A LOT of leaders are frustrated about this.

Recent research indicates that 99% of pastors don’t feel like their churches are doing a good job of making disciples.

99 percent!

This number is remarkable for at least a couple reasons:

1. It’s the main thing Jesus gave us to do as Christian leaders (“Go and make disciples!”)
2. Most of us are actually trying really hard to do this very thing! That’s why we got into Christian leadership (it wasn’t for the money, that’s for sure!)

Bottom line: we want to see people’s lives transformed. So how do our best efforts end up doing so little?

In our efforts to make disciples and bring transformation, we do the things we were trained to do: offer sermons, worship services, counseling sessions, leadership programs, internships, Bible studies, and small group experiences.

But here’s what happens: when we do a good job producing and offering these things, people come and “enjoy” the worship, “appreciate” the sermon, and “get a lot out of” the Bible study, so they come back next week, expecting another great experience (that you and your staff need to deliver).

In our efforts to help people grow, we accidentally contribute to a cycle of consumerism that does the opposite of what we intended.

Instead of people being transformed and then bringing transformation to others, they become consumers of religious goods and services (that YOU need to produce).

No wonder 99% of us don’t feel like we’re doing a good job making disciples! Even when we try to invest in transformation, it backfires. Our best intentions get co-opted by consumerism and we end up feeling even more trapped.

This is our story, too. Gravity Leadership was started by three families that have felt the weight, fatigue, and frustrations that come from non-transformational leadership.

We were all working as Christian leaders in various contexts, but growing more and more disillusioned by the lack of transformation that our best ministry efforts were producing.

We were discouraged, but we wanted to see if transformational leadership was possible in ministry. We wanted to see if it was true that if we focused on leading like Jesus, living on mission, and making disciples that Jesus would build his church. So...

• Ben and Sarah Hardman quit their dream job as an up-and-coming young leader at a megachurch and planted a church of missional communities in the inner city.
• Ben and Deb Sternke launched out from their longtime ministry position at a mid-sized church and planted a network of missional communities, knowing a lot more about what they didn’t want to do than what they did.
• Matt and Sharon Tebbe quit a life-giving ministry job with a church they still love in order to learn how to make disciples in a new context.

Along the way, through a million mistakes and missteps, we met each other and quickly realized that we were embarking on similar journeys of discovery, so we started walking together, learning from each other and encouraging each other.

We became friends and partners in leadership. It was a journey of trial and error, but we learned from our failures and from wise teachers. We kept coming back to the life of Jesus, imitating his way of leadership in our churches and family relationships. We kept experimenting and learning from our failures.

Slowly but surely, people’s lives were actually being transformed. They were growing in their character as disciples and their competence as leaders. Their lives were looking more and more like Jesus. The fruit of the Spirit was growing in them.

One of the biggest lessons we learned is that we can't just aim at increasing knowledge and adjusting behavior. For real, lasting transformation to take place, we need to aim our discipling efforts at the transformation of our DESIRES.

We need to learn to WANT the kingdom of God, not just know the WORDS and do the WORKS. (This is basically what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, and it's become the crux of all our training.)

And the best part was that this new way of leadership that was producing so much fruit in other people’s lives was also producing the same fruit in our lives! We were stumbling on a way of leading that was life-giving, not life-depleting.

Other leaders began to see the difference in our lives and churches, and started asking questions. We began sharing what we were learning, and and started coaching and training other leaders, who also began to see the same kind of transformation in their lives and leadership.

And now we’ve distilled what we’ve learned through coaching hundreds of leaders into a training process called Gravity Leadership Academy.

GLA is a growing collection of training journeys that will bring radical transformation to your life and leadership.

The foundational training journey is a 12-month training and coaching intensive called Find Your Center, and it focuses on the place that real, lasting transformation always starts: in you as a leader.

The impulse for most of us is to start with changing things for others, but implementing solutions “out there” that haven’t really transformed your own life never really works.

Inevitably, you reproduce who you are as a leader, so the first journey is a process of discovering the ongoing transformational center of your leadership.

Transformation in your culture starts when you as a leader simply start living into a new way of being, and seeing what happens… and that starts with finding an immovable center for your leadership to rest in.

That’s what Gravity Leadership Academy Journey 1: Find Your Center is all about.