Gravity Leadership

Lead Like Jesus. Live On Mission. Make Disciples.

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Why We Should Stop Funding Church Plants

Fitch01-150x150This is a guest post from David Fitch. David is a friend of Gravity Leadership, a church planter, and the B. R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.

We also partnered with David and Northern in 2017 to offer a training program in this new way of church planting called Church Planting Institute. If that’s interesting to you, contact us to find out when it will be offered in the future.

Here’s an idea whose time has come: Let’s stop funding traditional church plants.

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How to Shift Small Groups to Missional Communities

When I started my first full time job as a Pastor of Community Life, I couldn’t have been more excited.

I was thrilled to land a job where my primary focus would be the multiplication of small groups. I channeled all of my energy toward studying biblical community, small group theory, and leading groups myself.

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3 Things To Do When Your Disciples Don’t Make Disciples

Whenever someone joins the Gravity Leadership Community, we ask them what their biggest leadership challenge is right now. A few months ago, someone replied that their biggest challenge was the final “leave/launch” part of the discipleship process, where disciples make disciples.

He stated that he had personally discipled several people, but when they were launched to start their own discipleship groups, it just didn’t happen. His disciples didn’t make disciples. The whole thing was still dependent on him.

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Pastors: How (Not) To Talk To People About Money

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Some new church plant (or old traditional church, or hipster-deep “worship experience”) doesn’t have enough money to pay the bills. So the pastor, or the elders, or the stewardship committee decides it’s high time to start preaching more about money.

And unfortunately, it “works.” At least, it works in the short-term.

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From Affinity to Affection: Building an Actual Community

I was talking with a first-time church planter about how things were going. As we were talking about some of the difficulties he was facing, he blurted out:

I just don’t like the people who are coming to my church! I wouldn’t choose to hang out with these people, and it’s hard to create a community with people you wouldn’t normally hang out with!

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