MG731 Growing Churches in a Post-Christendom World

Eddie Gibbs; 8 units

April 7 - 11, 2008

Houston, TX

This seminar seeks to identify the key characteristics of the contemporary, post-Christendom ministry and mission contexts and address the challenges they present to the local church. With the contemporary scene, “tradition,” “modern” and “postmodern” mind sets prevail. The "modern" context refers to the self-confident, highly secular, rationalistic and humanistic world view, whereas the "postmodern" reflects the collapse of the Enlightenment paradigm, and abandonment of the search for objective truth and meaning, and its replacement by a therapeutic and survival mentality, in a decentralized world of competing interests. It will identify and assess the moves being made towards a “missional” understanding of the Church and of the Emerging Church conversations currently taking place.

 

Eddie Gibbs is a Senior Professor in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California and Director of the Institute for the Study of Emerging Churches in the Brehm Center.  Dr. Gibbs also previously occupied the Robert Boyd Munger Chair of Evangelism and Church Renewal at Fuller.  He has forty-four years of experience in the ordained ministry in the Anglican Church. He served for three years as Associate Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills as well as with the South American Missionary Society in Chile, later acting as their Home Secretary.  Dr. Gibbs was for five years the Program Director responsible for the Church Growth ministries of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and was for three years on loan to Mission England as National Training Director for six Billy Graham missions.

OD757 Organic Leadership Development

Terry Walling; 12/8 units

2009

Organic Leadership Development will focus on unpacking the paradigm of Leadership Development and its application to growing leaders from the ground-up, in the context of life and ministry. The class will focus on helping leaders to cultivate the core passion and unique contribution of those they lead. The core methodology for the class will be to first apply this paradigm to life and ministry of the class participant.

 

Leaders are grown by God, in the context of community, through the life experiences and ministry challenges that they face. They emerge and develop over time, and are formed spiritually (being) and shaped functionally (doing). They are destined by God to make a unique and ultimate contribution (Eph. 2:10) in the missional, post-modern context of our day.

 

Organic Leadership helps develop leaders from the field where life and faith must occur. These leaders need to live a more holistic faith, learning to integrate their faith experience and major roles into five life domains (personal, family, vocation, Church/Kingdom, community). This class will assist leaders in developing leadership emergence eyes as well as ongoing leadership development to the unique ministry context of a leader and his or her community.

 

Leadership is influence. Influencing God’s people toward God’s purposes is an issue of increased spiritual authority. Spiritual authority is a byproduct of a leader’s deepening intimacy and dependency on Christ. By becoming more intentional in one’s formation and development, leaders move beyond skills to greater character based influence.

 

Scriptures and history reveal an important linkage between personal renewal and the revitalization of structures. Transformed leaders are better able to bring transformation to ministry. The process of Organic Leadership Development affects not only the individual life of a leader, but also increases his or her ability to bring change to the ministry they lead.

 

This class will also give practical tools and resources for how to develop a more organic, systemic approach to resourcing the development of those one leads, tailoring the development and resourcing of a leader according to his or her life stage and development. Students will also develop a mentoring strategy for the three stages of leader development, and gain resources on how to teach leadership development to others

 

Terry Walling serves as founder and leader of Leader Breakthru, an innovative resourcing ministry that pioneers training, environments and resources that bring breakthroughs to the lives of entrepreneurial church leaders and strategic business leaders. Leader Breakthru is part of Church Resource Ministries (CRM), a mission agency that seeks to resource church revitalization and new church planting through leadership development.

 

Terry also provides leadership to Matthew’s Café In Northern California, an innovative missional community that seeks to develop Christ followers who are sent to the marketplace and the marginalized of our world.

 

Terry’s fourteen years of pastoral experience and twenty years of teaching and mentoring in the area of Leadership Development assists him in offering unique help and consultation to church leadership and those committed to bringing renewal to local churches, and new expressions of the church into existence.

 

Terry is a graduate of Point Loma College and attended Talbot Theological Seminary for his M.Div studies. For the last 15 years he has been mentored by Dr. J. Robert Clinton, Assistant Professor of Leadership at Fuller Seminary, and he received his Doctor of Ministry from Fuller Seminary in Global Leadership. Terry also teaches the D.Min courses on Leadership Development in other Seminaries around the U.S.A. He has authored resources on personal renewal and corporate revitalization which include: Focusing Leaders, the Focusing Living Resource Kit, Advancing Leaders, and the Focused Ministry Resource Kit. Terry originally served as founder of the ReFocusing Network System, which has resourced over 5000 pastors and church leaders in North America and around the world.

OD724 Misisonal Leadership: Character, Context and Challenge

Reggie McNeal; 8 units

2010

It’s A.D. 30 all over again. The church is having to play catch up to the Spirit. Enter the missional church. The emergence of the missional church is showing signs of being the largest realignment of Christianity since the Reformation. This course explores the distinguishing contours of the missional church revolution as well as the leadership required by it. Major course attention will center on three primary shifts underway: the shift from an internal to an external focus, the shift from program-driven to people development as the core activity of the missional community, and the shift from church-based leadership to apostolic-era leadership.

 

Reggie McNeal is the Missional Leadership Specialist for Leadership Network of Dallas, TX. His books, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (Jossey-Bass 2003), A Work of Heart (Jossey-Bass 2000), Revolution in Leadership (Abingdon 1998), and Practicing Greatness: 7 Disciplines of Extraordinary Spiritual Leaders (Jossey-Bass, 2006) target issues critical to the formation and development of Christian leaders in North America. Dr. McNeal draws his insight from twenty years of local congregational ministry (10 years in various staff roles; 10 years as senior pastor), as well as from over a decade of consulting and speaking for denominational groups, para-church ministry organizations, seminars, and hundreds of local church leaders. He is married to Cathy and, together with their two daughters, lives in Columbia, South Carolina.