YPN President Dean Cowles
Dean Cowles is an urban pastor, an author, and a speaker. More important, he's happily married to Cheryl (a Sunday school teacher and obstetrician/gynecologist) and a dad to three sons. Dean wears his passions on his sleeve: family, missions, and reaching children, youth and their families with the gospel.
Dean began his full time urban work in 1985 when he founded Shepherd Community, an inner city Compassionate Ministry Center and congregation in Indianapolis, Indiana.
After many years of fruitful urban ministry, Dean and Cheryl felt a call to serve in foreign mission work. The Cowles' left for two years of voluntary missionary service at Tenwek Mission Hospital in rural West Kenya, Africa. Dean's ministry was with the national chaplains and local churches. While in Kenya he founded the L. Nelson Bell International Chaplaincy Training School.
In 1996 Dean accepted the call to move to Denver to become pastor and director of Crossroads of the Rockies, an inner city church, and to direct their ministry outreach efforts.
Dean is a popular speaker in college chapels, missions conventions, retreats, and a conductor of urban ministry seminars. He also has a tremendous gift for generating vision and motivating people to become involved in active Christian ministry. In addition to writing numerous articles on urban ministry, Dean is the author of The Calling: Urban Suburban Partnerships (Dreamtime: 1999) and CAST: Throwing Your Nets for Effective Ministry (Franklin House, 2004).
Dean was asked by Compassion International to serve as their USA Ministry Director in 2000 overseeing all of their domestic programs and staff. During that time, the USA ministry started its advocacy approach and enlarged its national partnership network. Compassion USA also designed and produced one of the premier urban youth workers training conferences in the country called CompassionWorks.
In July 2003 Compassion launched the USA Ministry into a new organization called YouthPartnersNET in order to provide greater impact and flexibility to reach more children and youth and access new funding sources. Rev. Cowles is the founder and President of YouthPartnersNET, based in Denver, Colorado, assisting hundreds of urban, rural and native American ministry partners across the nation through its unique program model of Networking, Education, Training.
- Expertise Areas/Seminar Titles:
- Is Administry a Message of Your Ministry?
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- Compassionate Evangelism,
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- Strategic Planning,
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- Program Evaluation
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- Theological Foundations of Compassionate Ministries
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- Cross-cultural Competency
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- Board Development
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- Staff Development
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- Fundraising Techniques
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- Community & Economic Development
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- Starting a 501c3 Organization
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- Racial Reconciliation
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- Planting Self-Sustaining Urban Churches
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- Avoiding 'Sloppy Agape'
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- Working with Local and State Grants
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- Grant Writing 101
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- Developing After-school Tutoring Programs
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- Developing Your Child Sponsorship Program
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- The City: the New Mission Field
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- How to Combine Compassion and Personal Salvation
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- Improving Your Serve: Principles for Churches Wanting to Unleash the Ministry Passions of their People
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- Creating a Vision for Your Ministry,
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- Those Who Fail to Plan - Plan to Fail
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- Compassion: a Heritage of Holiness
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- Effective Policies and Procedures
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- Getting Started-the How-to's and Hands-on.
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For more information, please contact YouthPartnersNET via email or call 1.800.334.KIDS.
View a list of grants issued by YouthPartnersNET
