“As the vicegerents of God, we are to bring His teaching to every sphere of society—not only to the individual, but to the family, the parents, the schools, the government, the arts, and everything which God has something to say about.” -Dr. D. James Kennedy
God's Strategy for Impact and Transformation
The church of Jesus Christ is God’s strategy for winning and discipling the world–His chosen engine of impact and transformation. And His chief tool within the church is the preaching and teaching of His Word, by men who are qualified to “preach the word; [and who are] ready in season and out of season…” and to “declare the full counsel of God.” That means not only equipping Christians to go to heaven when they die, but to live as salt and light here, where God has placed them.
The D. James Kennedy Center for Church Leadership is spearheading a network of evangelical, Bible-believing pastors, helping them to be fully equipped and competent to guide and exhort their congregations on the crucial cultural issues of the day.
MISSION
Encouraging and equipping pastors to guide the church in engaging this post-Christian culture.
VISION
An engaged church, driven by biblical truth, teaching the nations to obey all that Christ has commanded.
The D. James Kennedy center for Church Leadership
It has been said that, “As the church goes, so goes America.” Sadly, that leads us to the crux of the problem today. An enormous contingent of the church in America has given up biblical authority and the defining doctrines of the faith.
But even among Bible-believing evangelicals, the internalization and privatization of faith, combined with pastoral neglect in engaging on controversial cultural issues, has caused the church to be caught by surprise and rendered ineffective in responding to the cultural tsunami that has brought us same-sex marriage, transgenderism, critical theory, and a mass departure of Generation Z from the church, among other cultural crises.
Dr. D. James Kennedy, one of the most effective American pastors of the 20th century, noted that “the Bible gives us two mandates that are the basic tracks upon which the train of the Church and the train of every Christian life are supposed to run”—the gospel and the cultural mandate. Most evangelical pastors recognize (even if somewhat guiltily) the need for evangelization. But they are often unaware of God’s cultural mandate—and thus unprepared to lead their people.
The very first chapter of Genesis shows us God’s intention for this world. In the Garden of Eden, after creating Adam and Eve, we see:
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
After their fall into sin, God does not revoke this mandate. Instead, after the flood of judgement upon the world, He reiterates it to Noah:
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. …And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. (Genesis 9:1, 3)
Nor is it merely a feature of the Old Covenant. In fact, while it is often widely overlooked, it is contained in The Great Commission itself!
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe [obey] all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The D. James Kennedy Center for Church Leadership exists to help pastors reclaim the cultural mandate in obedience to Christ, helping equip them to apply the word of God to every facet of culture, including government, politics, family, gender and sex, education, vocation, and more.
Our Values
With the Apostles, the early church fathers, and the Protestant Reformers, we hold the Bible to be the very Word—and words—of God, infallible, inerrant, and true in everything that they say. Further, we hold that God, as Lord of all, is sovereign over every sphere of life and human experience, and has something to say about it. The church is obligated to proclaim this word, and all human beings are
The church of Jesus Christ is God’s strategy for reaching the world and discipling the nations, and it is His chosen engine of impact and transformation. The local church is God’s primary means of Gospel proclamation and transformation, and His chosen engine of impact. The pastors who shepherd those congregations are called by God to “preach the word; [and to] be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2) so that through the Word of God, “the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:.17). This makes the strategic importance of each pastor crucial.
God created human beings on the final day of creation as the capstone of His work. Only human beings are made in the image of God—the imago Dei [Genesis 1:27]—and are thus infinitely valuable, no matter their age, status, health, productivity, or stage of development. God has a plan for his creation, and has intentionally designed each aspect of it. Three crucial aspects of this design are currently under ferocious attack: the sanctity of human life (through the holocaust of abortion), marriage (given by God to Adam and Eve—one man and one woman—as the first building block of culture and the means of procreation), and the distinction of sexes (“male and female he created them” [Gen. 1:27]).
As our namesake, Dr. D. James Kennedy, famously pointed out, the Church and the Christian life are to run upon two rails forming the tracks—the Gospel and the Cultural Mandate. In the Great Commission, Jesus calls his disciples to go out baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (evangelism). And in the same Commission, He charges them to “teach the nations all that I have commanded” (the cultural mandate). The grace of God is not only saving, it is transformative. It transforms, in ascending order, individuals, communities, and cultures.
Every age faces its own assaults on God’s Word and God’s people. In 21st century America, a large-scale rejection of God has brought a drastically rising tide of secularism, resentment, covetousness, strife, and sexual anarchy. Cultural Marxism (or, more popularly, “wokism”) teaches the fundamental division of oppressor and oppressed, dividing people along battle lines over sex, marriage, gender, race, and a host of other flashpoints, and children are indoctrinated in an idolatrous worldview via social media, Hollywood, and the public education system. We stand against all forms of wokeism, as well as all other godless ideologies. In a culture that has given up worship of the Creator and instead bows down to creatures, it is incumbent upon pastors to stand with the Apostle Paul, who calls out the rampant cultural sins (Rom. 1:29-31) that are both causes of and products of God’s divine judgment.
