NEXT Ventures is a ministry of Exponential NEXT designed to discover, connect, and learn from innovative ministries shaping the future of the church.
This year, we identified 12 ministry projects and invited their leaders and teams to join us for our 2024 Shark Tank Event at The Church Project in Houston, Texas. We also invited a group of Venture Partners who are making a significant Kingdom investment in these ministries while offering mentoring, financial resources, and encouragement.
The event format allows each ministry to give a seven-minute presentation and a 30-minute breakout session to share insight into their ministry and allow time for Q&A. This provides partners with the opportunity to collaborate, network, and learn from each ministry. The event culminates by selecting three ministries to receive a significant financial grant and with a time of worship and prayer. Here is a quick snapshot and a brief description of each ministry:
Streets of Prayer
Akram Hadeed
Akram Hadeed is the CEO and founder of Streets of Prayer, a ministry dedicated to the audacious mission of mobilizing every believer to pray over every street in the world by 2030. Inspired by the words of Jesus in Luke 11, Akram’s life began to change when he started to pray for the daily filling of the Holy Spirit. He then began to dream about mobilizing every follower of Jesus to persistently pray for their unsaved friends and cover the streets of our nation and world in prayer. With a background as a software developer, Akram created an app that has now mobilized thousands of people to prayer walk over specific routes in their city. With an interactive app and a vision to multiply exponentially in the next few years, he believes this dream can become a reality.
*Streets of Prayer received first place and a $25,000 grant at our recent Shark Tank event. Their full story will be featured in a future article.
Lighthouse Project
Josh Dotzler
Josh Dotzler is a justice advocate and CEO of Abide, a non-profit mission focused on revitalizing the inner city of Omaha, one neighborhood at a time. In 2009, they launched their very first “lighthouse” by purchasing a formerly dilapidated home, refurbishing it, and then placing a family committed to a life of mission. They aim to bring heaven to earth in every inner-city neighborhood in Omaha. What began with the purchase of a single home has now multiplied to over 50 homes, and the project has been recognized by local officials as reducing crime and violence by 75% in every neighborhood. Abide has a goal of purchasing 50 more homes in the next four years. When the people of God carry the presence of God into the darkness, they offer light to challenging communities.
*The Lighthouse Project received second place and a $20,000 grant at our recent Shark Tank event. Their full story will be featured in a future article.
Fathers on the Move
Victor Glover
God radically saved and delivered Victor while serving time in prison and began preparing him for a lifetime of ministry. He preached his first sermon at that same prison only three months after he was released. One hundred men surrendered their lives to Christ, and a new ministry was born! Fathers on the Move is on a mission to stop the school-to-prison pipeline, and their strategy is to discover, develop, and deploy pastors and churches into federal and state prisons while mentoring fathers and youth on the outside. They currently offer a 12-week course on leadership development and have seen over 500 graduates. They were the first program to return to federal prison post-Covid, have baptized dozens of men, and are beginning a national expansion.
*Fathers on the Move received third place and a $15,000 grant at our recent Shark Tank event. Their full story will be featured in a future article.
The Lovely Project
Emilee Westervelt
The Lovely Project is a non-profit ministry that engages young girls with faith-based character training to live healthy, confident, and purposeful lives. While their focus is supporting at-risk girls, the ministry has now expanded to students of all backgrounds and is now meeting at 15 locations and multiple school districts. With a strong background in education and leadership, Emilee’s Christian faith guides her as a devoted mother, wife, and passionate advocate for young women. The ministry is designed to empower young women to grow in purpose and confidence through peer mentorship, engaging curriculum, and interactive, fun-filled events, ensuring every girl understands her extraordinary value, voice, and valor.
EntreChurch
Greg Atkinson
Greg Atkinson is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, international keynote speaker, and leadership coach. However, in this season of life and ministry, he is devoting himself to helping pastors and churches start and support businesses to serve the future church in North America. EntreChurch helps pastors and churches build and support these thriving businesses. Missional businesses are a future strategy for supplementing income and changing the paradigm of how churches view finances. There are currently over one million bi-vocational pastors in America and EntreChurch hopes to help solve the funding problem for local churches in a missional way.
Faith City Church Network
Carl Johnson
The Faith City Church Network has developed and deployed five church planters among the urban poor and desires to vigorously plant churches in impoverished communities. Carl Johnson serves as the network’s director. His mission is to champion disciple-making and church planting among the poor and abolish food insecurity in the major cities of the United States. He is taking steps in this direction by pairing social enterprises like grocery stores, coffee shops, and other missional endeavors with church planting efforts. In addition to leading a faith community in St. Paul, Minnesota, he also helped co-found the Black Missional Convening, which is helping to train predominantly Black and Latino churches to make disciples.
Leadership Pathway
Dave Miller
The American Church is facing a staffing crisis that was exposed during COVID-19. There is also a widening gap between Gen Z and older millennials, and the average age of most lead pastors today is over 60 years. Dave Miller, founder of Leadership Pathway, wants to change these statistics by helping churches find, support, and develop the next generation of church leaders through residency and coaching. The ministry has now launched more than 100 residencies and wants to double that number in the next five years. Their mission is to combat the staffing crisis by helping local churches grow a sustainable pipeline of young leaders.
Collide Conference
Jordan Bochinski
The purpose of the Collide Conference is to help young people find truth, identity, and purpose in Jesus. What makes the conference remarkable is that it’s happening in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in post-Christian Canada. The vision of an annual gathering of young adults transformed by the living God was birthed in 2021. Two years later, nearly 1,000 young adults gathered for the first Collide Conference. And one year after that, even more young people showed up. The organizers of the conference and dozens of volunteers are praying for the movement to expand to five major cities across Canada and are praying for a revival where heaven and earth collide. Their desire is for nothing less than a move of God to recapture the heart of their nation.
MosaiXmultiply
Joel Lutz
With over 25 years of multicultural engagement in 12 countries and 26 different nationalities, Joel Lutz is well-positioned to lead diverse teams and various expressions of church planting. In 2011, he and his wife, Jenni, joined a church planting team in Frankfurt, Germany, and soon after, the vision was birthed for MosaiXmultiply, a ministry dedicated to planting multicultural, gospel-driven communities through education, coaching, and leadership development. In five years, they desire to establish 500 hubs for training that will reach 250,000 people and 100 nations. As the U.S. continues to evolve as a nation of immigrants, and as more pastors grapple with the challenges of fostering unity across cultural and ethical divides, this training will be even more important.
South City 2.0
Drew Cline
Drew Cline has served churches nationwide for more than 35 years as a worship leader, solo artist, and lead singer of the CCM group NewSong. In October 2016, he began a new journey at the historic Temple Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Drew led the church in a replanting effort named South City, and he’s now transitioning the church once again. South City 2.0 is moving believers to a new rhythm of gathering. The church now meets two times a month in City Groups and two times a month in corporate worship. To support the vision, they recently sold their original campus for three million dollars and purchased a local PFChangs restaurant, converting it into a full-time coffee shop, café, and music venue. This model will allow the church to be mortgage-neutral and reach new groups of people with the gospel while equipping people to live life on mission.
Trellis
Cliff Forbes
Cliff Forbes is the Executive Director of Trellis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training the future leaders of the church. Cliff has fostered collaboration between local churches and a select number of universities to shape a new generation of pastors. Through an innovative approach to funding the mission, Trellis allows students to serve at a local church while receiving their ministry degree… debt-free. Cliff’s dream is to transform the landscape of pastoral education, ensuring that the next generation is academically equipped and deeply connected to the real-world challenges and joys of their calling.
AZ Reach
Juan Chavez
This Arizona-based ministry was launched to provide mentoring for at-risk high school students. Many of these students have been let down by the church, are struggling to maintain their faith, or are atheists. Developing long-term mentoring relationships and introducing students to ministry gatherings and the gospel equips them to break the cycle of poverty and brokenness in their lives. AZ Reach runs multiple programs on high school campuses across the district that include support groups, life skills classes, and even an emerging entrepreneurs’ program.
What’s NEXT?
In 2025, NEXT Ventures will offer opportunities at Exponential Global, West, and Central for ministry leaders to pitch their innovative ministry ideas for a chance to receive financial grants and further investment. We are looking for practical, actionable approaches that historians will one day conclude were critical to the success of the future church in the U.S. We’re not looking for academic solutions as much as innovative practitioners who are in the trenches making a difference! If you are leading an innovative ministry and would like to apply to one of our “Pitching Deck” experiences, keep an eye out for how to apply! To learn more about Next Ventures, visit https://exponential.org/ventures/.
