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Why Lead a GCC Cohort?
Great Commission Collective exists to plant churches and strengthen leaders. Strengthening leaders entails caring for, supporting, and training pastors and elders to shepherd and multiply their local churches.
Cohorts are designed to provide group-based coaching to a group of pastors or leaders in a similar stage or specialty of ministry.
The longer I do cohorts, the more convinced I am about their effectiveness as a training and relational connection. I love them! They provide a rich context for specialized training that accents content, relationship, and application, all in the context of small groups.
Over the years of doing cohorts, I’ve discovered they are formative, not only for participants, but also for the leaders.
Cohort leaders have to have the experience, expertise, and gifting to guide other leaders into a meaningful training experience. The good news is that many leaders actually have these qualities but have never considered how to collate them into a cohort. Maybe you have a burden which has caused you to think deep and hard in a particular area. Perhaps you have a teaching or body of material which would serve GCC leaders in a particular leadership area. Over the years, I have discovered that the pool of cohort leaders can be enlarged just by inviting guys to think over their stories, their burdens and the body of all they have learned or taught.
One of the reasons I’m eager to see a growing number of GCC cohorts is because of how the cohort leaders benefit from the experience.
Here are just a few benefits that leading a cohort provides. Leading a cohort:
-Presses you to develop content for pastors and leaders. This process can help you transition from a generalist to a specialist in certain areas.
-Helps you to create content for potential writing. While sermons can do this too, cohort preparation presses your mind deeper toward application in ways that serve future readers.
-Allows cultivation of material you can import to your own church leaders, or it can provide a way for you to adapt your church material for other senior pastors.
-Create a context for younger pastors and leaders who long for connection and help. These connections are the kinds that shape you and can be used to build leaders within your church and the Collective as a whole.
-Provides a small revenue stream where you can be compensated for your labor. While you may not be accustomed to charging a fee for your training, the cohorts are set up to acknowledge, “The laborer deserves his wages.” 1 Timothy 5:17
Leading a cohort also serves the Collective! Here are some specific ways in which your leadership of a GCC cohort would serve us. GCC is served as you:
-Provide participants with specialized training and expertise.
-Connect leaders and pastors across the Collective, which strengthens the bond of unity we share.
-Applies our value of collaboration.
-Seize the opportunity for qualified leaders to put their knowledge and experience into the field.
-Decentralize training away from a centralized training location. It cross-pollinates us with the wisdom of emerging leaders within GCC and outside of it.
-Provide an opportunity for GCC to financially invest in training. For GCC participants, there is a scholarship system in place where GCC could share the cost of up to 50% of the participant fee.
We’ve got more information about the “how to” part of leading a cohort, and we hope you’ll consider the opportunity to learn more! If you want to take the next step, contact Jon Mollohan, our GCC Cohort Coordinator: jon@gccollective.org