TRANSFORM
Transform is a new Learning Community designed for HTB Network church leaders and their senior teams, exploring how to lead healthy, effective and growing churches to help us to “play our part in the evangelisation of the nation, the revitalisation of the Church and the transformation of society”.
What is Transform?
Transform Learning Community is an event for HTB Network Churches to gather together to reimagine where you want to go as a Church and be given the tools and models that will help you to achieve this.
It is a 2-year commitment and includes two overnight gatherings per year, in-person at HTB – four gatherings in total across the two years. To help frame our learnings, there will be times of worship, ministry of the Spirit and a celebratory dinner!
Transform Dates:
– 23rd & 24th March 2023
– 19th & 20th October 2023
– 14th & 15th March 2024
– 17th & 18th October 2024
Each Transform gathering will run from 9:00 on Thursday to 15:00 on Friday.
Whether you are a resource, town, rural or estate church – Transform has been designed specifically for you. The learning community is based on principles, practical application and peer to peer cohort learning. This interactive learning approach requires a high level of buy-in and accountability where everyone is both a teacher and a learner. The Learning Community gathers every six months across the two year period. Between gatherings we provide a framework for accountability and ongoing support, which leads to significant results. Churches are grouped by size for peer level learning.
Each Senior Leader is invited to bring a minimum of 3 people from your leadership team, these must include; staff members, leaders and the key decision-makers in your Church. For smaller Churches this might include members of the PCC or key volunteers. It is the senior leaders responsibility to identify and invite these leaders and the senior leader must attend all four gatherings.
Why Transform?
After gathering feedback from the Network Senior Leaders Retreats, we noticed a gap in our network support programme of events, specifically in regard to Churches that have already launched having scaffolding around them, enabling them to flourish at every stage of transition.
We have asked, how can we better equip churches to be healthy and continue in their mission tackling some of the common challenges in early launch years, the plateau phases and up to succession? How can we support one another better to combat isolation and burn out? How can we turbo boost our network to multiply and raise up dynamic leaders of the future?
After seeing the impact and success of cohort learning on the Accelerator Programme, we began to assess if a similar type of model could be suitable for our whole Network. Our search led us to Peterborough’s KingsGate Learning Community (which is run in collaboration with ARC and Gateway Church) who have generously offered to partner with us to deliver our own Learning Community called ‘Transform’.
Transform will replace Assemble and the Jan/Feb Senior Leaders Retreats. We hope you will join us on this new adventure.
What is the theme?
We have been designing the curriculum for Transform and are excited to announce that our theme for this 2-year cycle is Building Better! This will include; Missional Expansion, Spiritual Health and Wellbeing, Community Vitality and Organisational Strengthening.
We will begin by focussing on Missional Expansion, which is particularly relevant in these challenging times. We will spend our time together re-imagining what the next decade might look like if we were truly to become missional churches equipped to re-evangelise our nations, revitalise our churches, and transform society.
With the help of some fantastic practitioners we will be exploring models, ideas and best practice for the following:
- How can we effectively mobilise volunteers?
- How can we equip and re-fire our churches for evangelism?
- How can we develop our social action ministry to advance the Kingdom?
- How can we effectively engage in the workplace, the arts and media?
- How can we be effective in mission in the digital space, particularly reaching the next generation?
- How can we embrace diversity in mission (socio-economic, cultural etc)?
Alongside this, we will allow space in each gathering to focus on our own spiritual health and wellbeing as leaders, as this is so critical and relevant to all that we are and do.
Who is speaking at Transform?
Josh Howard
Josh has been living in India since 2008 and has a passion to see the Kingdom of God spread throughout the world. He desires to raise up disciples who make disciples, leaders who create leaders, and churches that plant churches. In order to see this, happen, Josh is overseeing the church planting school at Central India Christian Mission (CICM), which prepares church planters to go to unreached areas in India and the surrounding countries. In 2015, he launched a branch of the ministry called “Ignite”, which has seen over 16,000 churches started in about 8 years through movements of multiplication. Josh also serves as the Central Asia Regional Director for “New Thing”. He has a Master of Arts in Missional Church Movements from Wheaton College in the USA and is the co-author of the book Christian Extremism: A Life Worth Dying For and of the book Igniting Movements: Multiplying Churches in Dark Places. Besides God’s grace through Jesus, He is most thankful for his wife Lashi, his two sons, Josiah and Jeremiah, and his daughter Zara.
Julian Lowe
Pastor Julian Lowe is a passionate and humorous teacher of God’s Word who began following Jesus after a career in the music industry. After being introduced to Oasis by a friend — it is there he met his wife Christina, a Florida native, who moved to LA in 2007 to pursue a 10+ year career in the film industry. They were married in 2012 and after years of serving, became Lead Pastors of Oasis Church in October 2019. Through their passion to reach the city of Los Angeles, their goal is to have the church be a true family. They are always down for a dance battle or karaoke night with friends – and they are also convicted to continually learn to live the lifestyle of Jesus. Julian and Christina live in Los Angeles with their two children – Bailey and Dallas
Lucy Doggett Kamero
Lucy Doggett Kamero is the Director of Community, Africa/Europe/MENA/Asia-Pacific. She is from the UK but has been living in Africa since 2006 and has over ten years’ experience working with SMEs and micro enterprises across Africa, from working with the UNHCR to support refugees start enterprises in South Africa to running programs to help SMEs in East Africa scale and access investment. She is passionate about walking with people on their journey of relationship with Christ and is passionate about entrepreneurship. So, working with FDE combines two of her favourite things, for God’s glory!
She has an MBA from USIU, Nairobi and a Masters in African Politics from SOAS, London. She has been living in Kenya for four years with her wonderful husband Kamero. Her great loves are Christ, her community and conservation and on weekends can be found in a forest, up a mountain or in the ocean.
Justin Forman
Justin has inspired business leaders see their Work as a part of their Calling for the past 15 years. As Executive Vice President he was a part of dreamers and doers that built RightNow Media, which serves 20,000 churches and 3 million people through this “Netflix of Video Studies”. During that time, he was a part of creating the Work as Worship Retreat and RightNow Media @ Work’s tools to help business leaders equip their people to be better at home and at work. Along the way their teams captured dozens of short films from business leaders at companies like Hobby Lobby, Popeyes Chicken, Interstate Batteries, SeaWorld, Nature Sweet, David Weekley Homes and business leaders like Patrick Lencioni, Dave Ramsey and many others. Today he and his wife own several small businesses in Dallas and serves as Executive Director of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. Justin, his wife Sharee, and their three kids (Tristan, Audrey and Kate) live just outside of Dallas, TX. Some things in life are predestined, and for him it was to be a Michigan State Spartan Fan. Office legend has it that his family invented “Sparty”, the iconic Michigan State Mascot. On any given weekend you’ll find him coaching his daughters “Pixie Chicks” girls soccer teams and involved at Watermark Community Church.
Michael Fletcher
Michael served Manna Church as Senior Pastor from 1985 to 2021, guiding the church’s growth from 350 attendees to 8,000 in 2021. He now serves as the Multiply Pastor. Coupling sound biblical teaching with practical application and cutting-edge outreach, Michael and the staff have worked to create a culture that equips God’s people to not only change their world but to plant churches with the same vision. To date, Michael and the Manna family have helped plant churches worldwide and are presently engaged in planting a version of Manna Church near every U.S. military base. He and his wife, Laura, have eight children and 27 grandchildren – and counting!
Steve Mawston
Steve started in youth ministry with the YMCA and then spent 15 years in various pastoral roles in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia. Steve is currently part of the leadership team at Soul Church in Norwich with lifelong friends Jon and Chantel Norman. He also spends time encouraging and coaching Pastors, their leadership teams and young leaders. He married up, to the beautiful Rachel and they have two daughters, Melody & Mercy. Steve loves all his girls as well as good coffee, golf, body-boarding and Manchester United. He’s also passionate about theology and enjoys good books on preaching or biographies. He completed his Masters in Theology in 2019.
Noel Heikkinen
Noel is the teaching pastor at Riverview, a multi-site church-planting church in the Lansing, Michigan area that is actively engaging younger generations in both in-person and digital spaces. In addition to his work at Riverview, Noel serves as the U.S. Midwest Regional Executive Director for Acts 29. He is an author, podcaster, speaker, and leadership coach. He is married to Grace, and they have four children and a son-in-law.
Neil & Janet Young
Neil Young (not to be confused with the Canadian musician) serves as the Senior Pastor of Causeway Coast Vineyard (CCV) church alongside his wife Janet. God’s call for CCV is to be an outward focused church seeking to partner with God’s restoration of creation. To be an everyone, everywhere, empowered people who show up everyday seeking the transformation of their community for today and the generations to come
Transform programme
How much does Transform cost?
Transform costs £187.50 to attend per gathering, per person. With your team of 4 people; the Senior Leader and three others, this costs £750.00 total per gathering. You are welcome to bring additional team members if you would like, the cost of additional places is £187.50 per person, per gathering.
Food; Lunch and dinner on Thursday and breakfast and lunch on Friday is included in the above prices.
Other costs you will need to consider are travel and accommodation. We are currently working with local hoteliers to secure discounted rates, we will be able to share further details on that shortly.
How do I register and pay?
Please follow the red button at the end of this page to register for Transform. On the link you will be able to confirm your place and select your payment option. There are two payment options available, meaning you don’t have to pay the full cost up-front.
After you have registered you will be sent a short questionnaire to complete, this will help us to plan Transform so it best serves you and your church.
What if I can’t afford to attend Transform?
We certainly don’t want financial restriction to stop anyone from attending Transform, we believe it is critical for our Network in this season to be on this journey together. As such, bursaries are available upon request – please contact CRT’s head of events Phill Gray for more information: phill.gray@crtrust.org
NEXT STEPS
We are so excited about God will do through Transform and through you in this next season of leadership. To register for your place at Transform, please click below.