Stephanie (Steph) O’Brien is an author, podcast host, seminary teacher, activist, and the Lead Pastor at Mill City Church. Her parents were in ministry and worked for renowned evangelist Billy Graham. When it came time to think about her own life, Steph felt called to church planting. “The opportunity in starting a new church is to be able to bring together the things you’d like to see happen,” she explains. It’s been 12 years since Steph came alongside a few others to plant Mill City Church – which is a nickname for the US city of ‘Minneapolis’, where it’s located.

We recently spoke with Steph in our new podcast, Forming Church. She talked about how this season has proved how critical leadership agility is, saying: “Traditional leadership – while it’s really important to know your stuff, have a lot of expertise and be able to tell people, ‘this is how we’ve always done it, and this is how we’re going to get through it’ – leadership agility fills this other gap which is, ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen, this has never happened before’. We need to quickly learn new things and apply that to our new experiences…Seminary classes are awesome, but they’re lacking when it comes to leading in times like this!”

Steph has a timely message for the church today, sharing some of the key qualities and resources that church leaders will need as we navigate the current disruption. You can listen to her full interview here.

Featuring Jamie Freeman, Pip Miner & Ken Kamau from our Gen1K Mission team, the ‘Forming Church’ podcast explores what evangelism could look like in our rapidly changing world, resourcing the next generation of church planters and urban missionaries. If you’re a pastor, church planter or ministry leader keen to connect with others and discuss missional conversations that have kicked off from the podcast, request to join our Facebook group here

(The Forming Church Podcast is sponsored by Baptist Financial Services)

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