Courtney Lien

One thing that I can learn from Courtney is her patience in waiting for God to provide her with a position in ministry that she had a passion for. She gave up trying so to speak and trusted in God to lead her and possibly open up a position for her. It can be hard to be patient sometimes waiting for a position that you are passionate about sometimes. But it showed her humbleness in doing the job that she had been doing in administration. It shows that being patient and serving in the little things that God will honor you in that. In their approach to outreaches and discipleship I like their approach of getting away from the big, huge events of attracting people. That I think sometimes can be a waste of time, money and energy sometimes. But they have realized that they need to focus on people and discipling them. The idea of getting away from outreaches scares me a little, if they are not focusing on the community or the youth of the area. I think that it is very important for small groups to be a part of churches. But maybe they are putting too much emphasis on small groups. I think small groups are important, but they are just a part of outreaches and ways to disciple and outreach people. But I think sometimes small groups have too much emphasis put on them, there seems to be a lot of interests in small groups in the church today. But with all the emphasis on small groups they forget the other aspects of relationships between people. Small groups focus on intimate space, but forget the areas of public, social and personal space. People connect healthily through all four space public, social, personal and intimate. I think some churches focus so much on the two extremes of public spaces and intimate spaces in small groups. When there doesn’t always need to be so much focus on just one of the spaces at a time. With all the small groups, the church or youth group can be divided sometimes and are not unified.

David Crosby Jr. Pocono Community Church

I loved the focus of Dave Crosby’s church, to reach out and their commitment to reach the lost. I love their so practical ways to reach the community and just show love to the community. They had a vision of commitment to the lost and that’s what they focused on, their vision, reaching the lost. Again I saw a humbleness in a great leader, one of the main things I have been seeing over the past weeks in this class. He gave no credit to a specific recipe to doing things in the church or a specific model. But instead just want back to basics and relied on them, things like prayer. They built the church out of prayer and a love for the lost and love for people to grow in their relationship with Christ. One thing that he also said that encouraged me was that there are no philosophies that are the same in church planting and that any philosophy can be used as long as it is Biblical. I think that is important to be realized in church planting today, that with all the books out there and models of church planting and growth. He realized that no set model was to be relied upon, but only reliance on God and soaking the church in prayer. The idea of having a very diverse church I think is a good idea today in trying to reach many different people. The idea of having 33, 33 and 33 percents of people in the church, of those investigating Christianity, those just saved and those deep in their Christian walk. People today are looking for ways to incorporating all three different groups and reach each effectively. But I think that first needs to be an awareness and intentional focus on each group balanced in their message. I have been seeing humbleness in many speakers these past few weeks and have been realizing that that is a key aspect in ministry and especially in church planting. And also the need to love the community and reach them first before building their own church buildings even is a great idea.

Dan Miller Back Mountain Harvest Assembly

The one message that really stirred in my heart after hearing Dan Miller’s passion and the interview with him was what he said about the church’s role in the community. He said that “if you want to change the community, you can’t think about the church first, you must think about building the community.” What I have been hearing over these past two weeks with Gerry Stoltzfoos and this week in Dan Miller is really a heart and passion for those who aren’t in the church, but just for people in general. I think that’s is what sometimes we as Christians struggle with is what to reach people and love them, but wanting to do it our way, bringing them into the church first in order to minister to them. But I think now with the whole emerging church and the idea of being missional we are realizing that we need to meet and reach people where they are at. We don’t need to bring them into the church first. These past two week I’ve always seen the idea of reaching people who may have been hurt by church or don’t really want anything to do with the church because of their presuppositions about the church. And I think that is important and always I think being recognized in the idea of the missional movement. The idea of reaching people where they are at and just loving them, breaking down their presuppositions about the church that they may have had. And we do this by making them realize that we just want to love them and share what God has done in our lives with them and we don’t want to mold them into the image of the church and bring them into where we are comfortable, the church, in order to minister to them. My heart and passions have really been moved these past few weeks in realizing the need for church planting and the need to have the church re-imaged in a sense and think that it is very vital for the church to continually be the best means to change people’s lives.