… John

Dr. John S. Wenrich is the Director of Congregational Vitality for the Evangelical Covenant Church. His role is to help established churches confront their current reality with hope, honesty and faith.

His fervent prayer is that every established church in the ECC would become a healthy missional church. By “healthy” we mean pursuing Christ. By “missional” we mean pursuing Christ’s priorities in the world.

John grew up in the Philadelphia area. He graduated from Villanova University with a B.A. in Communications, has a Masters of Divinity from Denver Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry from Fuller Seminary. He is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Before moving to Chicago, John served in pastoral ministry for 21 years, serving at South Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Littleton, CO as a staff pastor; Applewood Community Church in Golden, CO as a church planter; and First Covenant Church in Portland, OR as a revitalization pastor.

He also worked in Saudi Arabia for two years as a news and sportscaster and served as a media delegate to the 1984 Olympics for the Saudi Olympic Team. While in Saudi Arabia, John planted an underground multiethnic church.

John and Julie have been married for 22 years and live in the far northwestern part of Chicagoland. They have three sons: Jonathan, Joel and Jordan, a golden retriever named Jake and a cat named Nelson.

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… Congregational Vitality for the ECC

It started by listening.

When John began his work as Director of Congregational Vitality, the first thing he did was to bring together groups of pastors in various locations around the ECC, and listen to their frustrations, hopes and dreams for vitality within our denomination. These discussions helped establish a knowledge base, create a network of people interested in revitalization, and set the ground work for the tasks ahead. He also met with leaders from other denominations to see how God was already at work.

Next, a common language needed to be created.

Veritas has been called a seminar, a workshop, and an event. While all three are correct, at the end of the day, Veritas is a language. To revitalize our churches, we all need to speak the same language. It is the “power of one.” Veritas is a beginning for churches, a way for them to begin looking at and assessing their current situation, and to start asking the tough questions necessary to implement revitalization. There is no vitality without reality.

For pastors, a coaching resource was made available.

There’s a lot more to being a local pastor than preaching and counseling. Many aspects of organizational leadership are not commonly taught in seminary. Organizational leadership training compliments the spiritual leadership training that pastors received in Seminary. The ECC has partnered with an organization called Ministry Advantage to make coaching available in these vital areas, at a discounted monthly cost to the local church. The coaching program normally lasts 12-18 months. The foundation is a one hour a week phone call between coach and pastor. Many of our pastors who receive coaching may go on to become coaches of other ECC pastors.

Now it’s time to start the hard work!

EPIC: Encouraging People, Inspiring Change (originally titled “Plant Before the Plow - How to Lead Healthy Missional Change”) is the next step in for congregations in this journey. This new seminar uses the biblical metaphor of the harvest, building around the Parable of the Sower/Seeds, and gives participants tools called ‘constructs’ that they can use in their congregations to lead effective change.

PULSE: An online survey designed to take the figurative pulse of a congregation, is in the last stages of beta-testing, and will soon be ready to offer to all Covenant churches.

More tools are still being developed, and will be made available to our churches in the future.

The journey of revitalization seems long, and is often difficult or frustrating. But as we’ve been asserting all along, God is pulling for the local church and for the national church to overcome! God is in the resurrection business!