Reproducing Leaders

I'm sitting in my office right now listening to Adam Forgety (Associate Pastor & our summer intern supervisor), Stacie Hooks (Intentional Communities Director & mission team extraordinaire), having a brainstorming, planning, dreaming, and calendaring meeting with our 7 summer interns.  I know it sounds like such a simple thing, but for me it's a really sweet sound.  It's a sound we've prayed for.  It's the sound of God answering our prayers.

You see, we have a vision as a church.  It centers around REPRODUCTION.  We want to be a church that REPRODUCES in 5 specific areas: disciples, leaders, Intentional Communities, worship gatherings, & churches.  Did you catch the second one?  Leaders.  We want to reproduce leaders.  Over the last 3 years, by the grace of God, I've been investing a big chunk of my life and whatever leadership ability I have into Stacie.  It's been amazing to watch her grow.  And now to hear her delegating, training, equipping and empowering our 7 interns to lead in ways I'm sure most of them never even considered?  Beautiful.

Over the last year or so I've been investing myself into Adam.  He came to Tacoma a worship leader but his hearts desire is to become a pastor and a leader.  He's incredibly teachable and he's taken on the task of overseeing our summer interns.  It's so fun to not just hear Adam teaching and training our interns, but empowering them to lead.  He's casting vision for the interns and giving them space to lead.  Incredible.

Our hope and our prayer is not just to have a "successful" summer here in Tacoma.  Our hope and our prayer is to equip 7 missionary leaders over a 2 month period here in Tacoma and SEND them back to their home towns, their universities, their neighborhoods and their churches ready to lead, ready to equip, ready to train and ready to empower the people in their sphere's of influence to be missionaries for the gospel.  And maybe just maybe, a few of these 7 will end up planting churches and being on church planting teams.  Most importantly, we hope all of them will gain and maintain the humble confidence to be REPRODUCING disciples and REPRODUCING leaders everywhere they go for the rest of their lives.

Listening to a meeting can be worship.  Our God is so cool.