The Exchanges will help you grow as a leader as you continue to make an impact on your local community.  There is absolutely no charge to attend, plus lunch is on us! Registration is required, though, so that we’re well prepared for you coming!

At this AllAccess Exchange in Hilversum, the Netherlands, ARC Lead Team Pastors Greg Surratt, Peter Haas and Matt Fry will be telling their stories, as well as myself. Greg is the president of the Association of Related Churches (ARC) and the Senior Pastor of Seacoast Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Peter pastors Substance Church in Minnesota and Matt pastors C3 Church in North Carolina. I am the Lead Pastor Thousand Hills in Hilversum and I have been a long term friend of ARC.

So what’s ARC? In president Greg Surratt’s words: “We are an association of relational churches working with church planters, church leaders, and churches in transition to provide support, guidance and resources to launch and grow life-giving churches.” – Click here to register for the All Access Exchange – Here’s a promo video for the Exchanges ARC is doing in the US. The one in Holland will be similar.

When you die, what kind of legacy will you leave your children? Will it be money, stocks and real estate? Or would you like to leave your children something permanent? What is that? It is helping your children develop a real relationship with God. How can you do this? It is easy but it takes commitment and it is never too late to start. The benefit will be that your child will develop their own lifelong, personal relationship with God. The important part is that you do not have to be a pastor or minister to help your child.

Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ now? If not, then we need to start with you. Any relationship spiritually or naturally is developed by the amount of time we spend with the other person. All relationships start with little or no knowledge about the other person. As we find out more about them, we choose to either develop or forget about that relationship. It is the same with God.

The more devotional time we spend reading His Word and praying, the more we learn about Him and his nature. We learn about why he created us and what He did for us. Ultimately, He created mankind to have a relationship with Him.

The Bible talks about men being the head of the house and the priest in the family. That principle not only applied in Jesus’ time on earth but for all men of all ages. This scripture also implies that all men even if they are not “officially” pastors or ministers can and should be the priest in their family. Becoming the godly head of the house will have a positive effect on your family and marriage.

You cannot expect a child or anyone else to follow you in this adventure if you are not doing it too. Your family needs you to lead them. If you accept this challenge, the result will be something you and your family will value and remember forever.

Decide on the amount of time you will commit to reading the Bible and in daily prayer. Keep it real and reasonable so you will be able to maintain your own commitment. The Holy Spirit will take advantage of every minute we give Him. The positive effects of your devotion time will benefit you all day long.

During your devotional time, ask the Holy Spirit to give you some ideas on how to work with your children and this new idea. Expect an answer. Thank Him for what you have and need. Tell Him what is in your heart. You have no problem talking to a friend about things happening in your life. It does not have to be a “religious event”. Not only talk but take time to be quiet and listen. The Holy Spirit can give you the answer in a variety of ways.  It can come though the scriptures, an inner voice or even a friend or stranger, just be sensitive and listen.

God loves to hear from us — about everything. As parents, it is our responsibility to impart biblical and spiritual wisdom to our children. It is not just the local church’s responsibility.

Make the commitment and start with these simple steps. The watch and see the benefits it will bring you and your family.

Larry Blakeslee
EuropeAdvance Lead Team
First Step Ministries,  Inc.

There will be those shots that just fly perfectly over the fairway and land exactly where you intended them to.  Emotions of satisfaction and joy will fill you and you think that nothing is impossible. You rule! Then it happens. You hit the ball and it does not go as planned. First you hit the bush and you have to search for it forever (since you won’t hold on to the five minute rule). When you finally find it, you hit and hit and it just won’t go anywhere and you get frustrated that you didn’t pay that one-stroke penalty right away! And when it finally flies again it hits the bunker… Well on a golf course everything can happen and rarely does everything go as planned! But after the most horrible play, when you tee up it all can change! Even if you have played horribly you just can’t stop. You have to follow it through! It’s just like the life of a church planter. You will have a life before the launch and a life after the launch.

I am a firm believer in Vision, Values and Strategy. And you will live in your vision, values and strategy in the pre-launch time.  That is one of the most exciting parts of planning and preparing a church plant.  And when it all has its climax on the launch day, when you have invited all your friends, and you pack that place you have chosen for your church, everything is awesome! But the thing is you will have to tee up next Sunday again! And the second Sunday is most of the time a serious reality check! You will start to realize that planning the strategy is not the same thing as living it!

To get a good number to attend a church launch is not that hard. But to get them back the next Sunday is harder. Especially in our secular European setting and culture. The attendance of a newly planted church in Europe is rarely as big as church plants in the U.S.  And the second Sunday can often be the most challenging experience a church planter can go through.

One of the fastest growing churches in Sweden told the story how they had an attendance of 16 people the second Sunday. But as a church planter you have to decide from day one that this is not a one hole game! How you play on your first hole will not determine if you will be successful or not! We have to stick to it and play for the long run!

I think every church planter will go through the emotions and sense of failure at some point on the course! They have all said to themselves, “What am I doing! Is this really worth it… will it ever grow…” etc.

Church planting is not really that glamorous or fancy. It’s hard work with lots of failures, challenges and hard opposition! And still… it’s the most rewarding thing any Christian can be apart of! But you need to be prepared for the post launch shock!

How to survive the post launch
There are too many church plants that do not survive the first year. It can be easy to think something is wrong or that this may not be God’s will after all since we don’t reach that many people! It is extremely important to be well prepared if you want to survive the post launch year!

In the U.S., I have heard them talk about the critical first 6 months. But here in Europe, I think the first critical time is the two first years! To hold out for two years can be a great challenge! Let me give you some of the things I think are the most important tools to survive the first one to two years as a church plant!

1. Be well prepared! Don’t plant without being trained for church planting. Since I had heard from great churches how they struggled in the beginning or had very low attendance their first months, helped us a lot when we planted Go Life Church. Even though I had been a part of planting several churches before I decided to do the ARC 1.0 (Church Planters Roundtable) and ARC 2.0 Advanced Training, the training was a tremendous help in preparing us for the reality of church planting. Not just the motivational inspiring pep talk, but real “how to” practical teaching that tells it exactly how it is! I am so excited that in 2013, we can offer an advanced training (EA 2.0) in Europe! The first class will be in November 2013 in Holland! If you are a church planter in Europe don’t miss that!! You can expect from the Europe Advance team that we will get some great church planters from ARC in the US to come over and teach and impart their anointing, wisdom and knowledge.
2. Keep on building! Just keep on building on the dream, the vision, values and strategy you have set up! Stick to the plan. Protect your dream from the wolves that want to come into your church with their own agenda and their own ideas of how to build a church! Vision leaks, so keep on talking vision! Keep on focusing on your goals. Keep on building your team! Invest in people and build them, encourage them and help them grow! If your team members won’t grow, they won’t stick around for the long run! And if they don’t grow, they won’t be motivated to bring others in to your church! Realize it will take time and all you can do is to keep on building. Don’t try to stress things into happening. Live NOW! Serve NOW! Act NOW! It’s so easy to think that you will do everything later when you grow bigger. But if you don’t build now you will never grow!
3. Keep on praying. It’s so easy to have too much focus on vision and strategy that you miss the importance of prayer. Everything is born through prayer! Teach your people to pray. Get a strategy for prayer and schedule prayer for your team! Especially when things get tough. You must be able to have your refuge in God!
4. Keep on connecting. The church is built upon relationships. As a church planter you need to continually invite people out for lunch or for a coffee. Try to connect with the key people in your town. Maybe you need to invite them for lunch before you invite them to church! But also see to it that you connect with other church planters. Don’t get isolated! You need others that are in the same situation as you who go through the same challenges as you. EuropeAdvance wants to be that kind of network where you are never alone. And finally, connect with those that have gone before you. Have those that can be your overseers and mentors. It has been such a great help for us to have had people with anointing and mandate to talk into our lives in hard times. But also who can look through our strategy and give advice, and help us avoid the pitfalls and mistakes that could be a head of us!
5. Keep your focus on Jesus. If you, in everything, let Jesus be your main focus it will help you from getting bitter when your best friends leave the launch team. Or when the burden of responsibility gets too heavy. “Roll all your cares on Him who is faithful.” Let Him be the guiding star and the heart of everything you do! Don’t ever get tempted to just preach some kind of motivational teaching that attracts all kinds of people! You are called to preached Jesus and lead people to Him! The church exists for one purpose only, and that is Christ alone!

I could give you ten more points on how to survive the post launch. But when you are in the post launch you just need a few that you can hang on to and remind your self and your team of every day! That will help you through! When you have survived the first period it’s time to plan for breaking through the different growth barriers. But first you survive, then you grow!

If your ball has ended up somewhere in the rough, just don’t get stuck there. Take the one-stroke penalty and just get back on the course! Growing churches are not churches that never ended up in the roughs, they are simply churches that got back on the course and did not give up!

 Thomas Jonsson
Go Life Church
Gothenburg Sweden

Have you ever thought about the secret of why some leaders seem to always know what to do in a difficult situation, while others almost shrink down when they are faced with a crisis? I am convinced that the difference is the leadership factor that some leaders have and develop, and which others don’t. Let me explain, because knowing what level of leadership factor we have will help us discern if we are called to be the planters who start churches, but let others to grow it; builders that take over an existing church and help it grow and multiply; or founders that start the church and then in the right time, and when faced with the right amount of complexity, switch from planter mode into building mode. Most of the founding pastors of great churches have this ability to switch their leadership style. Ever thought about how they do this? It seems natural to them, but there is a factor we can learn about by observing their stories.

One of the key discussions in leadership is whether leaders are born or made. We would like to believe that people can become leaders, and sure, to some extent they really can. You can learn to lead a group of people with gifts and empowered abilities. However, the exceptional leaders who have the ability to switch to growing and sustaining leadership momentum, have certain abilities that they have been born with. This would help us to answer why some people rise to the occasion while others seem to never even see the occasion. These exceptional leaders have four essential leadership qualities: integrity of heart; skillful hands; visioning capacity (or creative thinking); and the leadership factor that can be defined as a capacity for sound judgment and a capacity to handle complexity. This last quality is the presence of a developed belief system and the presence of emotional intelligence (and the absence of psychological damage). Let me look briefly at each of these last leadership factors.

A capacity for sound judgement is, in the words of Alistair Mant, “what you do when you don’t (and can’t) know what to do (but you sense you have to do something – fast!).” Within new church settings, this element is critically important. There are many times when we do not know what to do, but we need to, as leaders, be brave enough to make this leap of faith (it is like stepping into the darkness of uncertainty). This environment makes the identification of leaders within the church an important value as we are looking for people who are able to make decisions themselves, especially under pressure. A capacity to handle complexity explains that the higher we go on the leadership path, the larger the complexity becomes. Potential leaders will display a various capacities for dealing with complexity. Most people can cope with focusing on one thing for a short period of time like leading a small group for an hour and a half a week. But most people will struggle leading a large church with a 10 year plan! The presence of a developed belief system is important because effective leaders are able to lead because they know what they believe. Often we find it difficult to distinguish between what we really believe and what is just an emotional response to difficult challenges or situations. Ian Jagelman defines three sources of core beliefs for the Christian leader: information (discipleship process, generally held opinions, and theological education), formative relationships, and experience.

And lastly, the presence of emotional intelligence. One cannot be an effective leader with negative emotional stability for “when people feel good, they work at their best”. Emotional stability and intelligence is clearly one of the most important and most neglected areas in Christian identification of future leaders.

We tend to see qualities in a spiritual sense of the anointing of the Holy Spirit or the spiritual gifts and forget that until we can manage and lead ourselves, we will be of little use to others. Bill Hybels tells the story of how he discovered the importance of self-leadership in his book Courageous Leadership. He first quotes leadership expert Dee Hock who has suggested that “management of self should occupy 50 percent of our time and the best of our ability.” This was followed by an article from Daniel Goleman where emotional self-control had been defined as being “exhibited by leaders when they persevere in leadership despite overwhelming opposition or discouragement; when they refuse to give up during times of crisis; when they manage to hold ego at bay; and when they stay focused on their mission rather than being distracted by other people’s agendas.” These opened Hybels’ eyes to self-awareness issues regarding leadership as it completely described his situation, and later helped him to grow in leadership to become a pastor’s pastor.

We would do ourselves a great service if we would think about the capacity of our own leadership and also learn to measure potential leaders and church planters within our churches using these questions: Has the leader been tested in a different context and in different situations, especially under pressure and in difficulties? Has the leader realized the danger of lack of confidence? Has the leader recognized the impact of fear? Has the leader had to be under supervision or have they been able to make decisions alone? Leadership is a complex journey and because one of the main goals of effective leaders is to reproduce themselves, identifying and developing leaders is an ultimate need for survival and further growth of any organisation, including the church.

I recently preached a sermon where I apologized for all the times that the Church as a whole or more specifically, the church I pastor, has hurt anyone. I knew we had hurt people over our 17 years as a church and, as the Pastor, this breaks my heart. It would be great if we could have a re-do on these instances but we all know we can’t.

So how do we move beyond these hurts and move forward? How do we minister to those who have been hurt and offer the explanation they are looking for? I have a simple answer: we’re all flawed people.

Simply said, the church is flawed because you and I are in it. God takes a group of messed up, selfish, culturally biased people that are battling pride and a whole list of sins and He puts us together and expects us to get along. In a flawed church, we basically have two choices. We can say “the church is flawed and I am going to critique it” or we can say “the church is flawed and I am going to try to solve it”.

When God takes flawed, forgiven people and He puts it together, somehow He makes it beautiful. That beauty is way too magnificent to let the flaws get in the way of ministry! In fact, if you think you find a flawless church, don’t join it because you’ll mess it up. However, if we can get past the flaws and realize that we’re family and we have to love each other, flaws and all, this can be an amazing thing! As Jesus says in John 13:34-35 (MSG) “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

I believe one of the keys to healthy growth in your church is getting along with flawed people. If you don’t have unity in your church, you are only functioning at 80%. When the enemy can get the church to function at less than 100%, the church is now limping along instead of moving full speed ahead. The key to this unity is not harboring bitterness over hurt but realizing that we’re all flawed, forgiven people, and by giving grace and forgiveness and then focusing on trying to solve the problem. I’ve seen the end result of bitterness and it’s not good. I’d rather live in forgiveness, grace and mercy than become bitter and angry. One thing I’ve learned about the church is that as long as you have integrity, honesty, give grace and are moving it forward, God gives grace and completely fills in the cracks. However, the moment you are hypocritical, bitter, and it’s just a “gig” there is no grace in the cracks and the Church starts falling apart.

Many of us say “It’s not my problem, I don’t need to get involved, they need to figure it out.” In Philippians 4, Paul reminds us that it is our problem. Think about it like this: what if that problem could have been solved if you would have followed God’s call on your life and used your gifts and talents to fill that need? How would the Church look different? We cannot afford to confuse our allies with our enemies – we are in the same battle! Although it may be a flawed church full of flawed people, we are all forgiven and when we do our part and learn to live in grace, it is an absolutely beautiful Church because God is in it!

Thomas and Ann-Margreth Jonsson have been dreaming about reaching Gothenburg City through a new vibrant and relevant Local church for a couple of years. After 10 months of vision nights, prayer meetings and putting together a comitted launch team, that has now come into reality!

Gothenburg City will forever be changed by the tidal wave that has begun in and through this church that was launched in a strategic location in Scandinavia. The possibilities of the far-reaching impact of GoLife Church are beyond what any of us can hope for or imagine!

Please keep Thomas and Ann-Margreth, their core team and GoLife Church in your prayers! The Kingdom of Heaven is advancing across Europe!

Statistically we know that the percentage or number of people that actually get saved decreases dramatically with the increase in their age, children being the easiest, mid-life probably the hardest to respond to the Gospel.  Presenting children the truth of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ will produce the best long term results.  Children that are saved early in life have a greater opportunity to prevent problems for themselves in the future as they apply Biblical principles to life’s challenges.  They have a foundation for decision making.

The world provides no positive alternative to the challenges of life.  The world “preaches,” “Do what feels good for you at the moment.”  “Do what you feel is right in your own eyes.” Because of this, it is imperative that we reach this younger generation with Gospel.  We need to provide them with an alternative to the world’s perspective.

Church planting is the clear objective of building the Kingdom of God throughout the world. It is still God’s mandate to all of us as Believer’s:  to reach the lost with the Gospel.

Like many other parts of the world, Europe is in need of the Gospel.  The financial structures that the Western Civilization depended on for years are more uncertain then ever before.  No matter what part of the western world we live in, everything that has been considered stable is now unstable.  Not only are they unstable but all the other “solutions” society used to fix the problems have failed.  Local churches can provide the fellowship, instruction and especially hope to humanity through these current and future trouble times.  The local church gives people a place to fellowship, connect and learn as they travel through life.  Help support a new church plant in your local area.  The benefits can be incredible for your community.

Larry Blakeslee
EuropeAdvance Lead Team
First Step Ministries,  Inc.

With a population of 1 million and growing 2-3% annually, there is a huge need in this city for the life-giving message of the Gospel.  Especially because the percentage of confessing Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, Lutheran and Free Church) in all of Sweden is 4%.  Sunday church attendance is 1%.  According to the “World Survey,” Sweden is the most secularized nation in the world.  In Sweden, more than one church is shut down a week!  But Swedes are more open than ever.  Gothenburg is strategically located between three capitol cities within only a few hours drive: Oslo, Norway; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Stockholm, Sweden!  The time has never been more right to plant a church in Gothenburg to reach the northern part of Europe!

During the weeks surrounding the launch, it would be great to have some extra hands and feet available to help with the launch! Please contact Alicia if you are interested in being in Gothenburg to help with the launching of Go Life!

During this trip I had the privilege to speak for two churches in the north and one in the Republic. In the north I spoke in CFC Belfast (Pastor Andrew McCourt) and in Celebration Church in Craigavon (Pastor John Scott).  CFC has been going for over 20 years now and Celebration Church is a few years old.  While both churches are in totally different stages of their development, they are both doing very well and reaching out effectively in their communities.

The church in the South I spoke for was Lighthouse Church in Navan.  I met Lighthouse’s pastor, Jamie Corcoran, at a conference at CFC Belfast last year and immediately felt a connection.  In October of last year Jamie and two of his team members came to Holland for a conference in Thousand Hills with Ritchie Miller of Avalon Church (McDonough, Georgia).  So I was excited to see what God is doing in this part of Ireland.

What stuck out about the Republic of Ireland is that the Roman Catholic background of this country makes it really difficult for any non-Catholic church to develop.  Especially in the area of Navan it is very hard to even legally use a building for church services if you’re not a Catholic church. Call that freedom of religion… And this is Europe, not Turkey or another Islamic country!  And in spite of that, Jamie’s church has doubled over the last half year to around 100 people, which makes it one of the largest evangelical churches in Ireland!

As a pastor and church planter my hands are itching (sorry… Dutch expression ) to get involved with helping pastors and church planters in Ireland!  I wonder what God has next for us in this relationship!

And I have some great news to share with you!  The total of last Sunday’s offering and commitments was 32,931 euro (=45,000 USD)!  Add that up to all the commitments from our members for what they want to give towards the building after June 2012 (over 36,000 euro), a subsidy from the city of Hilversum for our renovations, various loans from church members and a mortgage, and the thermometer is now at 740,000 euro (978,000 USD), which is only 10,000 euro away from our initial goal of 750,000 (991,000 USD)!

That means that we are now sure that we are now able to buy the building late June 2012 and that we have enough finances to cover the biggest chunk of the first phase of the renovations.

Only thing I am still hoping and praying for is a miracle so we can buy the land also (worth 314,000 euro / 410,000 USD). Will you pray along with us?