God chose us to partner with Him to bring the Kingdom on the earth. One of the ways we partner with Him is through prayer and fasting. But how can we be effective in our prayer? Mike Bickle shares how to abide in the Word and pray from there the will of God. That will lead to fruitfulness. He gives us practical insights and tips how to develop our own prayerlife and make it effective.
Vital for a churchplanter is a strong inner man. We develop this through fellowship with the Holy Spirit. Mike Bickle shares ten prayers you can use in fellowship with the Holy Spirit. He uses the acronym FELLOWSHIP. A few prayers: pray for the Fear of God, pray for the Love of God for God and others and pray for Endurance in difficult times.
“He who abides in me, and I in Him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). The challenge for our lives is to live in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, hear from Him, obey and bear fruit. Without Him, we really can’t do anything. Mike Bickle shares five practical phrases that we can use to enhance our fellowship with the Holy Spirit. He uses the acronymn TRUST: Thank the Holy Spirit, Release Revelation, Use me, Strengthen me, Teach me.
“If the mentoring process is right, in a relatively short time the relationship moves from one of mentor/mentoree to coworkers/peers.” says David Watson. The goal of mentoring is the development of the mentoree into a leader-maker, not into a student. The mentoree has to mature and reproduce. One way to facilitate this is to only mentors people if they also mentor others. Knowledge and skill sets cannot be learned until one is teaching it to others. If we don’t produce healthy leaders we have to evaluate the mentoring process. Read on to learn more how to effectively train leaders!
Have you ever find your bible study group is not multiplying? People are sharing their problems and hurts and are focussed on each other but they don’t really grow in Christ? They don’t really share their faith with others and are inward focussed? Here’s a simple paradigm for turning your bible study group into a disciple making group that reproduces. In a traditional home group, it’s the red that gets left out when time runs out. In a multiplying discipleship group it’s black that gets left out when time runs out.
From time to time it is necessary to evaluate how your mentoring process is going along. Do your leaders train other leaders? Do your leaders grow and bring forth fruit? Do you learn from them? The questions in this post will help you to evaluate your process of mentoring and training leaders.
John White from Lk10.com shares their journey in experimenting with starting new simple churches in the harvest. They use Missional Resource Teams (MRT’s), which are small, regional apostolic teams who are committed to see a vibrant family of Jesus followers planted in their environment.
Jesus said at the end of His life that a follower of Jesus is someone who obeys the commands of Him (Matt 28:18-20). During His life on earth, Jesus gave 50 specific commands to His followers. Several simple church networks are learning together to obey these commands. These networks enjoy the blessings God is giving them in this learning process.
In the New Testament most of the people became followers of Jesus together with their whole household (Greek oikos). Cornelius, for example, was not the only one who became of follower of Jesus. He received Christ together with his whole family. Simple churches in Europe are using the same approach as Paul and Peter. They try to identify where oiki are and how they look like in a Western context. They plant churches among these oiki. This document gives an overview of the oikos words in the Bible.
Jesus and the apostles urged us to love one another, forgive one another, pray for one another and many more. These “one another” commands are of vital importance in starting and developing simple churches. This handout describes these one-another verses in the bible. You can use this tool to evaluate where you and your church are. Read it for yourself or with your simple church. Pray over it that God will help you to obey these commands.