June 13, 2025
DULUTH, Ga. – The writer who turned the Rocky Mountains into a metaphor that is helping a generation of church leaders rethink ministry will be one of the speakers at the Georgia Baptist Mission Board’s SPARK Conference next month.
Tod Bolsinger, a former California pastor now serving as vice president of Fuller Theological Seminary, has provided hope to pastors facing seemingly impossible barriers with his book Canoeing the Mountains.
The book chronicles the journey of famed explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as they set out in search of a route to the Pacific Ocean. The journey went well until Lewis and Clark and their entourage encountered the Rocky Mountains. The canoes that had served them so well to that point were rendered useless. They had to do something differently if they were to continue their journey. They had to adapt to a vastly different landscape. So, they ditched their canoes and pressed ahead.
Bolsinger will be one of the keynote speakers at this year’s SPARK Conference, which premieres online August 25.
Nearly 6,000 people took part in the SPARK Conference last year, making it one of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board’s Most popular training events.
That popularity is, in part, the result of the well-known Christian leaders, like Bolsinger, brought in to provide inspirational preaching and teaching on topics of importance to pastors and others.
Bolsigner’s Canoeing the Mountains has provided an aha moment for many church leaders who have futilely tried to take their congregations into the future using strategies that no longer work in the vastly different spiritual landscape of modern America. Just as Lewis and Clark had to adapt, Bolsinger’s prose convinces pastors that they, too, must adapt.
“All that we have assumed about leading Christian organizations, all that we have been trained for is out of date,” he writes. “We are in uncharted terrain trying to lead dying churches into a post-Christian culture that now considers the church an optional, out-of-touch and irrelevant relic of the past.”
“The answer,” Bolsinger writes, “is not to try harder but to start a new adventure.”
Scott Sullivan, the Georgia Baptist Mission Board’s discipleship catalyst, said Bolsinger will share insights into adaptive leadership that will be vital to churches.
Sullivan has pulled together a strong lineup of keynote speakers for this year’s SPARK Conference. Besides Bolsinger, they include Fred Luter, senior pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans; Michael Catt, author, producer and retired senior pastor of Georgia’s Sherwood Baptist Church; and Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Church in Hendersonville, Tenn. and founder of Replicate Ministries.
The conference includes breakout sessions in nearly every area of ministry, including discipleship, child protection, missions and next gen ministries.
Sullivan said this year’s SPARK Conference has been expanded to include in-person events in regional locations across Georgia. Those locations are Second Baptist Church in Warner Robins on August 6, First Baptist Church in Douglas on August 13, First Baptist Church in Alpharetta and Byne Memorial Baptist Church in Albany on August 20, and Christ Place Church in Flowery Branch on August 29.
