In a few days we will be heading to Orlando for the mother of all church planting conferences, the Exponential Conference.

I will be leading a pre-conference session on Monday and here is the lineup I have planned:

Monday

Stephen Gray, Planting Fast Growing Churches, from his book by the same name

Ron Sylvia, Creating Coaching Networks, NEXT Initiative

Tom Clegg, CoachNet on best practices in church planting coaching

Tuesday

Ed Stetzer, Church Planting Research

Mark Reynolds, Church Planting Internships, Redeemer Church's Fellows Program

The main sessions look as follows:

Session #1 with Ed Stetzer: The Characteristics of Reproducing Churches

Session #2 with Andy Stanley: Apostolic Vision

Session #3 with Alan Hirsch: Missional Movement

Session #4a with Steve Andrews: Radical Disciple Making

Session #4b with Dave Ferguson: Genuine Community

Session #5 with Tim Keller: The Gospel

Session #5b with Rick Warren: The Challenge

You can see all the tracks here. I will be leading some sessions in the missional track and the pre-launch track.

During the Best Practices Forum I will announce the formation of two learning communities for church planting leaders. These communities will meet:

-two times a year in Nashville, hosted by a local church planting ministry,

-once in Orlando at the conference, and

-once in another location (TBD)

The first group will be for denominational leaders, specifically the leader of church planting for a given denomination Those leaders will gather three times per year (in addition to the meeting next week) to talk about best practices, plan partnership research, and generally learn from each other.

The other group will be focus on church planting network leaders who want to learn from each other on the journey.

The meetings will be coordinated by Passion for Planting through our NewChurches.Com partnership. The groups will require an application and will accept only a limited number of participants to ensure that the learning community has maximum peer interaction.

We hope to see you in Orlando.