Group Life Conference Session 5 – How Community Transformers
(Pre blog notes: Everybody needs somebody sometime. Great reminder about a friendship that I need to work on.)
This session was led by Miles McPherson.
How come Christians are not lined up to help people escape from fire?
– We have to redefine our evangelistic starting point as God’s response to a broken world.
The gospel is a person – Jesus! God not only wants an experience with you. He wants you to share this to the world.
Exodus 3:6-10 Our communities are crying out. The church must respond to the cry of the people in the community. We need to first LISTEN to the cry.
– Identify God’s response to the brokenness of your own life.
What is your God experience? What is God doing in your life? Surely, you (I) are not fixed. Surely, God is still working on you. Small group leaders are not fixed and perfect.
As leaders, are we transparent to our groups?
If we realize how God has worked in our own lives, we will have a new perspective for sharing God’s amazing grace and power to others.
– Identify and love the brokenness in your church.
Our groups are breading grounds for helping people through their brokenness.
– Identify and love the brokenness in your community.
We need to find the people in our communities and listen to the tears.
What is going on within a 10 mile radius of our church? Where is the brokenness? We need to take Christ’s compassion out to the community – bars, strip clubs, adult book stores, women’s centers, jail, ….
Let me go to the bar and drive people home who are drunk.
The community wants this interaction, they just don’t know how to initiate it.
– Reestablish your evangelism priority.
It is a non-negotiable that you love your neighbor.
God created the church for the people who aren’t in it yet. (We turn it into a country club.)
God wants to bless us so that we have overflow to give away.
STOP, LISTEN, and GO!
Don’t waste the opportunity to turn people into a Jesus follower (not a Christian).
Keeping it to yourself will kill your ministry or your small group.
Take a risk!
….
Miles McPherson was hilarious and great!
Thus ends the conference. I hope to have a couple more posts to recap, so stay tuned until the next post…