Attending Leadership Institute at Church of the Resurrection

Last Wednesday, five of us from Chain of Lakes Church drove to Kansas City to participate in Leadership Institute, the yearly leadership development conference at Church of the Resurrection (COR). COR is the largest Methodist congregation in the United States. It was started by Pastor Adam Hamilton in 1990 and now has tens of thousands of members at five difference campuses.

I’ve lost track how many times I’ve attended Leadership Institute in Kansas City. I continue to go because I find inspiration and creative ideas from a mainline congregation. Methodists and Presbyterians are not that different. Methodists have bishops; Presbyterians don’t. Methodists look to John Wesley as their theological founder; Presbyterians look to John Calvin. Besides those differences and a difference in how pastors are called to congregations, these two denominations are very similar in theology and in the way we look at the world.

I now go with a team of people. When I used to go as an individual I would come back and have a hard time following up with some of the ideas I learned. People were interested in what I had to say, but no one else shared the experience I had a hard time implementing all the ideas I wanted to implement. This year five people, including me, attended the conference. A big thanks to Jan Boehm, Kathy Brevig, Kaya Flanagan, for attending with me. We had a terrific time. And even though I’m thrilled to have shared the experience with five people, I’m hopeful that ten people will attend from Chain of Lakes in 2022. The dates of the conference are September 28-30, 2022.

On the way to Kansas City we stopped at the Methodist Church in Ankeny, the congregation where Jan Boehm served for many years as the Music Director. She gave us a tour and shared a glimpse of her life in Des Moines. The picture above is of a stop we made in Iowa.

I shared daily pictures and two videos of our group’s experience at Leadership Institute. Check them out on my Facebook page--facebook.com/hmoorepaul

It’s refreshing to go to a mainline congregation who has experienced extraordinary success and who is so willing to share with humility their ideas with anyone who wants to listen.

On Wednesday evening Adam Hamilton started the conference with sharing interesting statistics about those who attended. He had conducted a survey of over 500 people who attended the conference and the thousands who participated online. Because of COVID, inperson attendance was capped at 500. Forty-seven percent of congregations had experienced a decline in inperson and online worship attendance compared to pre-covid; Thirty-eight percent had experienced an increase. I saw these numbers as encouraging. I would have guessed the decrease in worship attendance would have been higher. 

On Thursday morning Dr. Kevin Muriel shared a powerful talk about racial reconciliation. He serves Cascade Methodist Church in Atlanta, cascadeumc.org. He made the case for why the church should are for racial justice and racial reconciliation. Dr. Muriel shared that part of the challenge is the world and America are becoming more diverse, but the church is not. He encouraged participants to set aside time every day to be educated more on racial justice, to be conscious of race in conversations, and to find a trusted cultural informant on race.  He shared that the future growth of the church will depend on the church’s ability to embrace diversity rather than ignoring or seeking to defy it.

Hearing Dr. Muriel speak in person was worth the trip to Kansas City.

That afternoon I attended a workshop on small groups and one on worship. Because the entire conference was a day shorter than in the past, there were less workshops. Somehow I wish more workshops could have been shared. Perhaps an additional set of workshops and one less speaker.

Thursday evening a session took place on the future of the Methodist church. I care about Methodists, but as a Presbyterian I decided not to attend. Instead I gave the group a tour of the Inner-City neighborhood where I lived as a boy. My family lived in Inner-City Kansas City in the summer of 1972 and then between the summer of 1973 & the summer of 1974. My parents worked for Cross Lines, a social-service agency that works in the Inner-City. Even though I was a boy, my call to ministry began when I lived in Kansas City.  I showed the group the house and then building where my family lived—in both places we lived in community with others. I showed them the two housing projects that were a half mile from our house. We went to Stanley Elementary where I attended school, and I showed them Central Methodist Church in Armourdale where my parents ran a summer day camp for kids in the neighborhood.

On Friday morning we had the privilege of hearing from Bob Goff. He is a writer and speaker who founded “Restore International which is now Love Does. He recently wrote the book, “Dream Big.”  In his talk he shared a number of remarkable quotes. “I’m not trying to be right, I’m trying to be Jesus.” “You don’t need permission to be kind.” “Put a handle on your baggage—pay attention.” “Every act of self-love is a reflection of Jesus.”

In his last talk Adam Hamilton shared some of the best practices that Church of the Resurrection has discovered in the last year. I was particularly interested in their “Love your Neighbor” campaign.

The conference was outstanding. I'm already looking forward to attending next year from September 28-30, 2022. Because of COVID the conference is shorter than in past years. My feedback for improvement would be to have an extra session of workshops. In workshops participants have the opportunity to talk to people from all over the country about their ministry. I've received some excellent ideas from Leadership Institute by talking to others at a workshop. I also wish more music could have been shared from the different music teams at Church of the Resurrection at the start of different workshops.

To learn more about Church of the Resurrection go to: cor.org. To look at resources from this conference go to: cor.org/leawood/sharechurch 

I also wish that a PC(USA) church would share a conference similar to this. Or perhaps some of the larger churches in the PC(USA) could work together to share a conference like this.

Church of the Resurrection does the church a huge favor by sharing this conference every year. I am excited to see how these ideas can make a difference at Chain of Lakes.

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