Just as our young church in New York City was breaking through the 500 barrier, I received a call asking me to teach the Church Planting track at Rick Warren’s annual May conference.
I was humbled and excited… not sure if I could do it, but I said “yes.”
The conference was to be six hours over three days and I was to teach everything I had learned about launching large and starting a new church from scratch.
One week before the conference I received a call saying that the schedule had changed and instead of six hours, I would only have four hours to teach my sessions. With over 400 church planters registered, I simply didn’t know what to cut.
After much prayer, I decided not to cut anything. Instead, I would record the content I didn’t have time to teach live and share it with the participants. It’s been eight years now, but I recall that I recorded the following CD resources:
- Am I Called to Be a Church Planter?
- Funding Your Church Plant
- Launching Large
- Is My Husband’s Call My Call (with my wife Kelley)
The night before the conference (literally) I was up duplicating CDs on my computer and sticking labels by hand. It was crazy… but it worked! Thankfully, I was judged by the content on the CDs and not the design.
That conference came and went, but I started receiving calls and emails afterwards asking if those CDs were available for purchase. In fact, another large church planting conference that July wanted to offer the CDs for purchase at their conference.
From this humble start, we began making my resources available for purchase at various conferences, at my own speaking events and we put up a basic online store.
Why am I sharing this? Because it was this week eight years ago that all this happened and it was out of these “accidental” beginnings that Church Leader Insights was born.
Since then, I have had the incredible privilege of developing over 100 church growth resources. From that handful of church planters, Church Leader Insights has grown to impact 90,000+ church leaders a year. And eight years later, I’m still humbled and excited!
Today, I give away those early church planting resources on our Web site. We give away over $3,000.00 in free resources to church planters around the world each week. Not to mention thousands of dollars in free e-books, international downloads, free books and audio resources.
One ministry leader recently estimated that we give away over $45,000.00 in free resources each month to 3,000+ church leaders around the globe. God is good!
And yes, we still offer resources for purchase… In fact, it’s because we offer certain resources for purchase that we are able to run our ministry and provide the free resources we offer (like the podcast, e-books, webinars, etc.).
Our goal is to always give those who purchase resources from usfar more value than the dollars they invest. And it seems to be working – our ministry is currently expanding at the rate of 500 new church leaders a week.
As I’ve said several times already, I’m humbled and excited about the future. Thank you for being a part of the Church Leader Insights family. This ministry is truly a partnership between me and pastors like you.
God’s best to you,
Nelson
P.S. To celebrate our EIGHT YEAR ANNIVERSARY as a ministry, we have combed through our store and a number of powerful resources and made them available at up to 80% off between now and Tuesday, May 27… some of these resources have never been discounted before.
Check out THE EIGHT YEAR ANNIVERSARY SALE with resources at a full EIGHTY PERCENT OFF at:
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