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About Church Engagement
Through our Church Engagement initiatives, Welborn invests in Cultivating Healthy Church Leaders and Cultivating Missional Movement in our community.
Eric Cummings
Church Engagement Program Officer
Have questions? Email me.
Cultivating Healthy Church Leaders
Healthy church leaders build and lead healthy churches, which equip and send Christ-followers into our community to love their neighbors and contribute to the flourishing of people through the demonstration and proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
However, it’s not uncommon for church leaders to feel isolated in their work, to experience the burden of unrealistically high expectations from those they serve, and to be overwhelmed when trying to lovingly navigate the many viewpoints and demands of our challenging cultural moment.
Therefore, our work focuses in the areas of care, community, and capacity development for church leaders, including:
- Care & Shepherding Resources
- Fellowship & Retreat Opportunities
- Cohort Learning
- Organizational & Individual Capacity Development
The primary goal of this support is to cultivate health in leaders and local churches so that they are equipped to shepherd and lead their congregations into a deeper devotion and likeness to Jesus Christ.
Cultivating Missional Movement
In the missional movement area, we are strongly focused on seeing local churches positively and tangibly impacting the communities around them. We desire to see the full giftings of the local church, and all Christ-followers, mobilized as God’s people are equipped and sent out into our communities in a way that lets the love of Christ shine like light from a city on a hill.
Our hope is to create greater flourishing in our community by helping Christ-followers live their lives on mission where they live, work, play, and study – in the regular rhythms of life of everyday life – and to whom they’re called – the marginalized in society.
Growth Opportunities
Cultivating Healthy Church Leaders
There is no formal agenda for these retreats. We simply seek to provide local church leaders with an opportunity for no-strings-attached rest and fellowship. We also hope that this shared experience will contribute to healthy and supportive connections and relationships between Christian leaders in our community. There may be optional learning sessions provided by a support team that offer connections to deeper engagement in capacity development and training after the retreat. Participants are encouraged to join an Emotionally Resilient Leadership Cohort following the retreat experience.
Christian leaders and their spouses are continually in the position of pouring out and ministering to others. But who ministers to them? Many pastors, Christian non-profit leaders, and their spouses report not having anyone to talk to when it comes to their own problems and burdens. This can lead to feelings of isolation, burnout, and even moral failure.
We are partnering with Standing Stone Ministry to connect leaders to a local shepherd for companionship, care, encouragement, and pastoral support. Shepherds will walk alongside leaders as a guide and support in a wide range of personal areas, including strained relationships, burnout, exhaustion, loneliness, general guidance and accountability, church or board conflict, emotional and spiritual health, life management coaching, and more.
Healthy spiritual leadership concerns more than our spiritual or physical health. We can be doctrinally sound, even physically fit, but that doesn’t mean we are mentally or emotionally healthy, or that we are becoming kind, patient and gentle, humble and self-aware, that we are enjoying God and able to care for others (our church, our staff) wisely and well. In this small cohort experience, we’ll explore often-neglected areas of leadership: our mental health, our emotional health, the ways our fears and anxieties show up under stress, and other hinderances to our ability to be a non-anxious presence under pressure and criticism.
This cohort is a follow-up to Emotionally Resilient Leadership. If loneliness is part of leadership, then loneliness in ministry can be especially difficult. For reasons we will explore, no calling is more dangerous to your spiritual health than the calling to spiritual leadership. The demands – external and internal – inevitably push us into patterns that imperil our resilience and our joy in ministry. It’s easy to fall into a divided life – not just in high-profile ways that might make the news, but in more subtle, secret ways, as we feel increasingly detached and isolated. We need sustainable relationships that keep us deeply connected to others, but few of us know how to find them. In this small cohort experience, we’ll explore the practices and commitments that can support our growth into wholehearted health.
Cultivating Missional Movement
This semester-long learning cohort is designed as a working laboratory for building a discipleship culture in the local church. Most every church says that making disciples is a part of their mission, but if we’re honest with ourselves, “disciples” may not be what our churches are producing.
How might “how we do church” need to change so that the center of the target for everything we do becomes gathering, growing, and sending forth disciples of Jesus Christ? And how might we develop meaningful metrics that allow us to assess how we’re doing towards that goal?
Education and mobilization tools and resources for local church leaders and congregations that create missional movement of the local church into Gospel-centric community-based ministry.
Support Opportunities
Christ-Centered Communities (CCC) Grants
With a focus on local churches serving the Evansville, IN zip codes, this 2-year grant partnerships is available on a “by invitation” basis for Christian churches and Christ-centered nonprofits that build collaborative relationships, equip and mobilize the church, and support Gospel-centric community-based engagement activities.
Church Engagement Support Opportunities
These are modest grants to local churches to incentivize and support community outreach and engagement activities that mobilize Christ-followers outside of the church building, seek to build long-term partnerships, and that visibly and positively impact the community.
Coaching and capacity development resources focused on helping one local church and one local Christ-centered nonprofit work together in a year-long guided project to define and implement a healthy and sustainable Christ-centered partnership for community-based impact.
Scheduled throughout the year, these learning opportunities cover a wide range of educational, enrichment, and capacity development topics, such as conflict resolution, succession planning, and leadership skills.
With a long-term view towards church health and missional movement, these services include customized consulting support for organizational health, vision development, strategic planning, developing missional strategies, and more.