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The Art of Giving Away Members

There’s a church in North Carolina that regularly sends members away to other churches—and survives.
The Art of Giving Away Members

How does a church prepare and send out leaders? That question has obsessed J.D. Greear, lead pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, for years. Why? Because his church is committed to planting churches, which naturally will need leaders.

When we asked Greear about his path to church leadership, he said, some key older men “held a crown up over my head and grew me into it,” he said. By that he meant he was entrusted with leadership responsibilities far before he felt able to shoulder them. For a church located only 30 minutes from a major Southern Baptist seminary, the challenge was to create more formal leadership development. We caught up with J.D. Greear at Exponential East in Tampa, Florida to talk about that process, and the ways a culture of sending has transformed his church.

How do you identify potential leaders within your church?

It’s a process where the initiative is on us, and the initiative is on them. We get that from Acts 13, where ...

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