The Times: Minnery Fellowship Special Edition
Because The Times will not be going out next week due to the normal deadline falling on Christmas Eve, we have instead prepared this Special Edition about the Minnery Fellowship for this month. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Church Ambassador Network's Executive Director Chris Lightfoot at the 2024 Essential Summit
Understanding the Times and Knowing How to Respond
by Chris Lightfoot
The week that the abortion amendment passed in 2023 to solidify full-term abortion as a constitutional right in Ohio, I sat down with Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer to talk about where we go from here.
Before we had even completed the exit poll—which revealed through our Vital Signs report that 34 percent of weekly church attendees from biblically solid denominations voted for this heartbreaking amendment—we knew that there was no political strategy or message that would have changed the outcome of the election. The gap in public opinion was just too great.
What we needed moving forward was a strategy to serve and resource our pastors and local churches to rebuild a biblical worldview in their pews and communities. Chuck Colson used to say that politics is downstream from culture, and we knew that we needed to go all the way upstream to reform a culture that has walked away from truth.
So, we outlined two initiatives:
A pastor’s conference that would less than a year later become our inaugural Essential Summit.
A biblical cultural engagement fellowship that would serve as an ongoing professional development resource specifically for church leaders.
By God’s grace and provision, we had over 30 sponsors and more than 600 attendees at the 2024 Essential Summit on October 3. The feedback has been tremendously encouraging.
Applications to join our second initiative—the Tom Minnery Fellowship for Cultural Engagement—have been rolling in since it was announced from the main stage at the Essential Summit.
The Minnery Fellowship is launching in January with three regional cohorts across the state, each with 12 to 18 pastors. God has provided an amazing group of facilitators who will lead these cohorts for the spring and fall sessions in 2025. In the spring, our fellows will be focused on developing a biblical framework using Dr. Christopher Watkin’s book, Biblical Critical Theory.
By the end of the session, these pastors will have everything they need to share the framework with their people as a tool that equips them for the work of the ministry in our current cultural context.
Thanks to the generosity of CCV donors, we are offering full-ride scholarships to fellows for the 2025 program year. The Minnery Fellowship is not free, but there is no financial cost to you because the CCV team and board—and especially our supporters—believe in and desire to bless the shepherds of our local churches in Ohio.
The Minnery Fellowship application window for the January session is still open!
