Dr. John Rowell

Dr. John Rowell was born in Alabama and is 58 years old.  He and his wife, Ginger, have been married for 38 years and live in Atlanta, Georgia. They are the parents of four married sons, ages 29-35 and they have ten grandsons and one granddaughter!  John received his undergraduate education in California and began his business career as a Certified Public Accountant working with Arthur Young & Company.  He has also worked for several large corporations including a Fortune 500 multi-national company.

John made his transition from the business world toward full time vocational ministry in early 1978.  He received his first formal training in church growth and missiology at the School of World Missions at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.  He has served as an elder and the full time church administrator for the Fullerton Evangelical Free Church during Chuck Swindoll's tenure as pastor.  He was one of the founders of Church Resource Ministries, Inc., a mission agency specializing in personal discipleship, leadership training, and church growth consultation.

In 1981, John left the staff of the Fullerton Free Church in order to open an office for Church Resource Ministries in the Southeast.  Serving as a Resource Center Director in Atlanta, Georgia, John worked broadly with more than 25 churches in ten denominations over three years.  His specialty was church growth consultation and diagnostic analysis though his consulting experiences also provided a forum for the promotion of leadership training, team building, mission development and church planting.

In December 1984, John responded to an invitation from the Evangelical Free Church of America to serve as a church planter in the Atlanta area.  John pastored Northside Community Church for 18 years while assisting in four other church planting efforts, resulting in three American churches and a Persian congregation in Atlanta.  Concerns for the American family and declining values in urban areas have led to a significant involvement in the Pro-Life and Prayer initiatives for the state of Georgia.  In 1989, John became the founder and director of the Atlanta Coalition for Life, an association of pastors who agreed to aggressively lead their church members to support the sanctity of life and the protection of the unborn in Georgia.  He has also worked closely with other Atlanta leaders in the Greater Atlanta Prayer Fellowship, directing the Concerts of Prayer for Atlanta and the National Day of Prayer for Georgia.

Mission involvement has taken John overseas on numerous occasions.  He has a special burden for the church in Eastern and Central Europe and has worked extensively with congregations in Russia, Romania and several republics of former Yugoslavia.  Northside Community Church launched a church-based cross-cultural ministry targeting Bosnian Muslims in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina in 1992. The church has mobilized more than 1,500 short-term workers to serve in Bosnia’s war-torn areas and is now helping to develop a church planting movement in Bosnia.  Permanent church planting teams from NCC have started three churches and a Bible School in Bosnia.  This ministry is being conducted under the auspices of Ministry Resource Network, Inc. (MRN), a tax exempt mission organization headquartered in Atlanta.  MRN also has staff working in Croatia, Siberia and Africa.  John resigned from his pastoral role in April 2001 to assume full time duties as president and Executive Director of MRN. He has since worked as the Executive Pastor for the Atlanta Vineyard and is now planting a church in Norcross, Georgia.

John is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America having been recognized as a part of the ministerial association for that denomination since 1981.  He has also served on the Executive Board of Antioch Network and is currently on the US and International Board of Directors for Food for the Hungry  and the local Board for YWAM’s Atlanta Base.  John has studied at Fuller School of World Mission, holds a Masters of Missiology from the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia and has completed a Doctor of Ministry program in missiology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston.  John has authored two mission books, Magnify your Vision for the Small Church and To Give or Not to Give. Both books are available through Amazon.com.

James Rowell

James has been married to his beautiful wife, Betsy, for over 5 years. They have 4 sons, Dylan, 8, Josiah and Ephraim, 4, and Daniel, 1, all of them characters in their own right which translates into a little bit of chaos, a shortage of dull moments and a surplus of laughter. Ministry in the church and to their community is important, superseded only by their marriage and the stewardship of these souls as they raise godly men who love Jesus.

James attended Providence Christian Academy in nearby Lilburn, Ga., graduating in 1999. He thenattended Toccoa Falls College, where he studied bible and theology while ultimately graduating with a degree in Journalism and Print Media in 2003. James and Betsy married in December, 2004, spent the next few years in Marietta, Ga., where they attended Liberty Church. Liberty was a place where both of them were discipled further and released to do ministry as volunteers in several different roles. During this time, James was working as a Service Manager for two different swimming pool companies before entering vocational ministry as the Youth Pastor at the Atlanta Vineyard Church in 2007. In December, 2008, James earned a Master's Degree in Conflict Management from Kennesaw State University, and because he was married with three sons and a full-time student while working full-time, he had plenty of opportunity to put his degree to work at home. It turns out that people within churches experience a bit of conflict from time to time as well, so his graduate studies have had ample context for application.

James and Betsy spent a little over two years at AVC before God called them to participate in planting Generations, along with James' parents. He plans to spend the rest of his life loving his wife, and raising up godly men, beginning with his four sons at home, and extending into the local church and all those whom God gives to Generations.