New denominational high school leadership initiative

The Covenant is developing a new leadership experience for high school students and the Northwest Conference is hosting the pilot! It will be Aug. 24-26 at Lake Beauty Bible Camp. Registration and cost to be announced soon. Here's a taste of what to expect:

Emerge: A high school leadership experience

Leadership at the beginning can be extremely hard because you don't know who you are, what you're good at, or even how God has gifted you-but you know you're supposed to lead. As leaders emerge, it can be a struggle. It takes work, practice, experimentation, failure and evaluation to realize your potential and start using it.

We're here to help you in this process of discovery-to explore how you are gifted and how you can bring those gifts to the forefront and begin to put them to use in a beautiful way. The gifts, passions and beauty of each individual leader have been there all along. We're just helping to clarify, uncover and help you use these newly discovered gifts. This experience provides an effective, engaging student leadership development opportunity by combining practical teaching, hands-on, interactive learning experiences and time for individual reflection, peer-to-peer feedback and group worship.

Help us evaluate Congregational Vitality efforts with brief survey 

In the Northwest Conference, we are deeply invested in the missional health and vitality of our churches. In short, we want our churches to be pursuing Jesus Christ and His priorities in the world. Therefore, Congregational Vitality is one of the 3 priority areas for our work. As a result, we are committed to resourcing our churches through workshops and personal engagement in order to strengthen and guide them toward becoming more healthy and missional.

However, we are also committed to evaluating the effectiveness of the resources we provide. Thus, we are pleased that the Rev. Corey Johnsrud is doing evaluative work in this particular area for his D.Min. at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. NWC leadership looks forward to meeting with Corey to review his findings, as this can only help us become more effective in the work to which we have been called. Therefore, if you have been involved in the Veritas seminar and have not yet responded to his inquiries, we would encourage you to do so in the near future.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Stromberg

Superintendent

Survey instructions 

As most of you are aware, the Veritas seminar was developed and implemented in order to help congregations have healthy and honest conversation about their current realities and to encourage congregations to become "healthy, missional churches."

I am doing research that is seeking to explore what impact participating in a Veritas seminar has had on the missional understanding and practice of the churches of the Northwest Conference. If your church has participated in Veritas-either through attending at another church or at your own church, or through the DVDs of the seminar-you are invited to participate in this research.

You can find the survey here (This link is iPhone/Android friendly). The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you for your support of this research and the ongoing work of revitalization in our conference.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at 715.441.1613 or coreyj1@gmail.com. Thank you for your time.

Be God's,