Last week I had the opportunity to attend Leadership Institute at Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. I’ve had the opportunity to attend this conference every year for at least twenty years and have written about it in the past. (links to past blogs) This year I was able to take Kayla Flanagan, the Children & Youth Ministries Director at Chain of Lakes, and Destiny Anderson to the Leadership Institute with me.I love this conference.
I wish the PC(USA) had a church who would do this type of conference. I’m hoping that the conference that the Presbyterian Church Growth Network shares could become a similar type of experience for Presbyterians as Leadership Institute is for Methodists.
The music at Leadership Institute is fabulous. At the beginning of worship their Praise Band leads music. It is powerful to have 1,300 people singing with all of their heart. That never gets old. Sometimes they make mistakes in terms of having microphones on and in the movement of slides. The fact that they make mistakes is probably reassuring to most of the people at the conference—and certainly is reassuring to me. Even the churches who are “sold out” to quality make these mistakes.
This
year Leadership Institute had a bit more intrigue as Adam Hamilton—the founding
pastor of the church—spoke. The intrigue was not that he spoke; instead most of
us were curious to hear his thoughts on running for Senate in Kansas while
still serving as pastor at Church of the Resurrection. His role with the church
has changed significantly since he announced he is running for Senate and would
certainly change if he won his race.
On
Wednesday evening he shared a talk that had many stories about his running for
office. One story that has stayed with me is talking about visiting the Great
Ball of Twine in Cawker City, Kansas. Cawker City, Kansas is a very small town,
population of 457 as of the 2020 census. Adam shared how he had to encourage
his traveling entourage to go out of their way to see the great ball of twine.
And they did! He asked all of us to think about what is the Great Ball of Twine
in each of our congregations. What would we do or share that people would drive
out of their way to visit?
The
Great Ball of Twine at Chain of Lakes is our outreach to people who identify as
spiritual refugees. At the church we think of a spiritual refugee as someone
who has had ran into problems with congregations. Church has not worked for
them. At Chain of Lakes we go out of our way to welcome people who have had
hard experiences in other congregations. We welcome them, we extend hospitality
in an extravagant way, we accept people where they are on their journey. It has
worked! Of course, we have many people at Chain of Lakes who are not spiritual
refugees. But it’s my experience that a person who is a spiritual refugee will
drive a long ways and out of their way to experience what Chain of Lakes is
offering.
The
workshops were excellent. In fact I would enjoy Leadership Institute even more
if an additional day of workshops were offered. The speakers were good on
Thursday, but the workshops on Wednesday were more helpful in ministry. I
attended workshops on AI, on strategic planning, on supervision of staff, and
one on their Kindness campaigns. I have many ideas that I’ll be bringing back.
The final talk that our group heard shared by Magrey De Vega was one of the best talks I’ve ever heard at Leadership Institute. He talked about the teachers that each of us have. Three teachers he shared are our Inner Child, our Inner Elder, and our Shadow self. He set up two chairs and modeled what a conversation with each of these teachers would look like. For example, in having a conversation with our Inner Child what would we tell our self at five years old? What experiences would they have that we might share with them? And then what could we learn from our five year old self? What would that child say about some of the challenges that each of us are facing. Magrey acknowledged that for some people the emotional trauma of this conversation is too high. And indeed, some people had to leave the room while he was talking. The conversation with their five-year-old self is too hard. The same powerful conversations can happen with our Inner Elder and with our Shadow.
Our team had to leave after Magrey’s talk, so we were not able to hear Adam Hamilton’s final talk. I look forward to watching it on replay. In fact people can purchase a replay of all of the workshops and the talks at resurrection.swoogo.com/sharechurchLI26/begin
One highlight of going to Kansas City is taking a tour of the neighborhood that I lived in when I was in 4th grade. My parent worked for Cross Lines and our family lived in Inner-City Kansas City, Kansas. This was only twenty-five minutes or so from the church. I show the group Stanley Elementary, the place where my family lived, the "housing projects" that are a hundred yards from where we lived, and the Methodist church in Armourdale where my dad ran a day camp. The tour is like having a conversation with my 4th grade self!
A special thanks to Church of the Resurrection for sharing Leadership Institute. I look forward to taking an even larger group from Chain of Lakes next year.
