From the director....

Terri Elton

Welcome to Perspectives Online! It is our hope that you will find Perspectives Online as valuable a tool as the printed version. In this volume of Perspectives we are sharing with you some of the current things we are thinking about and hearing from other people. Pastor Foss was at the Group Convention in Nashville this past January and his presentation is summed up in the article on visioning. Several of our staff and volunteer leaders attended Youth Leadership’s winter training and want to share with you Noelle Palmer’s insights into the differences between adults and today’s youth and how they make decisions and choices. Several of you have requested more Bible studies to use with your council or staff, so Pastor Foss has included one he did with our Frontline leadership team. And finally, I want to spark your thinking about learning relationships and what they might look like as we move into a new time in history. In addition, we have included the toolkit, which has suggested resources and upcoming equipping events. All in all, we hope that you not only see this information as valuable, but that you want to share it with others. Remember – it’s free, so share the information and the link with other leaders.

Perspectives is also the place we try to keep you up-to-date on what’s changing at Changing Church Forum. As many of your know, we are not holding a national conference this May. We have been using this past year to discern God’s vision for Changing Church and to try our hand at some new ideas we’ve been thinking about for some time. In addition to the peer forum we held for women in youth ministry this past summer, we are also hosting a peer learning event in May for Sr. pastors and worship leaders of teaching congregations. As we continue to grow our partnership with LifeKeys, we held our largest "Train-the-trainer" event so far this past January, and will be hosting another one in June (see the toolkit for details). We also have our LifeKeys Online tool now available. This includes the LifeKeys spiritual gifts survey and the chance for individuals to match their gifts with ministry opportunities within subscribing congregations (see the toolkit for details). For youth workers, staff and volunteer, we have Group Live coming to Prince of Peace, May 7, 2001. Finally, we have just confirmed with Bill Easum and Tom Bandy that they will be coming to Prince of Peace in March 2002. So, as you can see, Changing Church is continuing to be invested in providing learning experiences for leaders of the church.

What’s in the thinking tank? We are talking with several congregations with the possibility of taking the PoWeR SuRGe learning event on the road. We are looking for clusters of congregations that are interested in the discipleship message and want to go deeper into transforming membership-based congregations into discipleship-based congregations. We are also doing some individual consulting with leaders and their congregations about customizing this message for their setting. We are also partnering with other learning experiences and many of our staff are speaking at conferences across the country. If you are interested in any of these opportunities, please contact us.

In the mean time, our staff continues to shift. Mary Frampton, the voice many of you have talked to for years, has left our staff and taken a position within Prince of Peace. Our new voice of the bookstore is Tina Stiebner. We welcome her to our team! In addition, Nancy Sheldon has joined our staff, as of February, as a part-time communication director. She will be handling Perspectives, editing the Toolkit, and working on our Web site. We are excited to have her on board in this capacity. As for me, I am reducing my time with Changing Church and giving more attention to leadership development within Prince of Peace. Handt Hanson will now be overseeing the development of the Toolkit weekly resource, partnering with Michelle Swanson and Nancy Sheldon. The bookstore will be under the management of Alan Bachman from the Prince of Peace development team. All in all, we are continuing to change as God leads us.