For the 12 years I've worked at Leadership, I have been asking pastors, "What do you really need?"

Usually near the top of the answers comes: "Trained lay leaders."

There are never enough of them. Where do you find the time to train potential or existing leaders? What approach do you follow? Are there materials to help—something intelligent, not just fill-in-the-blank?

Thus, Leadership has been on a quest to develop a top-flight resource to help pastors train key leaders.

We launched Lay Leadership, an annual journal, in 1987. Several thousand churches used it during the next three years and liked it. But pastors told us, "A 142-page journal is too much for busy lay people to read."

In response, we developed an easy-to-read, four-page newsletter, Ministry Team. When pastors began testing the prototype with their boards, they gave it good marks but said, "Give us more choice of topics."

One day, while talking with two pastors about training lay leaders, I was feeling frustrated over ...