<p> The project director has a deficiency in Christ-centered preaching from the Old Testament, lack of skills as to how the biblical genre guides the sermon structure, and misunderstanding of sermon delivery following the contours of Old Testament narrative. The lack of skills were supported by review of previous sermons preached from Old Testament narrative revealing logical sermon forms, moralistic application, and gospel presentations rather than Christocentric content emanating from the text. Additionally, the ministry location for the project implementation has experienced an absence of expositional sermons from the Old Testament over the past twenty years.</p><p> The purpose of this project was to enhance the skills of Christ-centered preaching from the Old Testament utilizing Eugene Lowry&rsquo;s homiletical sermon form. The project director preached a series of six sermons from Exodus 1&ndash;20 applying Lowry&rsquo;s five-stage sermon form. Expertise in sermon development and delivery was enhanced by exposure to scholarly work in the fields of Old Testament theology, exegesis, Christ-centered hermeneutics, and Lowry&rsquo;s sermon form. An expert panel guided the project implementation and the sermon evaluation panel provided data on each of the six sermons from Exodus.</p><p> Upon review of data received from the sermon evaluation team, the project director displayed increased proficiency building and delivering Christocentric sermons from the Old Testament. Data from the evaluation team revealed positive results concerning sermon clarity and structure indicating Lowry&rsquo;s homiletical sermon model as an effective form.</p>

<p>Churches in the United States struggle with onboarding and orienting new associate pastors. At the same time, many of these churches lack a broader leadership development strategy for their ministry teams. To address these challenges, the project director developed a strategy for equipping newly hired ministry staff members at Lawndale Baptist Church (LBC) of Greensboro, North Carolina, with leadership behaviors especially needed for associate pastor ministry. In chapter one, the project director established objectives for the ministry project. He then outlined the ministry context for which he designed the project, also offering a rationale for his work. He defined key terms such as leadership, leadership behaviors, second chair leadership, followership, coaching, and ministry staff. The project director used chapter two to address the biblical and theological foundations for leadership from a variety of associate pastor roles. He worked through three passages using the framework of observation, interpretation, and application. The project director drew specific instructions for following spiritual leaders from Hebrews 13:7?19. He then considered a positive example of secondary leadership from Daniel 1 and a negative example from Numbers 12. In chapter three, the project director established the research and literature foundations for the project. He began by focusing on situational leadership, as well as the balance between great and godly leadership. The project director next considered resources related to associate pastor leadership behaviors, before studying leadership behaviors in the context of the church. He then studied the complementary leadership concepts of followership and 360-degree leadership. He concluded the section by looking at comparable tools and resources available through Lifeway?s Leadership Pipeline and already existing within various local churches. In chapter four, the project director shared the narrative description of his progress through the ministry project. He used the first section to describe the preparation phase of choosing a project, researching, and recruiting an expert panel. In the next segment, he outlined the steps of implementation, including building a survey, writing lesson plans for the training modules, and creating a Likert scale evaluation to serve as a pretest and posttest. The project director finished the chapter by describing the process of qualitative analysis used to evaluate the lesson plans for the training modules and his process of creating them. The project director used chapter five of the project to conduct an analysis of the completed ministry project. He began by providing a summary of the results and evaluating the fulfillment of the project objectives. The project director then described strengths, weaknesses, and patterns discovered through the process. He finished the chapter by drawing conclusions, offering suggestions for further research, and providing personal reflection on the ministry project.