All participants were asked to to describe the Institute to another pastor in a sentence or two. My response is:My experience has been that the New Church Leadership Institute is an effective invitation to and catalyst for careful discernment for leaders and for the United Methodist Church about God’s call to plant new congregations for […]
Category: united methodist church
This evening we heard the first half of a presentation from Don Smith on the planting of Stonebridge United Methodist Church in McKinney, Texas. He is founder of Vital Connections. From their website: The mission of Vital Connections is to provide meaningful relationships where mentoring, coaching and encouragement serve to equip and inspire faith pioneers […]
New life and death are a natural part of the life cycle and overall health of a denomination and annual conference. This may be seen in the planting of new congregations, but it will also be necessary to move through the death of some congregations who are no longer effective in making disciples of Jesus […]
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2007 NCLI Participants
The roster for the participants in the 2007 New Church Leadership Institute came out yesterday afternoon. If you found this site via that roster, please comment here or come and see me during the conference.
This evening we heard from Barry Morton pastor at Mt. Olive UMC and Rob Williams pastor at Journey UMC in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. They are both in relatively new worshiping communities that are doing church in a new way. It is exciting to hear about new congregations that are being planted in a way that […]
From the session this morning…There are benchmarks that are going to help discern whether a new congregation is going to be viable or not. These are tangible benchmarks that can be quantified within eighteen months of the launch of public worship. Some of these are:Presence of a formal stewardship plan – The way that a […]
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Evening Session
These photos are from the evening session on January 9. They give a good depiction of the room set up and the people attending the event.
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Affinity Group
One of the most important concepts that I have gleaned from this morning is that each of us has a particular group to which we have an affinity. A quote from Jim Griffith: God is at work to draw people to God … through you. What people are drawn to you? What people are you […]
The keynote speaker for the morning is Jim Griffith. It is the first session of Church Planter Orientation. He is a part of the Griffith Coaching Network. He has worked with over 30 United Methodist Conferences in new congregation planting.
I woke up early this morning and took some pictures around Mount Sequoyah before heading to breakfast and to the 2007 New Church Leadership Institute sessions for the day. This is my first time to visit Mount Sequoyah and it has been a great stay so far. Hospitality by all of the staff has been […]
This week I am attending the 2007 New Church Leadership Institute at Mt. Sequoyah in Fayetteville, Arkansas. My wife, Nicole, and I attended an interest meeting a few months ago for pastors in the Kansas Area who were interested in considering new church plants. We attended a meeting with about 8 other pastors and left […]
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Preparation
I have been preparing for an examination with the Board of Ordained Ministry in connection with my request for Probationary Membership and Commissioning. Today, I have been focused on responding to questions from paragraph 329.4 from The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2004. When ready to submit to the conference level board, […]
Rev. Andrew Conard 