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Doctors, Hairstylists and Church Planters

Written by Eric Metcalf

Whether you are preparing to become a neurosurgeon, pilot, teacher or hairstylist, you are required to do a residency or internship.  Why do you think these fields require these experiences?  It’s pretty obvious, I guess.  Who wants to be the neurosurgeon’s first patient right out of medical school if he/she has never been trained on the job?  Would you have confidence in your child’s education if the teacher never had the experience of being a student teacher?

I’m sure you already know where I’m headed, but consider new church work - the most important work of all.  Imagine the millions of dollars that have been invested in church planting where the church plant doesn’t thrive.  There are many contributing factors including the lack of church planting residencies and internships.

Brian Moll, NewThing Leadership Resident: Detox & Reproduction

The six months that I spent at COMMUNITY as a Leadership Resident gave me an opportunity to unload and unlearn all of the things from the previous eight years of ministry that would not be beneficial to leading a church plant in New York City.  Having the time to correct the mistakes I had made in ministry was invaluable. Without that time, I fear I would’ve gone to New York thinking the same model that worked in my last post would work in the new one.  (By the way, our prior experience was AMAZING, but very, very different than where we were going.)

I had no desire to move my family to Chicagoland and, as I considered moving my family twice within one year, it became less and less attractive by the minute.  Looking back, however, it gave us a chance to bond together through adversity and detox from our last experience on staff at a church.  

At COMMUNITY I learned the value of REPRODUCTION.  This value bleeds out of every staff member, every leader, every volunteer and every artist in the church community. I  quickly developed a passion for multiplying leaders and artists, campuses and congregations throughout New York City and around the world so that more people could find their way back to God. 

In many ways I feel like the Residency has continued through the 3½ years of planting Forefront Church. I am still learning, still gleaning and still processing the time I spent with the leaders from COMMUNITY. They are still my close friends and they are people who drive me to be all God created me to be simply by pursuing that in their own lives. 

Here’s How NewThing Does It 

Each NewThing Affiliate Church is committed to catalyzing a movement of reproducing churches.  Alongside the unpredictable, undeniable power of the Holy Spirit, we see Leadership Residents playing a critical role in building this movement. 

Leadership Residents are those who sense God’s hand upon them and feel God inspiring them to start a new church, site, or fresh expression of church.  We’re specifically looking to recruit two critical roles that will lead these new churches: the Lead Artist and the Lead Planter.   

A Resident gets the opportunity to experience: 

• An apprenticeship with a Campus/Lead Pastor at any NewThing Affiliate Church.  Because we want this to be a viral, decentralized movement, we have chosen to recruit residents for every church within NewThing.
  
• Training on the fundamentals of leader reproduction.
•  Interaction with an online training experience that equips for becoming a reproducing leader. 
  
• An option to enroll at Wheaton Graduate School in Wheaton, IL with 25% off an M.A. 
  

With God’s provision, NewThing’s vision for the next 36 months is to recruit and place 137 Leadership Residents that will result in planting 100 new churches.  Imagine the sheer force of hundreds of Spirit-led leaders and what God is going to do through them and the networks of churches they are a part of! 

If you would like to learn more about what it would look like to do a Leadership  Residency at one of our NewThing Churches, contact Eric Metcalf, NewThing Leadership Residency Director.