What’s Ponorka?  First, a little backstory…

About half a year ago, I sat with leaders of the four primary church plants that we are working with and someone said:  “The pipeline has dried up.”  The metaphor was from this article about the state of church planting in the US.

In short, the idea is that the church planting boom of the last couple decades was fed by “a leadership pipeline that no longer exists.”

In the article, Bob Thune observes that over the past few decades in the US, with the vision and leadership of men like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll, church planting candidates that flooded boot camps and assessments in the mid-2000s were youth pastors, college pastors, and church staff members – in other words, men with real church ministry experience. They’d preached sermons, done evangelism, discipled new Christians, and learned to submit and serve under someone else’s authority.  But after a few decades, that pool has been drained.  Where will the next leaders come from?

Back to our roundtable discussion.  We agreed that this was absolutely true for Slovakia and Eastern Europe, acutely so because the pipeline was pretty minimal to begin with.  We agreed there that we had to focus on the “head water” area of the pipeline – forming and training young adults – high school and college students.

So this summer we took a small step in that direction and took 15 college students from around the country through an immersion experience. (I was involved in leading a similar training experience in Soma Tacoma for a while.)

Ponorka means “submarine” but can also be slang for “immersion.”  The goal for this pilot was for students to be immersed into the Biblical story and to see how their stories fit into this larger narrative.  They were also briefly immersed into the life of two church plants – in Bratislava and Nitra.

We had a deeply encouraging week and are sensing that we will need to create many more opportunities like these for college students.  Pray for these leaders as they continue to submit their story to God’s story and His mission.

PS.  Pray for the work of TCKompas, Josiah Venture Slovakia, that are working with high school students, and hope to see the pipeline resurging as a result.

PPS.  Our friends Dan and Bedo in the Czech Republic at Majak Network have also begun work with high school boys towards this goal already.  They created Draft Camps, three year / three tier summer camps, that begin with a call to biblical manhood and bold leadership and end with a call to be a part of church planting.