Take A Core Team Deep
By: Bill Easum
What would happen to your ministry if every year you chose a dozen lay people you felt had potential and spent the year discipling them? What would happen if every paid staff person on your staff did the same?

Suggestions for such an experiment:

Begin the time exploring the movement and antics of the church in the Acts of the Apostles. Spend time talking about the results of when the Holy Spirit appeared among the Christians. Look at how the church hunkered down in the early chapters and how it took folks like Philip and Peter taking the initiative to move beyond the confines of the church.

Then begin to trace the outward movement of Paul and how the Jerusalem church tried to stop the movement from going beyond the legalism of the Jewish law. Explore how that compares to what the church does today.

You should now be several weeks into your time together. Begin to pray that God would give your church the will to move out into the Gentile world. In a week or two suggest that on Saturday the group meet for an outing into the Gentile world. Options: a Servant Evangelism project found at www.kindness.com or door to door asking what the people needed most from the churches in their area. Begin to address any ideas you might have uncovered in the door to door. If you did an SE project, have one of the participants tell how meaningful it was to them. Then ask the church to set aside one Saturday a month for such a project for the whole church.

Continue exploring Acts with the group. Watch how new leadership emerges in the birth and growth of the churches. Talk with the group about opening their homes for a small group study like was done in the first century and see what happens. You might be surprised.

Of course this is just one possible way to explore faith with a group of Adults.