Church
leaders who attend this spring’s events featuring Tom Bandy are going
to hear a lot about how to renew their churches by refocusing the way
mission and ministry gets done.
But when they leave those events – the Andover
Newton Spring Convocation in May and the 202nd Annual Meeting in
June – they won’t have to go it alone to introduce those changes to
their churches.
Sixty lay and clergy people are currently being trained as Evangelism
Coaches, and they will be available to assist churches that want to
put Bandy’s recommendations into action.
“The goal is to have them ready to work with their own churches and
with clusters of churches in their areas after people are exposed to
Bandy’s work,” said Paul Nickerson, the Acting Associate Conference
Minister for Evangelism and Renewal.
Bandy is considered one of today’s leading authorities on church transformation.
He espouses a way of conducting church work that minimizes the number
of committees and meetings and instead emphasizes small group ministries.
The Evangelism Coaches are going through four training sessions, all
of which are being held in both Framingham and Springfield. They also
are taking part in online training directly with Bandy.
“They get all the training for free, all the materials for free, and
in exchange they agree to work with other churches for the next year,”
Nickerson said.
The Massachusetts Conference has had evangelism associates in the past,
but this year has seen a leap in interest in the program.
“People are so ready for this – they are tired of the same church year,
over and over again,” Nickerson said.
“This shifts the focus from church maintenance to adult faith formation.
It involves helping people identify their gifts, and then sending them
off as teams and small groups to do the ministry they are good at,”
he said. “As that grows, churches can do away with boards and committees
and let the small number of people who are good at administration do
that.”
Beth Barker, a member of the Trinitarian Congregational Church, UCC,
in North Andover said she is very excited about serving as an Evangelism
Coach.
“I have felt the frustration in my church – knowing that people are
sort of burning out, feeling like there are just so many people who
actually do things in the church,” she said. “You get bogged down with
committee work versus work with Jesus Christ.”
“This gives a new perspective on how to focus church life and the business
of the church and how to do it in a rewarding and positive way,” she
said. “It’s such a big concept – it can be exciting to some people and
scary to others It may take a long time to get there, but at least there’s
a start, a process.”
Stuart Maynard, a member of the First Parish of Westwood, UCC, has been
interested in evangelism since his pastor asked him to take his place
at a national evangelism conference three years ago.
He said he’ll never forget the morning he walked into the first session
and was greeted by praise music.
“What struck me was the joy in that room. I thought ‘this is amazing.
These people are happy. There’s a joy here that I don’t know in my own
work and that I certainly don’t see at church at home,’” he said. “I
realized that evangelism isn’t walking around saying ‘brother are you
saved’ – a lot of it has to do with how we grow our churches.”
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