Tuesday, August 4, 2009

New Members Course

Our church had its new members orientation week 1 session last night with 20 people in attendance and another 4 awol. Great to see so many new faces in the system. Our new program is much more comprehensive than before and it will be interesting to see how people respond to the progress.

We’re trying to work pragmatically with different people following different ‘streams’ dependant on their background and maturity of the faith. This is still a work in progress but at the moment it looks something like this image:








It means that we will have everyone go through orientation – 2 weeks to outline who we are, what we believe and what membership entails. Then they will all be interviewed. Those who are devoted followers of Jesus (perhaps transferring from another congregation) would come easily and quickly into membership. Those who are new to the faith would go through some doctrine course to outline the important essence of the Christian faith to ensure they know what they believe and that they have in fact been born again. They would also complete a spiritual gifts course to ensure they knew how they are gifted. Service is not optional but part of being the body.

We may at some point change this, like I mentioned it is a work in progress, but we believe that we are on the right track...It also means that people who do not get through the system for any reason will go into pastoral counseling so that they can be pastored into the system rather than lost as in the previous way of doing things.

What do you think?

2 comments:

Lenny said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lenny said...

You think like an engineer :)