Leader Vitality Program
Integrated Care and Experiential Trainings
Soul-Focused Training with Targeted Accompaniment
Leadership is a journey. You need a friend who knows the way. That’s why we’ve developed the Leader Vitality Program to support leaders in ministry, missions, and the marketplace. Wherever you are in your journey, our multi-disciplinary team can come alongside you and provide the tools and support you need to emerge stronger and more resilient than ever before.
The Help You Need, When You Need It
Life Action’s Leader Vitality Program is a customized solution to address each leader’s needs and may include integrated care and experiential training elements. Our approach blends Scripture, tradition, field experience, and best practices to address leaders’ individual needs.
Most solutions will involve points (intensive, experiential events) and processes (ongoing mentoring, coaching, or care) delivered by our multi-disciplinary team. What differentiates our approach is the targeted accompaniment built into the system to come alongside leaders on their development journey.
We view care and development as a continuum, guiding leaders from fragility to resilience to vibrancy.
Integrated Care Programs
Pastors’ Retreats
Hosted at The Lodge in beautiful southwest Michigan, our Pastors’ Retreats are designed to help pastors and their spouses experience physical, relational, and spiritual refreshment.
Guided Sabbaticals
A guided sabbatical offers rest, recovery, and rediscovery of your unique identity as an imager of God, independent of your vocation. It begins with a gentle care intensive at our retreat center to help you heal, followed by several weeks in a setting of your choice to relearn rest and rediscover joy. It concludes with a residential week of coaching to help you reengage with sustainable patterns.
Care Intensives
A care intensive allows you to stay at our retreat center and work closely with our integrated care team, focusing on healing with a twice-daily rhythm for about a week. The care intensive is typically followed by ongoing, less intensive follow-up care.
Trauma Debriefing
A trauma debrief allows you to pause, slow down, and process your experiences with support. It helps you examine your responses and coping mechanisms, and identify areas needing extra support. By offering guidance and skill development, we aim to help you feel seen, heard, and empowered to continue your journey toward healing and thriving.
Counseling
We offer services for individuals, couples, and teams in English and Spanish, virtually or at our beautiful retreat center in Michigan. Sessions are tailored to your needs and goals, supporting you on a healing journey that brings lasting change.
Spiritual Direction
Spiritual Direction offers a companion as you engage with God and your spiritual life through prayer and conversation. A Spiritual Director helps you recognize and respond to God’s work and voice in your life. (Offered in English and Spanish.)
Coaching
A coach helps assess your current situation, develop necessary skills, and guide you toward your goals. By asking targeted questions, listening deeply, and using tools for self-discovery, we help you thrive and live vibrantly as God intends.
Inner Healing Prayer
Inner Healing Prayer offers a safe space to invite the Holy Spirit to heal life’s wounds. Through guided prayer and listening, our Care Staff helps you welcome Jesus into these spaces, bringing healing and freedom that only He can provide.
Guided Retreats
Our 1- to 3-day guided retreats allow you the space to recenter, with the accompaniment you need from a spiritual friend. Our retreats combine spiritual direction, guided solitude, open space, and optional additional care as needed.
Experiential Training Programs
Resoul Conference
Resoul is an experiential learning encounter designed to teach Christian workers how to steward their own souls, connecting deeply with Jesus in five key dimensions.
Reweave Conference
Reweave is a dynamic workshop in which participants learn to integrate the critical aspects of their life and ministry, turning common points of fracture into points of multiplication and strength.
Reveal Conference
Reveal is a guided, transformational engagement through which participants embrace poesis, bringing forth the unique person God has made them to be in the world.
Cultural Intelligence Training
Cultural Intelligence enables effective functioning across diverse cultural contexts, essential for today’s global, multicultural world. Our certified coaches offer training to develop the four competencies: Drive, Knowledge, Strategy, and Action. Starting with an assessment, we focus on personal and organizational growth in each area.
Language Acquisition Training
This practical training equips you with skills and tools to become a self-driven language learner using the Growing Participator Approach. It includes daily language practice and is backed by our team’s 60+ years of cross-cultural ministry experience.
Relational Intelligence Training
A primary reason behind missionary attrition, ministry burnout, and ineffective work is a relational fracture in teams. But relationships can be incredible force multipliers, leading to deeper work satisfaction and lasting fruit. Learn how to cultivate your relational intelligence and supercharge your team’s impact for good.
Meet the Leader Vitality Team
Virgil Tanner
As the Senior Director of Leader Vitality at Life Action, Virgil is responsible for overseeing the constituency lane of leaders, including ministry leaders, missionaries, and marketplace leaders. Virgil leads the team at Life Action that focuses on helping mission, marketplace, and ministry leaders thrive holistically, do beautifully integrated work, and become everything God dreamed them to be, believing this to be a primary means for stewarding the reviving life of God through His people into the world.
Virgil holds a B.S. in Biology, an M.A. in Religion and Cross Cultural Studies, and an MEd. in Curriculum and Instruction. He is presently working on an EdD in Christian Leadership.
Calvin Tiessen
Calvin is the Director of Training at Life Action. He is part of the team preparing missionaries for fruitful field service, while also helping missionaries thrive in their places of ministry.
Calvin holds a PhD in Anthropology and Missions. He has served for 25 years with Wycliffe Bible Translators. He also holds an M.A. in Biblical Studies, an M.A. in Linguistics, and a B.A. in Education.
Calvin has lived most of his life on the mission field. He was born in the Philippines, where his parents served with SEND International, and then served with his wife, Gabi, in Central Asia for 18 years and Albania for 5.
Janice Maurizi
Janice is the Director of Care at Life Action and leads our Integrated Care Team as they walk with people into healing, thriving, and vibrancy in their lives.
Janice has an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy and 19 years of experience in clinical, ministry, and non-profit organizations. She brings a unique perspective, having worked both domestically in the U.S. and internationally in India, Kenya, Ukraine, Poland, South Africa, and Romania with organizations, children, and families. She is a TBRI practitioner and a Trauma Competent Caregiver Facilitator with extensive experience training and teaching about trauma and staff care and health.
Del Fehsenfeld
Del is a leader-health specialist and lead master trainer for Consentia Group. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist as well as a Neuro Change Coach with over 25 years of pastoral experience. He also leads Relational Health programming for Life Action.
Yeathus Johnson
Yeathus has served as a church planter, pastor, and denominational leader, with 22 years of experience developing diverse leaders and churches in urban environments. He is certified to train and coach in Emotional and Relational Intelligence with the Strengths Deployment Inventory using the Core Strengths Platform. He is a certified leadership coach and a trainer in Cultural Intelligence, serving organizations globally.
Yeathus holds a B.S. in Accounting from South Carolina State University and a Master’s in Urban Ministry from Alliance University. He currently serves as the Senior Director of Consentia Group, which focuses on training, coaching, and consulting faith-based leaders, churches, and non-profits.
Joy Tanner
Joy is the Intake Coordinator for the Integrated Care Team and helps to design personalized care and training plans for clients. She is a mother of five and spent nine years as a pastor’s wife in Nashville, TN, before moving to Central Asia with her family to lead a disciple-making team in a Muslim republic.
Joy has 15 years of experience working and living in the Muslim world and brings an extensive background in counseling and training to the team, which she uses to provide trauma debriefing and care for clients. She also holds a B.S. in Education with concentrations in psychology and English. Her passion is to guide people on their journey to freedom through knowing and being loved by Jesus.
Gabi Tiessen
Born and raised in Latin America and Michigan by American parents, Gabriela is familiar with cross-cultural life. She and her husband, Calvin, served with Wycliffe Bible Translators for over 20 years, working in the Caucasus and Albania.
Gabi’s primary roles have been as a Language and Culture Learning Coach and as a trainer; she has designed and facilitated courses in cultural adjustment, language learning, and intercultural dynamics. Her primary passion is to see cross-cultural workers equipped to flourish in another culture, fully rooted in the Lord, as they seek to build relationships and incarnate the love of Christ in their contexts. She holds a B.A. from Hope College and an M.A. in Intercultural Studies through Fuller Theological Seminary.
Ana Lucía Cornejo
Ana is an important part of our Integrated Care Team, offering services in English and Spanish. From Peru, she can serve our international clients via virtual sessions and engage them in their current context.
Ana has an MA in clinical psychology and worked for Kids Alive in Peru as the national coordinator of Therapeutic Intervention. She currently works for CAFO Research Center as the Liaison for Latin America. She serves as a member of the Peru por los niños committee, an alliance of organizations that advocate for every child to live in a family. She is a TBRI Practitioner and Trauma-Competent Care Facilitator.
Carrie Gaul
Carrie has dedicated 20 years to serving on staff with Life Action, encouraging women locally, regionally, and globally in their spiritual formation. She currently serves as a Staff Care Specialist with Life Action and as a Fellow with The Truth Collective.
As a speaker, author, and lay counselor, Carrie specializes in guiding women toward deeper spiritual growth and relational healing with God, with one another, and within their own story.
Carrie’s tenure includes roles such as Liaison for International Outreach and Staff Care, where she facilitated discipleship and transformative retreats domestically and internationally.
With over 30 years of experience in life-on-life ministry, Carrie is a certified trauma-care specialist adept in healing prayer and neurological integration. Her holistic approach guides individuals toward becoming more whole-hearted and thriving in their faith journey.
Doug Cuthbert
Doug is a leader care specialist and facilitator for Pastoral Retreats at Life Action. With a degree in counseling and theology, Doug has dedicated 36 years to pastoral ministry. His experience also includes working in Alaska as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Doug has been actively involved in mission work across several countries, including Peru, Russia, the Solomon Islands, China, and Mexico, where he focuses on supporting pastoral couples. Doug is passionate about journeying with people through their stories of pain, hope, struggle, and joy, encouraging them to recognize God’s immeasurable love and guidance in their lives (Eph. 3:20). He resides in Sister Lakes, Michigan, with his wife Marilyn and enjoys spending time with their four grown children and 13 grandchildren.
Ed Villaba
As Director of Pastoral Care, Ed serves as “the pastors’ pastor” with Life Action. When Ed was seventeen, God confirmed his call to full-time ministry, and he spent almost 47 years in various ministries before coming to Life Action in 2007 with his wife, Gayle. While having an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Calvary Christian College and Seminary of Kalamazoo, MI, Ed’s background in pastoral and counseling service helps him relate to pastors’ needs.
Marilyn Cuthbert
Marilyn is a dedicated leader care specialist and Pastoral Retreat facilitator with Life Action. With a background in Christian Education, Marilyn has enriched the lives of students in both public and private schools over a 28-year career. Her extensive mission work includes service in Peru, Russia, the Solomon Islands, China, and Mexico, where she focuses on supporting pastoral couples. Marilyn’s passion lies in mentoring individuals through their life stories, fostering a deep understanding of God’s boundless love and direction. She resides in Sister Lakes, Michigan, with her husband, Doug, and finds joy in spending time with their four grown children and 13 grandchildren.
Set Up a Discovery Call Today
Life Action’s Leadership Vitality Program is tailored to meet you where you are. A conversation with our intake team will help determine the most beneficial care or training elements.
Step 1 – Schedule a discovery call with the Leadership Vitality Team by completing the form.
Step 2 – We’ll customize a care/training plan for you or your organization.
Step 3 – Participants will embark on a supported journey toward vibrant leadership.