About ELI - Emerging Leadership Initiative

Interested in being a partner church or training site?

Emerging Leadership Initiative (ELI) is:

A collaboration of progressive, like-minded churches
...who have partnered together to provide the foundation
...for a church planting movement aimed at reaching emerging generations.

ELI's vision is to see the Church in America revitalized and returned to its role as an authoritative, healing, and compelling influence on this nation and its growing postmodern culture.

ELI's mission is to be a highly effective service organization helping local churches raise up new leaders to start, sustain, and multiply churches aimed at reaching emerging generations for Christ.

Core Values

Emerging: We believe a new church should be birthed “out of the culture.”
Leadership: We believe gifted leaders are required in order to start new churches that reach new people in a new way.
Initiative: We believe our efforts must be aimed at starting and sustaining a multiplying movement of new churches

Core Functions

Envising is key to mobilizing a new generation of leaders.
Examining is key to finding leaders with the cores competencies needed to plant.
Equipping is key to preparing leaders not just for teaching but also for leading.
Empowering is key to funding new churches with adequate resources to reach lost people.
Expanding is key to multiplying new churches as part of a self-sustaining movement.

Check out ELI's Statement of Unified Beliefs

"The most important single argument for making new church development a high priority is that this is the most effective means for reaching un-churched people."

(Lyle Schaller, Circuit Rider)

"This is the emerging church, not a church for a post-Christian culture, where Christians huddle up behind the fortress walls and make forays outside into the messy culture, but a church molded out of a post-Christian people - an indigenous church, rising up out of the surrounding culture to form the Body of Christ!"

(John Burke, No Perfect People Allowed)