NEW Tim Keller Reading Group in 2011!

This morning, I announced on PLNTD a training opportunity for missional leaders and church planters by reading through 20 of the most significant articles written by Tim Keller on church planting, gospel centrality, missional living, and cultural engagement.  These 20 articles are compiled as a “reader” and will be covered over an 18 week period including 8 video conferencing opportunities.

Those of you on Twitter last Fall may remember my first experiment with this when I created the first Tim Keller reading group exclusively through Twitter.  The result was 74 people joining in from 24 states and 11 denominations, all desiring to learn together over the course of 4 months.  It was an experiment that proved incredibly profitable, and since then several have asked if I would ever consider doing something like that again.

So obviously the answer is YES.  But why on PLNTD?  In our training relational community, I have been listening to church planters talk about the challenges they face with receiving adequate training.  Very few of them can afford to attend church planting conferences.  Many of them talk about how the theological education they received was divorced from reality on the ground.  What almost everyone of them said is that they wanted training that was personal,  inexpensive, contextual, and accessible.

The Tim Keller Reading Group is the first of what I hope to be several training opportunities for those in our network to take advantage of creative ways of bringing significant training that would be both challenging and encouraging to church planters and missional leaders.  This training is free (inexpensive!), suited for specific contexts and any season in the church planting journey (contextual), and available to anyone who is a part of our relational communities through Cobblestone (accessible).

All the details are spelled out in the training community of the PLNTD Network, including schedule, syllabus, downloadable PDFs, and even custom cover page for your own Tim Keller reader.  And all of this begins January 3, 2011, so you have just enough time to get on board, create your reader, and dive into the discussions which will begin shortly after the holiday break.

My hope is that dozens of folks will take advantage of this opportunity to dial into the thinking of the godfather of the missional church for the welfare of their church and the edification of their labors.