Dr. Luecke greatly admires the Apostle Paul. Paul was a world-class entrepreneur who established a new religion in the Roman Empire. To do that he showed himself to be an organizational genius and a top-level analyst. From Paul’s letters, we see how he could recognize what was going wrong in churches he helped establish and point out what needed to be done. Paul stressed the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit much more than we traditional Protestants do.
There was a time in Dr. Luecke’s professional career when he had the title “Analyst.” His Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior was great preparation for a consultant as well as a professor. For six years, Dr. Luecke taught the M.B.A. Organizational Behavior course at Washington University in St. Louis. For ten years he taught the Doctor of Ministry course on Church Management at Fuller Seminary, where he was an administrator and associate professor. He also taught Strategic Management as a professor at Valparaiso University.
These 52 blogs address what Dr. Luecke sees has gone wrong with traditional mainline churches that, fifty years ago, were healthy but are now in steep decline. Luecke thinks Lutheran, as well as Presbyterian, Reformed, Episcopalian, Methodist, and United Church of Christ churches, have lost their basic spiritual energy. The only way to regain it back is to pay much more attention to who the Holy Spirit is and how he works today — that is, to recover the emphasis in Paul’s theology that Dr. Luecke gained from Gordon Fee’s detailed exegetical study God’s Empowering Presence (1994).
In 1990, Dr. Luecke received a call to plant a new Lutheran church in a suburb of his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. He saw it as a great opportunity to practice what he had been teaching. That church just moved into its large new sanctuary in a choice location in Broadview Heights. From their, Dr. Luecke moved on to become the Administrative Pastor at Royal Redeemer Lutheran Church in the neighboring suburb of North Royalton, where he still serves as a semi-retired Missions Pastor. Dr. Luecke was ordained 50 years ago and has a multitude of experience with what works and what doesn’t in congregations.
Dr. Luecke’s blogs draw on these four books he published in recent years:
- Your Encounters with the Holy Spirit: Name and Share Them—Seek More (2014)
- How to Spot the Spirit’s Work in Your Life: Seek His Gifts and Fruit (2016)
- How the Spirit Shapes Prayer: Research Findings for Traditional Christians (2017)
- Builder Ministry for the 12st Century (2010)
These books are available on this website as well as on Amazon.
This website offers plenty of opportunities to comment. Dr. Luecke’s hope is that this website will develop an internet community sharing views on the most vital question today for churches that value the Reformation heritage — and how we can regain our spiritual energy.
