On Thursday and Friday of this week (August 11-12) I am looking forward to being one of the guest bloggers for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit.
Speakers this year include Seth Godin, Steven Furtick, Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), Bill Hybels, and lots of others. It looks like about over 50,000 are registered so far to attend on-site and at the extension sites. I think that afterwards the speakers are translated into several different languages and the Summit is made available to thousands more Christians internationally, which is especially exciting.
Here’s the purpose of the Summit: “The Global Leadership Summit exists to transform Christian leaders around the world with an injection of vision, skill development, and inspiration for the sake of the local church.”
And here’s an excerpt from the website on why they started and host the Summit:
“Why We Host The Global Leadership Summit”
Over the years we’ve come to appreciate just how critical leadership is to church vitality. We have observed that a church’s effectiveness in pursing it’s God-given mission is largely dependent on the character, devotion, and skill of its leadership core. This is why WCA’s focus is to elevate the quality of leadership within the church.That leadership could be formal or informal, staff or volunteer, full-time or bi-vocational, clergy or laity. It doesn’t matter where the leadership comes from; it just matters that it is present.
WCA recognizes that the leadership core of any church includes leaders from the business, education, government and social sectors. The Global Leadership Summit welcomes leaders from all these sectors and fully believes that the maximum influence and impact of the Church is felt when all of its Christ-centered leaders are at the forefront of establishing and growing well led local churches, companies, schools, governments and social enterprises. This is the Church at its best! This is when God’s love and care inevitably spills out into our neighborhoods, towns and cities through acts of love, justice, mercy, service and restoration. Each year, we do our best to provide a world-class leadership training event that challenges, inspires and serves the leadership core of every church.
I’ve attended the Summit twice before and have always found it fantastically helpful. One of the reasons I find it so important is because I believe that, as Bill Hybels has said, local churches need to be both well taught and well led. Too often, our churches are either one or the other (or, worse, neither!). We either care about theology to the exclusion of leadership (thinking good leadership will just “take care of itself” and happen automatically — which it doesn’t), or we focus on leadership without a sufficient theological foundation. Let’s not fall for that dichotomy and help our churches be both well taught and well led, and continually growing in both. The Summit is a key resource that can help this happen.
The Global Leadership Summit telecasts live from the campus of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, reaching more than 185 host sites across the United States. To attend one of the host sites you can find a location on the website.
To follow the guest blogging, go to the Willow Creek Association blog on Thursday and Friday (as well as this blog here, where I’ll also be posting).