Culture change…oh my!

At Annual Conference this year, each attendee received a glossy new church-planting brochure celebrating the more than 45 active projects across the Dakotas-Minnesota Area. Very cool…and already very out of date!   
 
In the few weeks since our respective Dakotas and Minnesota annual conferences, several new initiatives have begun to emerge:

• A Dakotas congregation wanting to start a Hispanic congregation in a nearby town where there isn’t one
• Six new residents have been identified to join the Embrace Residency program. These will eventually find their way into our churches and new starts. 
• Mission Fargo had their first public worship gathering with 85 people attending and 17 people being baptized.  
• October 16-17 a group is already beginning to commit to our first Bismarck INCUBATOR event to dream about church planting in the North Dakota HUB CITIES.  

What’s going on here?! Could it be that a culture of “church for us” is shifting to “church for them?” Oh my!

As you may know, we are working to accelerate the planting  growth rate within the Dakotas Conference to 3 percent each year—which translates to starting roughly 7 new congregations each year. I’m pleased to report that in 2019, more than 5 new multiplication efforts have begun to take shape, showing we are well on our way toward this ambitious target.
 

This fall we will offer a “Startup Incubator” in Minneapolis, MN (Sept. 24-25) and in Bismarck, North Dakota (Oct. 16-17). It’s designed to teach leaders best practices for innovative start-up projects before they dive into those projects. In the past, I’ve typically recruited the dozen or so people who attend each event. But this year, people I’ve not spoken with are proactively signing up because they have an interest in new places for new people! This is tremendous! 
 
What’s going on here?! The Holy Spirit is indeed breaking through and the culture is changing. Oh my!