I’ve been to a lot of conferences. I love them. I love the whole experience of getting outside of my normal environment, focusing on ministry, dreaming, and hearing from speakers I don’t normally get to interact with.
I grow as a leader when I intentionally carve out time to be a part of conferences.
I’m a small groups pastor, and unfortunately, many conferences don’t focus on small groups exclusively. When I attend most conferences, I need to pull out the groups nuggets to apply to the ministry God’s called me to be a part of.
The Accelerate conference isn’t like most conferences.
It focuses exclusively on small groups. And even better, it gives you time to process. Over the course of 2 days, Accelerate walks you through 22 vital questions that every church needs to process. Questions like:
- How are we going to assimilate people?
- Who are we trying to produce? (what’s our end in mind?)
- What are our goals for our church for this next year?
- How are we going to budget for those goals?
- How will we take what we’re processing and lead our church to buy in to this dream?
At Accelerate, we don’t tell you what you have to do. We provide you a framework, share with you what we do at Saddleback, and give you the space to do the hard work of contextualizing the truth for your church in your city for your members.
We’ve had all kinds of churches that have attended and benefited from Accelerate, too. We’ve had leaders from
- megachurches of 20,000+
- churches of less than 50 people
- churches that do exclusively off-campus home-based small groups
- churches that do exclusively on-campus Sunday school
- churches that work a hybrid model
- churches that have never done small groups before
- churches that have done small groups for decades
- churches that have been to Accelerate before and are ready for a tune-up
Before I came to work at Saddleback, I attended Accelerate. It was one of the best decisions I made as a leader. I was able to process the most important aspects of group life, come up with a plan for how we were going to grow, set goals, budgets, and a strategy for how we were going to lead our church through these big God-sized dreams. I walked out with a fully complete 18-month planner for group life!
Do yourself, your team, and your church a favor. Accelerate your ministry!
