Pruning happens before Growth.  Jesus does His best growing just after pruning.  Pruning is the process by which the Gardener has to remove, cut off, or break off pieces of a plant/tree that are dying or chocking out the rest of the healthy plant.  Pruning is painful, pruning often feels like you are moving backwards, but in reality pruning is moving forward because pruning is about health.

And as Rick Warren says, “HEALTHY CHURCHES GROW.”  Pruning happens in every believer’s life as a part of our spiritual growth; God disciplines and corrects His children because He loves them.  God removes the dead stuff in order to set us up for greater health& growth!

God also does this in His churches.  God removes spiritually dead people (vision vandals), dead programs (the activities you have to artificially manufacture energy just to do), and dead thought processes (not believing in a God who does the impossible when we do the possible) in order for a church to become healthy and grow!

Momentum is a Leader’s Best Friend.
My friend and leadership mentor, Josh Gagnon says, “CHURCHES THAT GROW IN THE SUMMER, EXPLODE IN THE FALL.”  When a church has momentum life change multiplies and soon we begin to see exponential growth.  Everything just looks better when the BIG MO has your back.  But getting to the point where you have momentum is extremely painful and challenging; there are a lot of personal sacrifices, difficult decisions, church pruning, and vision refining experiences.

When one person invites Jesus Christ into their life, then invites a friend to the weekend worship experience the following week, and that person gives their life to Christ, and their lives begin to change from the inside out as they passionately follow Jesus Christ in their first few steps, that kind of change builds momentum in a church, people get passionate about seeing their family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors come to know Jesus as their Forgiver and Leader!

As a leader, you don’t feel like you are pulling as many teeth to build excitement, the energy just keeps compounding, lives just keep colliding with the gospel, and the city just keeps getting transformed by the Almighty power of God’s Love!

Our mission is to see Jesus made famous all over New England ONE LIFE AT A TIME, and that will happen as the momentum from one church begins to impact and infect another church, and eventually an entire region of churches!! Momentum in one church can actually generate momentum in all of God’s churches in that area if they are intentional about networking, sharing, and completing one another instead of competing with one another.