Day 1 at Evolve

I am in Cumming, GA over the next few days for the http://www.churchplanters.com/ Evolve Conference. I am here learning, connecting and representing the Evangelical Free Church of America http://www.efca.org/ along with a few others from our denomination. There are probably around 1000 church-planters gathered at this event of training and providing tools and best practices. This is a direct ministry of Mountain Lake Church, and the EFCA is one of its partners. MLC is about eight years old and has about 2000 in attendence. It is obviously very heavily involved in church-planting, so its impact is much much larger than its attendence indicates. By the way, many of the folks at the church became believers through the church.

I hung-out with George Klippenes, our national leader, and a few others from our National Team. We interacted with other movements leaders and with church-planters through-out the day. Coming to a conference like this makes me grateful for how far we have come; yet, it makes me realize how far we still have to go.

The 1st message of the Day was entitled - Being a Healthy Leader. The basic premise was that Being a Spiritual Leader means that we need to Disciplined Leaders. This message was by Shawn Lovejoy, founding pastor of MLC. For a great set of self assessment questions as a leader visit http://www.shawnlovejoy.com/ The question that followed was - "who wants to follow an unhealthy spiritual leader?"

The second message of the day was by a very strong young preacher named Steven Furtick, founding pastor of Elevation Church in Charolette, NC. This church was started 2 years ago and has grown to nearly 3000. http://www.elevationchurch.org/ or http://www.stevenfurtick.com/ His biggest point was taken from the life of Joshua 10:14-17 and the challenge was that we must not move to mimmick others, but we must follow God from our own hearts, from our own design. No more Mr. Potato Head churches, we need leaders and churches who will follow God audaciously.

During one of the other training sessions, I attended one on giving and on Capital Campaigns. I learned several of the myths of giving, the biggest being that we should not be afraid to ask people to give to God, for from Matt. 6:19-20, we are reminded that where people's hearts are, there will there treasure be also. If we are truly spiritually concerned for people, we need to be concerned with what they treasure. Often times, people are just waiting to be asked.

I am looking forward to day 2 of this event. God is certainly beginning as great movement in our land, we certainly need it, and it is a privilege to share in it.

A Few pics below!