November 2022 – Essential Church

Episode 140: Equipping our Youth for the Mission of God

In this episode we chat with Greg Stier, the founder and CEO of Dare to Share, which equips youth leaders and students in relational evangelism. We chat with him about best practices for doing just that. You can learn more about Greg HERE. And also download a free copy of his e-book “Gospelize Your Youth Ministry” for Kindle HERE or iPad HERE.

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What I try to remind everyone of is that everyone’s story is a radical story of salvation…

We’ve forgotten the power of the gospel to change and decided to focus on politics and culture instead… we’re just hacking at the leaves of evil rather than striking at the root…

Too many people are putting the onus of evangelism on the pastor… it’s a come and see mentality… we need to combine come and see with “go and rescue…”

We read in Acts that the apostle Paul trained and equipped people in the School of Tyrannus so that everyone in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord… we need to start flipping our churches so that they become like little “schools of Tyrannus…”

We teach youth pastors how to build gospel greenhouses, where evangelism is as normal as breathing and disciples are made and multiplied by the teenagers…

Intercessory prayer fuels everything… the youth groups that grow the fastest are those that pray for the lost by name…

Relational evangelism drives our efforts… we’re trying to teach kids not only the content of the gospel of giving them strategies for engaging with their unreached friends…

Leaders have to fully embrace and model this… the youth groups that grew the fastest had leaders who were living out these values of prayer and relational evangelism…

The changing cultural factors make youth ministry more difficult IF we’re stuck in an old approach… we’re stuck in the 80s…

We need to create gospel-advancing youth groups and make the Great Commission the greatest cause… teenagers have been suffering from depression, anxiety, and isolation and the gospel gives identity, belonging, and purpose… that’s the answer…

Episode 139: The New Landscape of Church Leadership with Sean Morgan

In this conversation we sit down with Sean Morgan, founder of The Ascent Leader, to talk with him about some shifts he’s seeing in the landscape of church leadership over the last few years. You can check out Sean’s work with The Ascent Leader HERE.

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A lot of leadership energy is being spent right now dealing with disgruntled staff… it seems we are losing the ability to disagree in a healthy way…

The question isn’t whether we agree all the time or not, but how we disagree, and Scripture has a lot to say about unity…

This is especially challenging for churches that have campuses… it’s really difficult to have alignment when we’re not in physical proximity to one another…

Even when you have a campus that’s close, if you don’t take advantage of that proximity, you might as well be on the other side of the country… you have to be intentional…

The campuses I’m talking about are the ones that have live preaching… an arrogance can creep in that creates a toxicity which is ultimately unrecoverable…

We need to ask whether we are building churches at the speed that GOD has ordained for us, or are we putting growth hormones into the system to get what WE want…? Some of this is the bitter fruit of speeding things up to our pace, not God’s…

The higher the trust, the fewer the rules… when the trust level is high, you need fewer rules, and I think senior pastors are sending people out to lead churches WAY too early…

Most young leaders are not willing to sit in the hidden places… they see hiddenness as a punishment rather than a place where the Lord can do his best work in us…

The leaders that are thriving are the leaders who are willing to evaluate what is and is not “today”… are we willing to accurately look at what’s working and what’s not working…?

When you do identify what’s not working, are you willing to stop it or change it…? And can your team speak into that process…?

Every five years there needs to be serious renewal in vision and strategy… the leaders that are doing this well are leaning into their teams to evaluate vision and strategy and then are taking risks towards what they see needs to be done…