A Pastor's Toolbox

Today's parish leaders are expected to be holy and prayerful spiritual guides, great preachers and compassionate confessors, but also to make important decisions in key areas like finance, budgeting, hiring and firing, fundraising, risk management, relationship-building, and more-often with virtually no transition or training. And with all the requisite education in philosophy and theology they must provide future pastors, in addition to formation in priestly spirituality and pastoral care, seminaries can do little to prepare priests to deal with the difficult temporal issues pastors face.

A Pastor's Toolbox is designed to help fill that void. It is loaded with valuable information, insights, and practical tools that pastors need in order to begin handling the complexities of parish management in the twenty-first century.

The book is an outgrowth of The Toolbox for Pastoral Management, a nationally recognized joint project of The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management and Seton Hall University. The Leadership Roundtable is a nonprofit organization of Catholic lay leaders, religious, and clergy working together to promote excellence and best practices in the management, finances, communications, and human resources development of the Catholic Church in the U.S. through the greater incorporation of the expertise of the laity. Learn more at www.TheLeadershipRoundtable.org.

Reverend Paul A. Holmes, STD, is distinguished university professor of Servant Leadership at Seton Hall University where he has taught moral and sacramental theology since 1988 and served as vice president for nine years. He also serves as spiritual director for the Clergy Consultation and Treatment Service at St. Vincent's Hospital in Harrison, New York.