LIFT

by David Odegard, GLC Executive Director

Several years ago, the Great Lakes Conference recognized its greatest need was for more leaders who would have the ability to revitalize existing churches or plant new ones. It also recognized that many of these leaders were outside the CGGC. We wanted to create better paths for those within or without the CGGC to be able to gain competency in ministry and respond to God’s call on their lives. This led to the creation of the Leadership Fellowship Initiative, a program that allows us to recruit new, young leaders, scholarship their M. Div. at Winebrenner Seminary, place them in a church alongside a seasoned pastor, discover their ministry strengths, and ultimately deploy them in a way that maximizes their potential for Kingdom impact.

We hoped this would be a way to help assimilate leaders into the ethos of our denomination. In turn, they would have a support group around them who walk with them while they learn the practical skills to be successful in main street ministry. Initially, we thought that the scholarship for the M. Div. would be the most valuable offer that we made to our Fellows, but it turned out it was the support network which surrounds them.

To facilitate this vision, the GLC Executive Board designed an oversight committee to create and then evaluate Teaching Churches. These churches were those who showed good health, best practices, and were those ultimately that we most wanted to duplicate. The support network needed to be able to evaluate the progress of each Fellow, their spiritual gifts and entrepreneurial abilities. Also, it had to evaluate each teaching church to ensure quality in all the various nuances would be maintained through time.

The fellow also is provided much guidance, prayer, and evaluative oversight as she or he progresses. A series of standards, made deliberately high, was enacted for quality assurance in this program. Not that anyone who did not finish the program was in some way deficient as a minister, but that this program was not a fit, and there remain many other programs which are still available.

We graduated our first Fellow, Pastor Derek Pryor, last summer who currently serves as the senior pastor at Wharton First Church of God. He excelled at his studies with a very high GPA and served at Celina Church of God for three years where he learned from Pastor Craig Flack. He and his wife, Tay, are providing excellent ministry to the people in the Riverdale School District.

Currently, we have three more Fellows who are placed in teaching churches experiencing the same qualitative mixture of formative and instrumental knowledge. Our hope is to expand the fellowship to accommodate more Fellows in the future as an aid to the entire CGGC and in partnership with our beloved Winebrenner Seminary.

A further expansion came as a result of the Executive Board recognizing that the LFI oversight committee had become proficient with evaluating pastoral and church health and they decided that it would be good to include all of the GLC internship program and trainees under their oversight as well. Thus, LIFT was born: Leadership: Interns, Fellows, Trainees. We remain grateful to the many churches who pay their Fair Share and also to The Foundation of the Great Lakes Conference which make programs like this possible; this has really enabled the GLC to pivot in these crucial times.