Exponential Book Affirms Leadership Residency

Church-Planting Lesson 2: Don't Skip a Leadership Residency.

A leadership residency is an invaluable experience for a leader preparing to launch a new church.  The opportunity to remove yourself from your current context and immerse yourself in a reproducing church culture is priceless.  Many of our residents have significant ministry experience and have families with children, and yet they will be the first to tell you that this costly and time-consuming step on their journey to planting a church is more than worthwhile.

Brian Moll, Lead Pastor of Forefront Church in NY (former NewThing Leadership Resident), will tell you that he initially questioned the value of the time he would spend at COMMUNITY, a NewThing Church.  "At first I thought of it more as a 'detox' before I jumped on the church-planting bandwagon," says Brian.  "But soon after landing at COMMUNITY, I discovered that the next seven months were going to be critical for the success of a healthy church in New York."

Brian describes one of the lessons he learned from his residency this way: "I learned the priority of reproduction.  Leaders reproduce--they reproduce Christ followers, artists, leaders, small groups, celebration services, campuses and churches throughout their city and around the world.  Without strong leadership and a firm grasp of the value of reproduction, churches begin to grow stale and get desperate or die (or in most cases, both).  One of the most critical values I took with me as I journeyed east to New York was that the health of our church was dependent on our ability to reproduce at all levels."