Back again

It has been a while since we have utilized the blog area. Hopefully that will not happen again. Our Parent Church cohort has been mobilized and we are seeing some great things happening. It has been two years since we made the shift from our sectional teams being the catalyst for church multiplication to individual churches providing that catalyst. We have a number of projects in the works and have already seen a number of launches. So far we have launched 8 or 9 churches in the cohort and are looking at several more. Roger (District Church Planting Director) has just completed the first go around with meeting most of the Cohort pastors in small groups and will meet individually with those who could not attend the other meetings. There have been some bumps along the way as we try and navigate through these waters, but for the most part we are pleased with the amount of ownership many of our pastors are taking. The whole idea of every church can be a church planting church is taking hold and many of our pastors and congregations are accepting the challenge. One of our goals was to take as much of the restraints off of people to free them to plant a church according to how God was telling them, but at the same time providing a platform of resources and training that would give them the greatest amount of success. One way to do that is our Leadership Development Grant. We will not generally pay for the rent, or any other bills but we will pay to train the leadership of the church to do the work God has called them to do. So we decided a couple of years ago that we would allot 2500 for the first 4 years of the plant that includes $2500 for prelaunch training and $2500 for each of the first 3 years after launch for leadership development and ministry training for the lead pastor and their team. We of course, don't know yet what the outcome of all of these changes will be, but we are seeing great things so far.

Stay tuned there is more to come on this journey.

Mac