Transforming Church

A New Way of Equipping Leaders
Out of this gathering 15 leaders came together for 4 hours of Focus Group meetings to spark a new leadership development initiative for the ELCA. We have recognized the huge gap in leadership skills needed by the church, and have banded together to meet that need. Dick Magnus, Ruben Duran and Dave Daubert represented the ELCA Evangelical Outreach and Congregational Mission unit. Kelly Fryer brought us a view from teaching leadership the last three years at Luther Seminary. Dave Stark represented the Changing Church Forum and brought greetings from Mike Foss. Doug Hill represented Rick Barger and the Abiding Hope Adaptive Leadership Academy. Al Sagar, Jerry Cox and Gregg Burch came from the Academy for Transformational Leadership in Atlanta.

Lou Forney, Bob Driver Bishop, Bob Rognlein and Ron Lee came as pastors who have built thriving churches and yearn to equip our future leaders. Tom Lyberg and Roger Ganzel represented the Transformational Leader Gathering. Each brought a unique perspective to the table as we seek ways to equip the best and the brightest future leaders with tools they can use to create short-term measurable goals and results.

TransformingChurch.org
Out of our work together, we created a draft Mission for this new initiative: Equip those with potential to become Disciple-making leaders who cast vision, raise up other leaders and make useful change.
We embarked on a process: Plant seeds and see who responds; bring the right people into partnership; seek planning grant from Thrivent; form governance board to meet in August to finalize vision and strategy. We are looking at the model Thrivent helped to build in the LCMS, the Pastoral Leadership Institute. PLI has just finished some longitudinal studies that have demonstrated a pretty remarkable impact on participating congregations. 215 congregations participated in the program the first four years, about 50 in each year. These statistics were gathered when the first group of 50 had completed the four years, another group of 50 had only completed three years, and so on. Those churches have increased aggregate worship attendance over 10,000 and had over 13,000 adult baptisms/confirmations. The entire denomination (over 6000 churches) only saw 18,000 adult baptism/confirmations, with over 72% of them from these 215 churches.

Dick Magnus conveyed the interest and support of Wyvetta Bullock, Bishop Hansen’s Assistant for Leadership to our efforts. We agreed to move forward with a planning process to create a vision for achieving the mission. The next months we embark on a listening tour to make sure we bring the right voices to the table. We will share this idea at the Multicultural Commission, the ELCA Lifelong Learning Partners and the Large Church Conference. In May, we plan another focus group meeting to bring a larger cross-section of leaders together.

We are forming TransformingChurch.org, a 501C-3, and applying for a planning grant to fund this development process. Out of our focus groups, we will draw leadership for our effort, first a Vision Team with Supporting Advisors, and later a Founding Board. This Board will come together in August to cast the vision, and create the strategy and action plan to make this vision a reality. We will seek funding from many sources to bring us to the point of sustainability. We plan to begin our work at the first of the year.

Since our leadership development process is as yet unproven, we must bring together people of influence and credibility, people who have proven the ability to build communities. We do not want to be perceived as another program from Chicago, yet we want the support of Seminaries, the ELCA and Synods who will partner with us to overcome the leadership challenge facing us.

Stay tuned as this vision takes shape. You will see updates regularly in our newsletter; they are numerous.

Also, to see and learn more about Transforming Leaders Initiative on what is now its own website, click here.