Tonight, we kick-off the Church Growth Collaborative's first ever BREAKING BARRIERS CONFERENCE - a gathering of lead pastors and their teams.  A night of motivation, encouragement and an articulation of what is possible in our churches when we partner with the Holy Spirit using 21st Century best practices to grow thriving, vibrant communities of faith in the places we each have been called to serve.

A key characteristic of the Church Growth Collaborative is the community aspect of being a Professional Learning Community.  Iron truly sharpens iron.  This gathering calls out from among the Church those who are serious about increasing in their effectiveness as leaders as life-long learners and implementers of contemporary best practices.  Our Meet-N-Greet is designed to allow conference attendees to meet some new friends who are on the same journey.

Start your day off with a delicious, hot breakfast in the company of champions.

Clear vision is what allows leaders to lead courageously and what inspires others to follow them enthusiastically.  While our mission was set by Jesus in the Great Commission found in Matthew 28, the vision God gives each pastor is as unique as a snowflake.  No two are exactly alike.  Vision is what your church and your community will look like as you fulfill the mission.  

This session will equip you to reimagine, refine, and reembrace your vision so that you can share with with such succinct and compelling clarity that joining you will become irresistible to those you go to recruit to your team.

The health of the leader's spiritual life will be reflected at every level within the church and will determine not only your partnerning capacity with the Holy Spirit but also the staying power (the longevity) of your ministry. Charisma may catapult you, but only character can keep you.  

This session will give you a road map for building the kind of inner, spiritual life that can be the foundation for a superstructure.  

Someone once said a leader with no followers is just a guy/gal taking a walk.  All of us know the loneliness of leading and we all have a sense that our impact would be greatly expanded if we could more effectively duplicate ourselves in the lives of others by getting very skillful at buidling cohesive teams.  

This session will arm you with the philosophy and practical strategies for building multiple teams within your church to accelerate and broaden the impact of your church both internally and externally - within the congregation and within the surrounding community.  Empower others and you will take the limits off your growth potential.

Almost all of the challenges you face as a pastor or ministry leader can begin to be solved by one thing --traffic.  Getting good at generating a constant and growing flow of first time visitors in your church.  Solve your inflow problem, and you begin to the process of breaking your current church growth barrier.

Getting people is one thing.  Keeping them is something else entirely.  Traction comes when not only do visitors come, but they also stick around long enough to become a part of the church.  This involves systems centered around excellent first impressions and effective guest follow-up.

The church growth engine really revvs up when you graduate from getting people to keeping people to growing people.  This is a shift from evangelism (catching fish) to discipleship (cleaning the fish) and to completely mix my metaphors, to turn new converts into expert fishers of men.  The goal is always discipleship and real disciples, by definition, are always themselves engaged in evangelizing and discipling others.  Once this church growth engine ignites this third cylinder, you have the kind of "flywheel" internal momentum that literally becomes self-fueling.  The church begins to grow itself, to fuel its own mission/vision focused forward motion.  

We all know there is no ministry without money.  The first law of any living thing is to survive.  And churches need two things to survive:  people and money.  This session will equip you with tools to secure the monetary resources you need to undergird and finance the vision.