive political issues can and will “consume and take over the central mission of the church – helping people become followers of Jesus.”  He has four practical values to hold up as we navigate these issues.

What Happens When Loving Others Conflicts with Our Convictions? – This article from the RCA’s Faithward newsletter seeks to answer this question by looking at the life of Jesus. We all encounter people and issues that challenge our faith and our convictions these days…this article looks to help us engage them as Jesus did.