Arrow Leadership International Ministries

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Craig Hendrickson - Urban Mosaic

Craig Hendrickson, born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba, may be remembered by some for his career in the Canadian Football League where he played for five different teams over the course of eleven years. Today, however, Hendrickson serves with a different kind of team at a ministry called Urban Mosaic. Urban Mosaic is developing a two-year mentoring-based leadership development program at a missional training centre in Long Beach, California. Craig is a graduate of the 2004 Arrow Leadership Program and he and his team at Urban Mosaic are now teaching Arrow’s mentoring models to the leaders they are training in this multi-ethnic ministry.

“We’re excited because we’re actually implementing some of the stuff that I learned at Arrow with mentoring,” Craig says.

They’re including the peer mentoring that Craig found kept him accountable and encouraged and the one-on-one mentoring that helped him discern God’s calling.

The new training centre will serve urban pastors who cannot afford seminary or don’t have time for it because of being bi-vocational. It will teach them the character, calling and competencies needed in the complex urban environments in which they minister.

Urban Mosaic seeks to help North American urban churches change from being primarily made up of one ethnicity to being a group made up of many different ethnicities as their communities are usually made up of diverse and regularly changing ethnic groups.

Craig says “God’s kingdom values call churches to engage those environments – that really reflects the diversity of his kingdom and his desire for modeling a counter cultural way of life.”

It is also the only way for churches to be sustainable. If churches just reach out to one ethnic group then in the long term, when that group moves away, or gets older and dies, it will either have to move or close down.

“Your churches need the flexibility to change as the community does,” says Craig. “Multi-ethnic churches give you a better opportunity to be able to do that because if the one group you’re targeting does leave you’ve already got potential from the other groups in your church that are moving in and you’re equipped to reach them.”

Craig is a graduate of the 2004 Arrow Leadership Program.

 

 

 

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