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Tools & Trainings for Organic Church Movements
Issue No. 22 01.09.2009
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This year's Organic Church Movements Conference is turning out to be the most exciting yet. Here are a five reasons why you should consider coming:
1. New messages from some of our best thinkers. All our speakers this year are coming out with a new book the very month of our conference.
Reggie McNeal is back with us just as his new book  Missional Renaissancecomes out which follows his bestselling book The Present Future. This is a book that questions our old score card of success in church and gives more appropriate suggestions to measure how we are doing. This is very needed today.
D ave Gibbons who started and led New Song Church in Irvine has a new book being released in February called The Monkey and the Fish. After leading a fast growing megachurch in Southern California, he took a year off and went to Bangkok to start churches there. While there he came to realize that more organic expressions of a missional church are needed. New Song has been evolving over the past couple years to be more decentralized and empowering of its members in whatever vocational field they are called to. I really enjoyed his new book and I am sure you will as well as he identifies the need to be multi-cultural in a fast changing world.
Neil Cole (yours truly) will finally see the release of Organic Leadership this  February. This is a much-anticipated follow-up to Organic Church. It will answer many of the questions that the previous book raised. It will also provoke people even more than the first book did as it addresses some of the fallacies we have about leadership in church. It will be controversial, radical and practical at the same time.
2. Winds of change are blowing strong and we are only beginning to figure out what all of that means. This past year, I have felt the Lord say all that we have been working for will yield changes way beyond any we were hoping for. He then began to show me some implications that I hadn't really considered. There are some lies that have kept the people of God in small boxed in categories for centuries. This is a design of the enemy. Many of us have worked for years to overturn some of these lies just to set the church free. Lies such as the separation of the clergy and laity. The distinction between secular and sacred has been a devastating lie as well.
We have all worked for years to correct these illnesses in hope of having better churches, but the Lord has been showing me that this is too small of a goal. If these lies are removed and the dividing walls that are a by-product, then the whole world can be changed! No, I don't believe this is an oversimplification.
If every Christian is free to pursue God in any vocation he or she is called to (with the same holy passion and divine accountability as what was previously reserved for pastors and missionaries) we will see deeply profound transformation occur. In light of some of these new ways of thinking we actually felt it was important to shift our conference to address such changes. So we've changed the theme to: Organic Church, So What? This Changes EVERYTHING!
We will have workshops presenting on how the kingdom of God can bring transformation into all the domains of society across the world. Politically, economically, educationally, medically, technologically, in entertainment and so on. We will have presenters who will share what they are learning about bringing God's kingdom into each of these domains so far. This is what gets me most excited right now.
3. Long Beach, California in the dead of winter...need I say more?
4. Free copies of my new book to the first 100 people registered! Yep, 100. Baker Books donated 50 and now CMA Resources is donating a matching 50 so the first 100 registrations get a free book.
5. We extended the Early Bird Registration one week to Jan 18th!
Come and be a part of it all! Click here for more!
Pressing on,
Neil
Church Multiplication Associates/CMA Resources
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 UPCOMING TRAININGS
Memphis, TN // Story 1
January 16-18, 2009
@ The Snowden House
Online Registration ends Sunday Jan 11
Trainings in the planning stages for 2009
- Atlanta, GA // Story 1
- Dayton, OH // Story 1
- San Diego, CA // Story 1
- Mobile, AL // Story 1
- Chicago, IL // Story 2
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Featured Resources
 Beyond Church Planting
by Bob Logan & Neil Cole
2 week $20 off sale
Authentic kingdom ministry flows out of who God is ... who we are ... how we relate to each other ... and how we fulfill God's purpose for his people. If you want to plant a church that ...
� Experiences God
� Cultivates true followers of Jesus Christ
� Develops organically within the culture
� Empowers its members to serve fruitfully
� Grows and reproduces itself
...then Beyond Church Planting is for you!
This resource kit includes a three-ring binder notebook, 8 audio CD's and the author's powerpoint presentation on CD.
 Cultivating A Life For God
by Neil Cole
Cultivating a Life for God calls upon us to rethink our busy, fast-paced lives. If there is a stirring in your soul for "something more" in your spiritual journey, take a risk on what God might do in and through your life. Discover the compassion that comes from heaven and can be experienced in a Life Transformation Group (LTG). You may never be the same again!
Save 10% when buying a 10 pack!
This booklet, translated in Spanish, is based upon several chapters take from Neil Cole's book, Cultivating a Life for God and the Life Transformation Group System (LTGs).
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Featured Article
The Networking of Groups
by Neil Cole
The created world has natural boundaries held in place by gravity. The oceans are held in place by the shores. The atmosphere is contained by the weight of earth's gravity. Gravity keeps the solar system contained in orbit around the sun. In a similar way people have natural boundaries in the way that we function best. We are pulled into social groupings of certain sizes by a spiritual gravity inherent with the function of the group.
Jesus, too, consciously stayed in the boundaries of social gravity...
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