African American Church Evangelism Institute
Cohort Experience
Our two-year cohort process is designed around this equation.
Missional Imagination
Missional Leaders
Missional Congregation
Conversion Community
Cohorts will focus on challenges facing African American congregations such as effectively reaching the next generation, fruitfully navigating shifting contexts and demographic changes occurring around their churches.
Also key is developing team ministry approaches and leadership pipelines in congregations
to launch new ministries, and creating new evangelism models that work effectively in a new era.
Cohort Year One
Developing Missional Imagination &
Missional Leaders
- Modeling Personal Witness Others Can Imitate
- Partnering with a Missional Influence Leader
- Investing in a Key Leadership Team
- Key Leaders Investing in Their Teams
Cohort Year Two
Cultivating a Missional Congregation
- Belonging to the Broader Community
- Blessing the World to Reach the World
- Bringing the Community to Church
- Building a Community of the Beloved through Hospitality
Pastors learn how to revitalize their congregations by helping them to become “conversion communities”, where churched and de-churched people come to faith, grow in their faith, and their congregations become more welcoming places for emerging and young adults.
COHORT COMMITMENTS:
- Cohort participants must be the Lead or Senior Pastor.
- The cohort is a 2-year commitment— knowing it usually takes 3-5 years to fully implement evangelism impact and culture change.
- Cohorts meet monthly for 9 months for 2 hours via Zoom.
- All dates are set at the time of the cohort launch. Only 2 absences are permitted for graduation.
- To operate the program it costs $3600/church/year. However, with grant support, we can offer the program for $1800/year.
The new cohorts will begin yearly and aim to integrate an outreach leader, and a leadership development person from each church, with the ongoing goal that one of these leaders will be under 40 years of age.
