Ethnographic Analysis Of Discipleship Plan

I chose to do my religious ethnographic study at my home church, Tabernacle Baptist Church in Youngstown, Ohio on Sunday, May 8, 2016. Tabernacle is an 112-year-old historic Black Baptist church located on the lower Northside of Youngstown surrounded by a mixed income housing development, homeless shelter, Youngstown State University, and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. I would say the average age of a Tabernacle member is 55 years old. About 70% of the members at this church are “middle-class” families. Until about five years ago, its membership was almost exclusively middle class. There has seen an influx of membership in working class individuals and students since the arrival of Tabernacle’s young, vibrant pastor, Rev. Christopher McKee, Jr., three years ago. The church is attentive to the needs of this demographic but remains true to its historic Black Baptist church roots. The church previously struggled with this conundrum until it came to the reality that an exclusivist mindset around worship is detrimental to the body of Christ when it did not have a pastor for over three years. The church was dying because no one was welcome to it and it did not have a leader. Though it was difficult, this reassessment was beneficial in making Tabernacle more relevant and welcoming to the community it is blessed to serve.

Galindo analyzes that the fundamental “mission” of a congregation is the same as any other congregation that exists in any part of the world. He argues that though every congregation has a mission and a vision, at the same time, it shares a basic common mission. (43) This reminds me of my home church The First Church of Evanston and my Field Site, The Evanston Vineyard Church. Both churches have a common mission of welcoming people to the church, irrespective of their ethnic, cultural, racial, and economic and, gender backgrounds. The mission is to help people be received in the house of God with due and deserved Christian love so that they feel loved and welcomed. Both these churches encourage church attendees to attend the service and receive the Eucharist.

The Vestry Book of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, Virginia and the Letters of Maria Taylor Byrd to William Byrd III provide examples of how the community ledgers and leadership provided by Early Virginian parishes are responsible for the foundation of our nation’s religious and social structure. The pilgrimage to North American left early colonial citizens attempting to build a functioning civilization on a vast unknown land. Due to the zealous faith of early immigrants, the church flourished much quicker than political, social, and economic systems. Early Virginian religious leaders, equipped with Christian authority as well as the business adeptness needed to maintain a church, extended beyond their religious duties to also resolve social and economic controversies for the wellbeing of the community. In order to understand the roles of the Early Virginian Parish, we must study the church’s roles as a sacred place of worship, community center, economic firm, and political office.

May 1, 2016, the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, located in Greenwood (S.C.) County will celebrate its 142nd church anniversary. Many years Mt. Olive have been a church that loved people, gave without limits and took great care of its members. The last five of those one hundred and forty-two years, I have been honored to serve as pastor of this great church. Although this is a great church, Mt. Olive and many churches like it are plagued with a disease that has slowly, but surely, causing the church to drift further away from God and fall deeper into the ways of the world. This epidemic is known as “tradition”. Churches that are bound by tradition and not led by the Holy Spirit will find themselves missing the mark of what God has called us to do. The bible is filled with instructions for the church, but as Christians and Disciples of Christ, Matthew 28 is the foundation upon which we should be operating on in the church as well as in our lives. The Great Commission challenges us to “go, teach and preach to all nations.” Traditional churches will allow church tradition to dictate biblical doctrine. It will allow the church to argue about who’s right instead of what’s right. Sadly, church success has been based on structure and finances rather than saving lost souls.

57% of Dakotas’ churches have fewer than 50 weekly attendees (and 16% of the conference’s total weekly attendance) while 13 churches contain 36% of the conferences total weekly attendance. In comparison to other conferences, a large portion of the conference’s membership is concentrated in large churches. Since 2005, attendance has declined by 584 attendees-per-year, while the overall population has barely

Crossing the hurdle of staying connected to missional communities requires planning and discipline, which is challenging since missional communities are by nature organic. The “sending church” should take the lead, ensuring staff or elders make regular and frequent contact with the missional communities.

The principles of discipleship can be found throughout the Bible. One of the ultimate goals of discipleship is to become more Christ like which makes Jesus's life and grace an excellent basis for discipleship. Jesus invested in twelve men, the first Disciples, and entrusted them to continue the process. Peter, James, and John were a part of Christ's inner circle and he fostered and encouraged an exalted spiritual life and growth in these three. Paul was a Pharisee who was murdering Christians and then his life was transformed and he became an apostle. He gave his life over to God's purpose not only in a broad perspective, bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles, but also personal. Timothy was a disciple of Paul; Paul was personally involved in Timothy's life. The Great Commission commands the Disciples, in Matthew 28:19, to "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". The Disciples followed the Great Commission and Christianity spread. Believers are meant to follow the

What does the word missional mean, and how is it crucial to the contemporary church? In his compelling work A Light to the Nations The Missional Church and the Biblical Story, published in 2011, author Michael W Goheen, both a professor and a minister, answers these questions, demonstrating that the identity of the church is rooted in missional work. He clearly defines the word missional as being deeply rooted in Scripture, from Genesis in the Old Testament through Great Commission in the New Testament, focusing on some recurring themes. 1) God’s people, the church, shares in His mission.

sacrificed his life for the man. He had a lot of faith in Jesus that

Reflecting upon the readings of Torrance’s Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace and White’s Introduction to Christian Worship will deeply shape how I look at worship in the churches I now order worship for the congregations. I used one of the churches in which I serve to do the Order of Worship assignment. It is a blue collar, small membership church located in a rural, retirement/ vacation area of North Carolina, Lake Gaston. It is also predominately Caucasian. Torrance’s focus is on trinitarian worship, participating in Christ’s communion with God, the Father and Christ’s life, death, and resurrection through the power of the Holy Spirit. And White’s focus is to look at how the forms used in worship give worship its meaning. These forms include but are not exclusive of, time, space, music and art. There are implications for both focuses in the order of worship for the congregation used for my order of worship.

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

Over the years, many models have been developed and implemented to endeavor to make disciples. Some of the models have been effective and others have not. Among some of the most biblical and efficient models are the ones that involve small groups. Within the small groups models, they can be broken down into further detail, such as pastoral involvement, the church’s goal, missions mindedness, etc. In this paper, I will explain my philosophy of small groups in a church and the importance of the relational group in authentic disciple making. I will also explain how missional groups can help the body of Christ move out into the community. Finally, I will summarize my status in regards to living in community with other believers and being missional with that community.

God calls us all to have vocations and there is an array of ones that He might be calling us to. We must at least discern religious life as a potential lifestyle that may suit and fulfill us. In this project I was ask to pretend to be in the mind set of someone who has chosen the call of consecrated life. With this in mind I decided to research the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. Through my research, I immersed myself in studying their website and became familiar with lovely order of dedicated sisters who shared a heritage of much hardship intertwined in the good deeds they have accomplished.

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate how the Sacramental Life or Incarnational Tradition help me focus on my life as a harmonious unit and to illustrate how my life is impacted by my view of worship. In addition, I will give a theological analysis on how focusing on life as a harmonious unit is essential to the myself, the individuals I administer spiritual counseling to and my ministry constituents.

The objective of this report is to contrast and compare the culture of the Calvary Church with Catholicism, which is the religion that I practice. A field trip was taken to the Calvary Chapel in Rancho Cucamonga On February 12 of 2013, in which a clear observation of its services was