hello everybody!

it’s been awhile since i last posted and that’s because life has been moving in high gear.  there has been a lot of stuff that we’ve been working on for chi alpha at missouri state.

this semester (spring 2009) we are are officially relaunching our small group ministry at campus life.  we spent much of the fall semester working on developing a ministry structure focused on community and discipleship.  we’re now ready to launch this structure and support our young adults who are so passionate about pursuing God and they are ready to explode!

i’ll give you a basic overview of what we’re doing.  in the fall we started our leadership development process.  this involved recruiting students who wanted to lead small groups this spring.  i think we had about 12 students involved in this process.  this semester we are broadening this leadership development process to include student who want to get more involved with our group and those who want to be discipled and trained in leadership.

this leadership development process includes 3 phases of discipleship and training.  we want to make sure that we focus enough of our energy on developing the people who come to us.  in the past and in many other ministries, it’s easy to forget to teach leaders and instead get leaders teaching other people, which inevitably leads to leaders burning out.  in this new process, we emphasize discipleship and training for our leaders and then allow them to go out lead.  we see it as 2 sides of the same coin.  if we teach our leaders, we will end up teaching new people.  this process allows us to fulfill our primary goal of being missional and impacting the lives of all the people around us.

with the leadership development process in full swing, we are now relaunching our small groups.  we are setting our small groups up to be a primary avenue for getting people connected to our ministry.  small groups offer community within the context of people who can build genuine relationships with no strings attached to them.  it an opportunity for christians to build relationship with pre-christians in non-threatening environments.  this allows an open conversation about Jesus Christ and exposes people to God’s love and the genuineness of it.  small groups focus on building genuine relationships with people and teaching the gospel.  these groups will launch within the week.

we are super excited to see what God does through these groups.  we are launching with 5 groups; 3 guys groups & 2 ladies groups.  all of the leaders of these groups are excited to get moving!  pray that God blesses there efforts and inspires them to reach out to the people around them!

alright.  that’s enough for this post.  i’ll write again about other things that are going on.  God bless you all!

-peace
christopher