This paper considers a class of iterative message-passing decoders for low-density parity-check codes in which the decoder can choose its decoding rule from a set of decoding algorithms at each iteration. Each available decoding algorithm may have a different per-iteration computation time and performance. With an appropriate choice of algorithm at each iteration, overall decoding latency can be reduced significantly, compared with standard decoding methods. Such a decoder is called a gear-shift decoder because it changes its decoding rule (shifts gears) in order to guarantee both convergence and maximum decoding speed (minimum decoding latency). Using extrinsic information transfer charts, the problem of finding the optimum (minimum decoding latency) gear-shift decoder is formulated as a computationally tractable dynamic program. The optimum gear-shift decoder is proved to have a decoding threshold equal to or better than the best decoding threshold among those of the available algorithms. In addition to speeding up software decoder implementations, gear-shift decoding can be applied to optimize a pipelined hardware decoder, minimizing hardware cost for a given decoder throughput