Gifts and Talents needed for turning around an existing church.  The “Apostolic Leadership Traits.”

• A clear personal experience (often over time) of the Risen Christ that has become the foundation for everything else one does in life.
• Attraction toward friends and relationships on the edge of conventional church circles and often far beyond. 
• A clear, and often amazingly simple, sense of mission. 
• The passionate conviction that we offer something that will renew human lives and communities. 
• The belief that God sent us to this particular place in this particular moment. 
• A keen awareness of the ways that organized religion has stopped short of living out the Christian good news faithfully and/or effectively. 
• A determination to clear some new territory—to push the church to new places and to new people. 
• Boredom with unchanging routine and maintenance tasks.  Something has to change.  
• Energy discovered in short-term and sprints rather than marathons. 
• The capacity to communicate our spiritual experience and vision winsomely to others, so that they are persuaded to jump aboard the bandwagon.

From I Refuse To Lead a Dying Church by Paul Nixon (Cleveland:  Pilgrim Press, 2006), pp. 17-18.