(RNS) Now begins the annual season of church leadership workshops, retreats and formation events. It’s an important time because when leaders have their act together, the faith community can move forward.

Here are my six suggestions for church leadership. I know they represent course changes — and serious ones at that — but I am concerned about congregational well-being, and I think these steps are critical.

1. Elected leaders need to stop running churches

Leave that to staff and lay volunteers. A healthy organization needs an elected leadership that sees its charge as the future and its task as strategic thinking. In a corporation, that would be the board of directors. In a congregation, elected leaders should work in partnership with the clergy — perhaps starting by studying how successful congregations are thinking about their futures.

2. Leaders need to embrace risk and change

I don’t see any way forward for congregations that doesn’t involve substantial risk and change. Leaders need to stop trying to avoid, minimize or even manage risk. After nearly 50 years of relentless decline, leaders need to make a radical commitment to change, including moving away from Sunday morning worship as the primary locus of ministry. More importantly, they need to invest aggressively in technology and rethink their devotion to inherited facilities. The “over-my-dead-body” attitude toward change that prevailed in the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s needs to stop. If longtime leaders can’t imagine a future beyond what they know, they need to step aside.

3. Leaders need to get smart about organization development

They need to understand how churches work — not how they once worked in the “golden era” that a few always remember, but how they work today. We need methodologies that are better suited to this era. We need to ask how others have been growing churches of all sizes while we were declining. All other systems — from schools to banks to newspapers to gasoline stations — are changing, so why would churches think themselves exempt from needing to adapt as well?

4. Leaders need to enhance their skills

Too many elected leaders believe their life skills and job skills are readily transferable to the church setting. In fact, church duty is unlike other work. It calls for skills (such as knowledge of addictive systems, family systems, dysfunctional systems, conflict management) that too many church leaders simply don’t have.

5. Leaders need to ramp up their preparation and performance

Too many church leaders believe they just need to show up at meetings, take a few minutes to examine the budget, and then start making decisions. Given the complexity of issues facing most congregations, such lack of preparation is irresponsible.

6. Leaders need better data

They need to insist on sophisticated, consistent and accurate metrics. Everything that went astray in the 1960s and beyond could have been anticipated and dealt with if leaders had been equipped with better metrics. Annual reports are barely a starting point. Church leaders need to be studying the larger marketplace, looking at how people’s lives and interests are changing and then figuring out how those changes will affect churches.

I know full well that most church leadership groups will recoil at these six suggestions. But I also believe they will be the only way forward. Now is the time to take the first steps in setting aside inherited ways of being church leaders. They haven’t worked for nearly 50 years, and they aren’t likely to start working now.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus” and founder of the Church Wellness Project. His website is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com. Follow Tom on Twitter (at)tomehrich.)