Leighton Ford Ministries

Leighton Ford Ministries comes alongside emerging missional leaders as they journey through life and ministry. Our strategy focuses on safe places and safe times where emerging ministry leaders can be received and welcomed by safe people. Places where leaders can address their challenges. LFM provides additional support for organizational issues via professional ministry consulting.

Specifically, our current mentoring goals for the next 3 to 5 years are to:
1. Train approximately 50 experienced pastors/ministry leaders to serve as mentors.
2. Support and resource those pastors in launching 50 to 60 new mentoring communities.
3. Serve 320-400 pastors through trained mentors and mentoring communities.

Our goal is to be an exponential ministry. The very first Leighton Ford Ministries mentoring community, founded more than three decades ago, has generated at least 20 second and third generation mentoring communities. As we train a new generation of mentors and launch new mentoring communities, we will also be alert to exponential opportunities to launch even more mentoring of pastors and ministry leaders.

We enable pastors/ministry leaders to thrive in many different contexts by providing safe times, safe places, and safe people where peers and mentors listen deeply, pray together, and help one another listen to God.

We also seek to engage pastors/ministry leaders in using whole-life mentoring within their current ministry. For example, working with a church to launch a program for mentoring key volunteers, or working with a mission agency to provide mentoring for missionaries and staff.

Leighton Ford Ministries is a catalyst for mentoring healthy leaders who sustain thriving ministries for the sake of the Gospel.

On an ongoing basis, Leighton Ford Ministries identifies and/or receives requests from experienced pastors and ministry leaders to launch new mentoring communities. Often, these communities are made up of pastors working in the same region or denomination, or within similar ministry contexts (for example, evangelists or inner-city ministry).

We host at least one annual "Potential Mentors Retreat" in which experienced pastors/ministry leaders experience a typical mentoring gathering and receive specialized training in how to lead a mentoring community. In order to focus on each individual and promote deep listening, a typical retreat involves no more than 10 potential mentors. LFM then supports and resources the potential mentors in launching mentoring communities.

LFM does not enforce a one-size-fits-all model. Each group reflects the personality and gifts of the mentor leader, as well as the needs and personalities of the mentees.

At the core of each LFM mentoring community is deep prayer and authentic paying attention to each individual. We are committed to three vital aspects of spiritual mentoring:
• Attention to whole-life development
• Withdrawing for time together, regularly
• Long-term, and ideally, lifelong relationships

Typically, a stipend to help cover travel costs is made available for the first three years of each mentoring community. In our experience, after the first three years, participants find the relationships so valuable they joyfully pursue their own funding.

LFM has a 30-year history of supporting and nurturing mentoring communities for pastors and ministry leaders, many of which are volunteer-led and self-sustaining. Financial support for administration, stipends, and resources is provided by an existing network of Christian business leaders across America.

We strive to operate as a lean organization with low overhead, primarily utilizing a network of 1099 consultants and experienced volunteers. This approach allows us to have someone like Ken Carter (former president of the World Council of Methodist Bishops) on our team. A full-time role would be impossible for a variety of reasons, but he can contribute as a coach and consultant because that work is more episodic for him.

LFM directly supports a network of 50 mentoring communities encouraging and sustaining over 500 ministry leaders worldwide. Because our ministry is exponential, many of these mentoring communities have spawned second and third generation mentoring communities.

Our leadership includes:

-Dr. Leighton Ford served as Vice President of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association from 1955 to 1985 and as Chairman of the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization from 1976 to 1992. Since the mid-1980s, he has focused on mentoring the next generation of ministry leaders as "a friend on the journey and an artist of the soul."

-Kevin Ford has consulted with hundreds of churches and pastors throughout North America and has a Master of Divinity from Regent College at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of "Transforming Church" (Tyndale, 2007) and the upcoming book "The Attentive Church" and was a senior consultant for the redesign of the U.S. Army Staff - the largest employer in the United States.

-Rich Hurst is a veteran pastor with experience in multi-ethnic settings, church leadership consultant, and former editor of Strategic Adult Ministry for David C. Cook Publishing. Rich joined LFM in 2019 to help develop a master’s in ministry leadership program in partnership with Belhaven University. He has a Master of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary.

-Dr. MaryKate Morse is Dean of Portland Seminary and is the lead author of "Lifelong Leadership: Woven Together Through Mentoring Communities," an LFM resource published by NavPress in 2020. She is the lead mentor for Portland Seminary's Leadership and Spiritual Formation D.Min. track and serves as a mentor and trainer for Lausanne Young Leaders and Leighton Ford Ministries.

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Since 1985, Leighton Ford Ministries has:

-Launched and sustained 50mentoring communities supporting over 500 ministry leaders worldwide.
-Facilitated personal spiritual retreats for hundreds of pastors and ministry leaders.
-Directly counseled and mentored thousands of ministry leaders, ranging from the well-known leaders of marquee ministries to local church pastors to former inmates now involved in prison ministry.
-Consulted with 1,000 churches and a broad range of denominational judicatories to support congregations through visioning, governance, transformation, and leadership development.

Our mission is to be a catalyst for mentoring Healthy Leaders who sustain Thriving Ministries for the sake of the Gospel. This ministry has an exponential impact as pastors and parachurch leaders minister to their congregations and spheres of influence.

Leighton Ford Ministries has pressed forward with launching three new Mentoring Communities thus far in 2023:
1. A cohort of emerging, missional pastors of small churches in Ohio.
2. A group of women from Germany involved in a variety of ministries in that country.
3. Training a pastor from the Canadian Artic who has a dozen other pastors ready to be mentored.


Over the next five years, our goals are to:

1. Train approximately 50 experienced pastors to serve as mentors.
2. Support and resource those pastors in launching mentoring communities.
3. Serve 320-400 pastors through these mentoring communities.

We are also pursuing opportunities to provide professional ministry consulting to smaller churches.