At the end of May I started a project that will not be completed for six or seven years. Over the next six or seven years we hope to provide a leadership, preaching and evangelism training program for all 16,000 United Methodist clergy and at least one layperson from all 32,000+ United Methodist churches. The program consists of three 90 minute sessions: Essentials of Leadership, Improving Preaching and Worship, and Evangelism and Outreach in the United Methodist Tradition.

We’re providing this training exclusively through the sessions of annual conference so that every pastor and a lay member of every annual conference must attend. There are sixty-six annual conferences in the United States and they are all held in late May through mid June, which will require speaking at 8 to 10 a year - two to three a week. To my knowledge this has not been done since the time of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke - the first two General Superintendents of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America in the late 1700’s.

This year we took a trial run at this by presenting this material at five annual conferences: the Kansas West Conference, the Alabama-West Florida Conference, the Memphis Conference, the Tennessee Conference and the East Ohio Conference. All together 4,900 pastors and church leaders participated. It was exciting and exhausting. My aim was to encourage, equip and inspire leaders.

We’re challenging every United Methodist Church to have a written mission statement that is short but compelling and consistent with our denomination’s mission statement. We’re challenging pastors and church leaders to develop several specific and measurable goals to strengthen their churches in the following year. We’re challenging pastors to develop a preaching plan, to offer sermons that will connect with unchurched people, and to develop follow-up strategies for new visitors. And we’re encouraging lay and clergy leaders to honestly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in the area of leadership and to focus on at least two areas they will work to improve.

Will all of this really make a difference? I don’t know. I think that for at least 20 to 30% of the pastors and church leaders this will have a positive impact on their ministry, perhaps more. I believe this because every place I go I hear stories of people and churches who have taken the ideas we’ve shared at our Leadership Institute or from my books, applied them, and seen significant results. In the last few weeks these included a church that had shrunk to 17 people a few years ago, but now has 60 in worship; a church with 22 now has 90; and a church that had 100 members ten years ago now has over 1,000.

If you are a pastor or lay leader from another annual conference and would like to see us bring this training to your annual conference, we are booking dates for 2009 and 2010 right now. Contact Debi Nixon, our Executive Director of Catalyst Ministries at debi.nixon@cor.org if you would like more information. We’re preparing to send materials out to all of the United Methodist bishops in the United States in the next eight weeks inviting them to consider including this event as a part of their annual conference sessions.