Featured: Asbury Seminary’s Church Planting Initiative
Every so often, in an effort to keep you all informed about what is happening at Asbury, we feature one of our departments or initiatives to let you know how you can best interact with the seminary. This month, we would like to feature details from our Church Planting Initiative.
The Asbury Church Planting Institute seeks to help others join in God’s mission by offering affordable, non-residential training that enables leaders to study while remaining in the context of their current ministry. Consisting of 6 modules, the institute courses can be studied through one of our regional learning sites and can typically be completed in one or two years based upon on the availability of the courses being offered. After completing the 6 modules, each participant receives a Certificate in Church Multiplication with the potential for earning advanced standing credit into our Masters degree program. This is already a proven mode of training that will allow us to train hundreds of church planters in the next few years.
Our Director of Church Planting, Winfield Bevins, had this to say:
The Church Planting Initiative is born out of a heart to serve and equip church leaders in an increasingly multicultural, secular, and global context. Our vision is to equip church leaders for planting new churches and re-missioning existing congregations so they can become reproducing disciple-making movements. We offer a variety of training, assessments, and resources to equip church leaders to fulfill the Great Commission as they live out the Missio Dei in their local context of ministry. Since we started our church planting institutes we have trained almost 500 people in North America and around the world. We currently have 117 active students in the Masters and DMIN church planting-related degrees. At current rate, we will reach our goal of training 1,000 church planters by 2020 thanks to the help of the Latimer Foundation. Here are a few of the highlights from this past year.
To stay in touch with the latest updates from our Church Planting Initiative, visit www.asburychurchplanting.com.
After being part of one, I definitely have a heart for church plants. Keep me updated.