Unlocking Potential
Photo by Nerene Grobler on Unsplash
It is well known that less people are “coming to church” for their spiritual needs. Even though the solution seems simple - go to where the people are. We've often found churches simply feel stuck or locked in place. So how do you unlock the potential of each church to reach their community for Christ?
One of our responses to this reality was to start two “Pastoral Disciple-Making Cohorts” in Maine. Each is designed to help pastors develop relationships and make disciples “outside the walls” of their facility. Here is a brief testimonial from one of these pastors
My monthly meetings with Kim have been invaluable. He has helped me focus on how I should be investing my time in ministry; thinking about what things I should consider letting go and what things I need to devote more time to.
Kim has encouraged me in times where I have felt overwhelmed and been an ear when I needed one. He has led me to look into trainings and resources relating to making disciples. My wife and I have completed an eight week course on disciple making movements. We are beginning to implement some of the strategies learned through this with Kim’s guidance. We have also discussed how these strategies fit into our efforts to collaborate with campus ministry to reach college students. Our discussions most recently have focused on how to adapt these strategies to, with God's help, grow the church and its ministry. This has all made my monthly meeting with Kim even more valuable.
If you could see our faces, we’d be blushing. We are grateful for the opportunity to help pastors discover their God-given potential for reaching their community. In total we are serving 15 pastors in Maine with the hope that each will begin to develop a relationship with 15 people outside their church who don’t know Jesus. We’re also working to help each pastor also disciple 15 people inside their church who would potentially reach others in their own relational networks. This, we believe, is one way the church “goes” to the people.