Helping your church overcome practical problems with spiritual solutions.
Ministry is full of complex leadership decisions. What works for one church may not work for the next. Our consulting team doesn’t just give you cookie-cutter answers and leave you to figure it out. We will help you tackle the real world problems of ministry with spiritual solutions. We walk with you through the process, giving you the principles to lead your people through challenges with Biblical wisdom and practices.
Before the days of endless books, statistics, and analytics, the leaders of the Church made critical leadership decisions that allowed the church to flourish and multiply. Knowing the laws of leadership and culture can be helpful, but they will only take your so far. What you need is Spirit-led, Scripture-fed solutions that help to accomplish God’s will for your church. Our consulting team can help you walk through many of the issues that classroom learning never covered, including:
Dale Sutherland has been a pastor for over twenty five years. He was bi-vocational for most of his ministry, working also as a police officer in Washington DC. Throughout his pastoral ministry, he he served as Youth Pastor, Missions Pastor, and Lead Pastor at McLean Bible Church. He led the succession effort from the founding Pastor, Lon Solomon, to the new pastor, David Platt. Dale also has started a church planting network, five different non-profit ministries, and is currently the President of International Care Ministries USA. While he is in the US, Dales serves as interim Lead Pastor at Veritas City Church in Washington DC. Dale and his wife Patti have three daughters and ten grandchildren.
Len Crowley has a broad ministry background, serving as pastor of four churches, Bible teacher, board member, and ministry director. Len is also Co-Founder of Whole in One (designing multi-ethnic collaborations), has led PLI Global (worldwide, character-based leadership training), helped direct COUNSEL & CAPITAL (a non-profit investment bank), and trained trainers as a National Instructor with Walk Thru the Bible.
Our team is committed to helping you not only work through your situation, but to grow and flourish in it. Here are just a few of the areas we can help you
There are many voices in modern Christianity telling us how we should come up with a vision for the church. Many of them offer wisdom that is usable, but rarely are they based in prayer and Scripture. The biblical mandate for His church is written in the Bible for all Pastors to see. Strategic Renewal wants to help church leaders learn God’s vision from the Scriptures and make a plan for how to best contextualize that biblical directive into their congregations and communities.
One key resource in moving forward in executing God’s mission for your church is the one thing we hate to discuss – money. Learn how to biblically raise funding for the mission of the church in your city. This coaching will guide a pastor through the key bible passages that speak to giving. You will learn how a Pastor can lead a godly campaign for ministry expansion and how to truly disciple your congregation throughout the campaign process.
One of the hardest, most stressful challenges for Pastors is conflict management. It can stop a ministry in its tracks, or worse, divide it entirely. Elders, parents, families, community leaders, congregants sometimes share their “concerns” (read “gossip”) with the way the Pastor is running the church. How do we biblically, practically handle the conflict and the fall out that goes with this “sharing?” Learn practical, godly ways to think through and relieve the stress of conflicts the enemy creates to divide our churches.
God requires His people to “preserve the unity” (Eph. 4:1) He is establishing in the church. The Pastor may often feel like the congregation and the leadership are ignoring this critical command. We will study how to bring a church together in a multicultural world in order to see the Lord’s desire fulfilled in His people (John 17). Watch God do great things in ways you can’t do yourself.
Every church is challenged when one leader leaves and God calls a new leader to the church. Churches can feel the effect of this for years. We can help your church navigate this time of great change with biblical examples, faithful prayer, and the development of a step by step plan, tailored to your church’s situation. There are great books available and lots of examples of good and bad succession at churches. The problem is the books and the stories don’t match up to your exact situation. Let us help you walk through your transition and see the Lord continue His work in your church.
God has called the church to reach the community and the world. Every pastor is excited to be part of God’s local and global mission. The problem is that most of our growth attempts aren’t making the impact they could. Pastors don’t have enough time to do all that is asked of them and often it is this the church that suffers. We can chart a practical, biblical, prayer saturated plan for reaching the local community around your church and the find the best available ways to make impact in the world around us.
The Apostle Paul considered leadership and its principled practice so vital that he writes an entire book (1 Timothy) so people will know how to conduct oneself in the household of God (3:15). Yet, in most churches, biblical organizing principles receive scant notice. “Governance” is often regarded as a “necessary evil” rather than a life-giving blessing. Ordering the church in alignment with biblical means, methods, and principles (functions, not forms) will improve quality, selection, community and confident decision-making practices of the board, minimize political distractions, increase congregational blessing, and administer effectively the vital tasks that enrich church life.
So many consultants that we’ve worked with bring in leadership principles from the marketplace that just don’t work in ministry. But Dale Sutherland has helped us fulfill the vision for our church in a way that is based in Scripture and dependent on the Holy Spirit. We highly commend him to you.
MIKE KELSEY
Lead Pastor, Preaching & Culture
McLean Bible Church | Montgomery County
