Your Journey Blog

How to Build Your Launch Team - Free Webinar

Over 300 people have signed up for these free Church Planting webinars and the response has been encouraging.

Join us for Part 4 of the FirstSteps webinar series with Gary Rohrmayer as he provides a deeper look at another critical step of planting a missional church: Building Your Launch Team. We will be providing insights on:

• What is a Launch Team?
• How to build agenda harmony
• How to design your launch team meetings
• Building an Advisory Team
• Keeping the evangelistic temperature high in the launch team phase

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 2 pm Central (3 pm Eastern/12 pm Pacific)

Register Here

Find out more about the FirstSteps Network

FirstSteps for Planting a Missional Church Manual

Excellent Generosity Series from GenerositySummit.com

Below are some video clips from the "Pirates" series done at Sun Valley Community Church. We hope you can incorporate these messages into your generosity talks at your church...

 

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four | Week Five

Generous church ministries strive to help churches maximize their potential by helping leaders create a generous culture in their local church.  The generous church strategy is simple:

Expose church leadership to generous living principles from God’s word
Coach them in developing plans and practices that create a generous culture in the church
Resource them through partnerships with organizations that add value to their ministry
Reproduce generous cultures in other churches through intentional mentoring in local church peer groups

Our goal is to help each local church maximize the generosity potential of their congregations while creating a network of local church generosity and stewardship teams that share best practices, resources and ideas which result in greater kingdom impact locally, regionally and globally.

Scott Ridout, Director of Generosity for Converge Worldwide, facilitates the Generosity Summit.  Scott has been Lead Pastor at Sun Valley Community Church in Gilbert, AZ for 10 years and serves on the Boards of Vision Arizona (www.visonarizona.org), a local church planting movement, and Vision Abolition  (www.visionabolition.org), which is committed to the  prevention, rescue and restoration of victims of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation worldwide.

Generous Church Summits are a ministry of Converge Worldwide.    (HT)

Bring More Focus into Your Spiritual Conversations

Many of you would agree that the majority of your spiritual conversations lack focus and direction. The reason I developed this spiritual conversation tool was to bring more focus and direction into my evangelistic conversations without being pushy or overbearing. The Spiritual Journey Guide provides an
opportunity for personal discovery and spiritual assessment through a relationship and will revolutionize the way you share the gospel.

Many pastors are using this in their visitation program, handing them out in their small groups and giving them out to their entire congregation through their weekly worship services to generate more focused spiritual conversations throughout their
congregation.

The holiday season is a great time to engage people spiritually. In order to serve you this holiday season, as you bring more focus into your spiritual conversations, we are drastically reducing the price of the Spiritual Journey Guide until December 15th.

The Spiritual Journey Guide is a simple conversational guide that helps people self-assess where they are on their spiritual journey while providing guidance and direction for taking the next step towards spiritual discovery and spiritual maturity.(Click to see a Sample Version)

Save up to 40% Take Advantage of this Special Price by Ordering

For Canadian or international orders go to ChurchSmart Resources

Free Tim Keller Sermons - Great Resource

Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York has opened up a new free sermon resource, starting with 150 of Pastor Tim Keller’s sermons, all categorized, labeled, and downloadable, at this site:

• Download Tim Keller's Sermons

Here’s more info from the site:

Redeemer’s Sermon Ministry has been faithfully recording, cataloging and reproducing all of our sermons for the past 20 years. To celebrate all 20 years of our history, and to meet the growing demand for our church’s teaching in New York City and around the world, we have created this resource of 150 sermons and lectures covering a broad array of topics, completely free to download and share.

The recordings chosen for the Free Sermon Resource were culled from classic sermon series as well as lectures and seminar addresses delivered to various Redeemer ministry gatherings, and are intended to present to the listener the full scope of teachings they would receive over several years of active involvement at Redeemer.

This is an amazing new resource, and there will be more content getting added regularly, so tell all your friends: Redeemer Free Sermon Resource.  (HT)

The Painted Door - A New Converge Church in Chicago

Mark & Acacia Bergin are Planting The Painted Door in Chicago, IL with Coverge MidAmerica and Acts 29  Find out the meaning of this new churches name though this excellent video.

The Painted Door, an introduction from Mark Bergin on Vimeo.

GoD and DoG - Video

This is for all you dog lovers out there who love God! Enjoy!

Lent Video - Just for Fun

A Christmas Must See!

Updated Spiritual Journey Guide is Here!

Over the last couple of years I have been working on updating The Spiritual Journey Guide, moving it from a 90's feel to more of a new millennium feel.  After gathering many ideas from several avid users of the tool we have made some tweaks and changes to this 'spiritual conversation tool.'

The first major change is that it is square in  shape and looks more like a CD cover.  Daniel Montgomery of Sojourn Church in Louisville, KY made this suggestion. Thanks Danny! 

Another change is that we have real people reflecting each stage of the journey. It was tough but I the let the "alien heads" go!  We made the print more readable on the inside and also changed and tightened up some of the language to reflect more of a missional and gospel centered approach. Thanks to Darryn Scheske of Heartland Church, Fishers, IN, Geri Bourget our graphic artist, Dave Wetzler and Bob Rummel of ChurchSmart Resources.  Finally, a special thanks to my wife Mary who makes me look better than I am.

To get a sneak peek you can Download NewJGSample. 

To take advantage of the Pre-Order Sale you can Order Here.

Sowing Seeds of Love Into Your Community

Sowing seeds of Christ's incarnational love into your community is a key characteristic of a missional church.  NorthBridge Church in Antioch, IL, at their one year anniversary banquet, raised $17,000.00 to give into their community and cast the vision for three other churches to simply love a local struggling school district by turning a useless, old school building into a functional classroom.  Here is the newspaper article on the project: Download NorthBridge School Article.pdf

A few take aways:

1) There are hurting organizations in your community.  Open your eyes and ears to see and hear the hurting.

2) Ask people how you can help them.  Don't tell them what you want to do.

3) Don't do it alone.  Involve the larger body of Christ.

4) Love them unconditionally in the name of Jesus.

5) New churches can make a big difference!