We’ve done three of these now and each one has been a tremendous blessing for me.

Our topic yesterday was leadership, specifically on how to develop leaders in a church plant and what that looks like. I love hearing stories and I love hearing the other guys seated around the table share about what is going on in their churches and the struggles and victories that they are experiencing. They have all been where I am headed into right now so I listen very intently to learn what I can and to ask as many questions as I can.

As Lane led our time together, we started off and really ended up spending the morning session talking about the responsibility and weight of leadership. We looked at Exodus and how Jethro rebuked Moses for trying to do it all himself and then looked at the very practical implications of what that means for us as leaders. We were encouraged, in a very strange way, as one guy after another talked about his experience in planting and what that has meant to him from an emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective. I know that doesn’t sound like very encouraging but in a strange way, it’s very encouraging to know that you are not the only soldier on the battlefield and that there are other guys who can exactly understand what you are going through because they’ve gone through it themselves.

We then broke for lunch and spent our lunchtime and afternoon session talking about qualified leadership and how to identify and develop qualified leaders in our churches. It was a good discussion as we examined six words: Call - Commitment - Competency - Courage - Clarity - Character.

When you look at those six words, they really define what it means to be a leader. We talked about pathways to leadership and then ended our time praying for one another and then simply hanging out afterwards decompressing what had taken place the previous four hours.

This is definitely something I want to do when I get to Jefferson City and begin planting Eternity. The encouragement, camaraderie, and sharpening that happens in these is great. And I can’t for the life of me understand why more of this isn’t going on in regions across the country. Either way, it was a good day and I’m looking forward to our next time together in July.