This class has been such a blessing to my life, and it is an honor to create this discipleship strategy for my future ministry. It is the job of the leader of the church to evaluate the spiritual growth of the church, and one of the ways to do this is by measuring expansion growth. This is a tricky subject because there are a lot of ways to define growth. There is transfer growth, which is the swapping of church members from a different congregation. This type of growth is good, but not the best type of growth. While many churches want to see their numbers increase, creating a church that takes away people from surrounding churches is not an ideal term for growth, because no new life change is happening. Tender growth is where people begin …show more content…
Lawless, is “an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other discipleship in order to encourage, equip and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ.” This concept is vital to the growth of the church, because without discipleship, a church can grow to well over a 1,000 members, yet still be full of spiritual infants. Discipleship allows a church to grow spiritually, as it takes those believers and use their gifts so that Christ might be glorified. This is modeled well in Ephesians 4:11-13, but only in certain translations of the Bible. In the KJV Bible, Ephesians 4:11-13 implies by comma usage (that is not in the original manuscripts) that evangelists, pastors, and teachers are alone to do the work of Christ. In many KJV only churches (the fact that they only use this translation is a problem in itself), they take this verse to imply that only the trained professionals are allowed to minister to the congregation. The Catholic Church does the same thing, as the clergy does not need to do ministry unless they feel called to be a trained minister. The ESV takes this verse and does not put the commas in the text, showing from Scripture that all of Christ’s body can work together to see more people come into a relationship with God. This can be seen abundantly in many TV churches today, such as the Summit. When people join the Summit, they are told in the membership class that they must serve the body of Christ in some way, shape, or form. To be a part of the Summit and not serve on a greeting, prayer, or any service team is in direct violation of their church covenant. They take the ESV translation of the Bible and use it in the life of the church, so that the body of Christ can serve Christ. This also will naturally get people more involved in the life of the church, and will allow them to feel more connected. The church best serves the people who serve the church, because they walk together through
According to the authors, Rainer and Geiger, “simple churches” or dynamic churches, experience a steady increase in the number of members that join their church each year. Churches that experience this annual growth in membership are more likely to have established programs and events that effectively share the gospel with the unsaved and aid in the progression of the church’s congregants’ spiritual development. Paradoxically, churches who do not experience this growth are likely to be “complex churches,” which have ineffective ministries that fail to evangelize and aid in the progressive of congregants’ spiritual development. Rainer and Geiger offer the church leader a
In this paper I will identify the five stages of discipleship according to the growth
The author discovered four major factors that church growth in the North American Division tremendously. First factor is empowering servant leadership. In this section, the leaders work hard and they are willing to make sacrifice in the purpose to see a growing church. The second one is passionate and authentic spirituality they believe that it is spirituality that is the source of passion of passion and power behind their effectiveness. The third point is about how their members are committed to get involved in different activity. Some churches they not growing because they expect their pastors to do all the duties of the church. The fourth factor about a growing church is God exalting worship. Worship is one of key factor for church growth.
I never thought to be a Christian leader. As a matter of fact, I am a person who did not know about God for 26 years. I was the center of my life, and there was no room for God to enter. Even when I was attending church service, I was trying not to be exposed to other church people. In other words, I was the kind of person who was afraid to walk into a life of faith. However, in the past three years, God has changed me in many ways, and showed me so many miraculous things. And, finally here I am. Being a Christian leader seems the most challenging job in the world. I am working as the chairman of a youth ministry, and walking on the path to be a church leader. When God called me to work for the
I enjoyed reading your post. I am in agreement with your statement in Christian coaching promoting greatness and God’s plan in someone’s life. As Catherine defined Christian coaching during the video lecture, “Christian life coaching is a new helping relationship to propel Christian formation” (American Association of Christian Counselors, n.d.). I also believed that it is essential to embrace our Christian worldview when working as Christian coaches because this is what would set us apart from other coaches. In addition.there are many important aspects to consider when working as a professional in a discipline such as this one but the key aspect is to understand our spiritual foundations. In other words, we as Christian coaches need to have
It is not our goal to “trade” members neither with other churches nor to increase our membership by reaching disgruntled members of other churches. Our vision is to reach young people who may not have a “church” background, teach and train them, equip them, and qualify them to go out and win souls. We believe that by doing this, we will build a strong army who can take our community, state, and the world for Christ. We want to reach young people ages 10-18 in our community. According to Warren, “If you want to build a healthy, strong, and growing church you must spend time laying a solid foundation.”
What particular aspects of this chapter have improved your understanding and appreciation of intercultural learning?
Just what is theology? This question can have a wide variety of answers, from irrelevant facts about God thought up by men centuries ago, to complicated theories discussed by scholars. Typically, the average 21st century man does not consider theology as relevant. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Theology by definition has the characteristics of both expounding the truth, and impacting the believer with that truth (Himes, 2011). Therefore, theology and the church are intricately combined, in that the church embodies the revelation of God, and is reality, not theory (Himes, 2011). A personal practical theology must begin with revelation, not the individual (Himes, 2011), and proclaim
First, the church growth movement is a modern solution to the problem of a church that is not growing. As Rainer points out, theology often takes a “back seat” to correct strategies that will yield the best growth results. Therefore, a church that is faithful to the act of discipleship and preaching can be considered a failure
Nations crumble, churches and business fail, families become dysfunctional, children lose their way, and men stray from God for one disturbing reason; lack of leadership. These failures are often because of the lack of instruction, proper leadership, and confusion over what Christian leadership is and how that leadership is applicable to every facet of business and personal life.
We place great emphases with the horizontal relationship and we try to do our best to keep those relationships in a healthy zone, but our vertical relationship must be kept up with as well.
Teachers around the time when Jesus lived thought that learning was such that the people who wanted to learn should come to them to be taught. But Jesus felt differently and rather than waiting for people to come to him, he went out to find them and then chose them to be his followers. He called them disciples and this word means one who learns. But Jesus chose his disciples carefully as we are told in Mark 1:16-20 and also in Mark 3:13-19. In the first passage, Jesus appoints his first four disciples, Simon, Andrew, James and John. Jesus said to them "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." (Mark 1:17) In Mark 2:13-17, Jesus calls up the fifth disciple, Levi who was a tax collector, and Jesus later renamed him
was owed a great sum of money by one of his servants. The king let the
Jesus then goes from speaking to His disciples specifically, to calling out to the whole crowd, in which He goes from speaking plainly to once again speaking in metaphors and riddles. Within this passage Mark uses the words of Jesus to reveal the true cost of discipleship. He tells the crowd that if anyone chooses to come after Him then the condition of that decision is that they must take up their cross and follow Him. So one must ask: What does it mean to deny yourself? What does it mean to take up your cross? And when you follow Him where are you going? So then one must put this into context by looking at what has not yet happened in Mark. When Jesus denies Himself, He is essentially denying the human instinct to self preserve through a fight or flight response. When Jesus picked up His cross, He was deciding to be rejected, tortured, mocked and falsely accused on His way to Calvary where He died for the sins of all. Therefore, if you want to go after Jesus, you must be willing to commit to sharing the gospel with others at all costs, you must be willing to tortured, mocked, and falsely accused and you must also be willing to die, not necessarily for anything that you have done, but so that others can reach salvation. Historically, during this time period, the cross was a well known style of execution in Rome, and so although one reading this might see this as simply a metaphor, it is actually a foreshadowing of reality, which can be seen in the fact that all the
Christ is the leader of the Church, Paul in Ephesians 1:22 said “God placed everything under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the Church” however, God entrusted the authority to lead to his servant whom he set them aside to lead the community. Pastor as a public Leadership is to lead community. A person who is called by God to lead public has a responsibility to be in the community, with the community and for the community. One of best questions raised in the class during public leadership discussion was “How we can be a community pastor rather than just a church pastor?” This really a kind of question we are to consider as pastor especially as rural congregation pastor. In most cases when pastor are called to