You can sign up all of your teachers by emailing me their email addresses: josh@joshhunt.com

References from recent conferences:

"This may have been the best seminar I have attended. I really have been motivated to give this a very close look and then do this. "

"I had been thinking this was something our class needed to do. I appreciate the affirmation. You're right. We need to act in love, not just teach."

"Josh is very real to life and practical."

Thank you for a great session. You have been thought provoking and scriptures you shared are very convicting. I know I need to look inside me and be confident in God's use of me. You were fun and made learning fun.

"Thank you for time well spent. Your ability to make truth clear and drive to the heart the responsibility of showing nothing but truth is most valuable. It's helpful to understand what is behind the 2020 program. It's exciting and your effort is appreciated. And I will add you to my prayer list.

"The timing and the material was perfect as we prepare to reach out to our community and at the same time grow our church. Thanks Josh."

Can you imagine what a difference it would make if you knew what the road ahead looked like? You’d grow a lot faster, and progress a lot farther towards becoming the mature, seasoned Christian you’ve always wanted to be.

That’s why the 7 Stages of Spiritual Growth is such a groundbreaking new video series. In it, Dr. Bruce Wilkinson has studied the stages of a Christian’s spiritual journey as they are presented in God’s Word – and discovered that they come in seven precise and predictable stages that are the same for everyone.

It’s so reassuring to discover just exactly where you stand in your walk with God . . . and so encouraging to find out how you can get "un-stuck" and move on to the next level!

Complete with fascinating dramas, and entertaining graphics, Dr. Wilkinson walks you through the seven stages in two sessions per stage, with each session lasting about 29 minutes.

Order Here.

Do you want to be a woman extravagantly blessed by God? If you're ready to leave the mundane behind and reach for a life in which miracles happen on a regular basis, you're ready for The Prayer of Jabez for Women. Starting with the powerful message of the best selling The Prayer of Jabez, this new book uniquely addresses the needs of women in today's world.

Order Here.

by Tom Clegg and Warren Bird
Jesus came to seek and save the lost…and he wants you and your church to join him! Increasingly the church is sharing Christ with people in a postmodern culture who respond, "no thanks!" The evangelism "playing field" and "rules" have changed dramatically. The key to reaching this culture lies in reviving the passionate call of Christ to seek and save the lost. Lost in America is full of powerful yet realistic ways you and your church can effectively reach out in genuine love to those without Christ in their lives. 176 pages

Order Here

I have seen the future! (Wanna help create it?)

I have seen the future.

I attended church today at a
church that. . .

• Had over 2000 in attendance
• Is less than five years old
• Will start its fifth weekend service next weekend
• Does not have a preaching pastor, and has no plans to get one
• Uses Bill Hybels and John Ortberg (Willowcreek) videos for their teaching
• Has a live band
• Is an independent, autonomous church with local church pastors, small groups, a building and so forth.

The church is Heartland Community Church located in Rockford, IL. I think it represents an emerging paradigm of the church. I am predicting this kind of church will change our world as much as McDonalds changed our diets. I am not saying that every church will be video preaching 10 years from now–we don’t all eat McDonald hamburgers every meal. I am saying that over the next 10 years or so this will become a trend that will substantially change the life of church as we know it.

There are three main reasons I think this kind of church will take off:

1. It is of high quality.
2. It is reproducible
3. It is a proven model. Based on the God-given law of sowing and reaping, it should work anywhere.

It is all made possible through the technology of the video projector. With the presence of the video projector, you tend to look at the screen anyway. I attended Willowcreek last night and found myself looking at the big screen a good part of the time, even though Bill Hybels was standing right in front of me. Watching video on a twenty foot screen is a completely different experience than watching video on a 27 inch TV.

(By the way, weekly Willowcreek videos are not yet available. Heartland is able to get them out of a personal relationship between Bill Hybels and Heartland's Directional Pastor.)

This model is going to change the face of church planting. Heartland is essentially a church planting model. It may be the fastest church plant ever. I am sure it has grown much faster than Willowcreek itself. Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina is the only church plant I know of that would approach this speed of rapid take off. (Feel free to email me about this if you have better information.)

This model is going to solve the problem of overcrowding in many fast growing churches. Willowcreek is simultaneously experimenting with another model of satellite churches. These churches are not independent, autonomous churches, although they do have local church pastors who do assimilation and small groups. Second Baptist, Houston follows a similar model. Instead of building bigger and bigger barns, a better model may be to create satellites.

It is going to solve a huge problem for church goers looking for a church. Suppose you move to a different city. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get plugged in right away to a church you knew you would like, instead of spending six months or a year trying various churches? We go to McDonalds, not because we love the hamburgers, but because we know we won’t hate them. In the same way, knowing what to expect in a predictable church experience will be desirable to many. People who move from Atlanta to Dallas will enjoy immediately plugging into a church that looks and feels like the church they came from in Atlanta.

This may be a model for some existing churches. Bill Hybels may be your next preacher. Some existing churches, upon the departure of their pastor, may choose to watch video on a big screen. This may be better than any option available for an interim. It may be a good enough model to stay with over the long haul.

Some people will deplore this, I am sure. I am sure some of you who read this will think this trend is awful. Although I like the idea, I am not trying to persuade you that it is wonderful. I am simply saying it is coming. What McDonalds did to Hamburgers and Best Buy did for electronics and Barnes and Noble did for books, churches like Heartland are going to do for church life.

The reason I am so sure of this is the same reason why McDonalds and Best Buy and Barnes and Noble work. They work because of the God given law of sowing and reaping. If you do certain things you are going to get predictable results. If McDonalds is successful in California, it proved to be successful in Chicago and Thailand. There are subtle adaptations. We sometimes have green chili hamburgers at our McDonalds in New Mexico and they had an outback burger at the McDonalds in Australia. Still, there is remarkable similarity between the McDonalds in Sydney and the McDonalds in Opelika, Alabama.

The other issue is an issue of quality. George Barna’s research indicates that two thirds of the people who attend church say they don’t sense the presence of God when they go. Let’s face it, many churches are sloppy in the way they do their work and the quality of the presentation is just not that great. I have listened to hundreds of Bill Hybels’ sermons. I have never heard one I thought was crummy. Not only is he very gifted, I suspect he has access to paid research assistants, probably several of them. Many mega-churches, at least, employ such help.

Willowcreek may or may not be the church that actually rolls this out. They have an inherent problem in that they are also trying to build the Willowcreek Association. I am wondering how Association churches will feel if Bill Hybels starts a church down the street. It may prove to be impossible to build the Willowcreek Association while promoting this model.

Usually, when a new technology or paradigm comes along, it is not the existing entities that jump in. The key players on the Internet are not the mainline brick and mortar business, they are businesses like Ebay and Amazon. Similarly, it may not be a mega-church at all that rolls this out, but rather someone outside spotlight at this time.

Somebody is going to reach a slew of people by figuring this model out. Someone is going to figure out how to launch thousands of churches with a completely reproducible model of video teaching on a big screen. You can decide whether launching these churches and reaching these people is a good thing or bad thing. I am telling you, it is coming.

%unsubscribe%