How Church Works 2010

February 3rd - 6th

About the How Church Works Conference Series

How Church Works conferences deal with ministry leadership at a higher level than most other conferences. How Church Works focuses on the principles that shape ministry strategy.

Many other conferences present helpful ministry "how-to's." Leaders attend in order to learn a method for doing the ministry: how to teach their people to evangelize, how to take people through discipleship training, how to train worship teams to produce uplifting worship services, or how to produce a kids ministry program that is engaging and educational, etc. The how-to's seminars meet a real ministry need.

However, as ministries grow larger and more complex, leaders often face challenging situations that demand a deeper understanding of the ministry. How Church Works conferences are designed help these leaders grasp the principles behind the "how-to's."

An individual HCW conference will focus on an arena of ministry. The conference will lay out the principles and concerns that should shape ministry strategy and guide decision making in that arena.

The goal for each conference is to provide insights that will enable leaders to:

  • Build ministries that sustain effectiveness in a given arena (such as evangelism, discipleship, etc.)
  • Intelligently solve problems in that arena before they spill over to create problems in other areas of church life.

For example, all ministries have to operate in such a way that the various parts of the ministry (such as, outreach, administration, and training) work together in harmony A how-to seminar on administration might show a leader how to make the different parts of the organization function systemically.

However, the organizational system is only one of several "layers" of systems. So, the How Church Works conference, Systems Thinking: Decisions Without Disasters, identified the different layers of systems, looked at how they interact to create problems in the organization, and gave guidelines for wisely making decisions in a manner that does not stir up problems in the different layers.


Past Conference Outlines