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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