Last night we had our first vine group for our facilitators who have been going through training for the past month and last night was the first of 8 that we will be doing up until mid December. Our goal is to model what a small group should look like over the next 7 weeks. We will share life together and come to know what it means to have relationships of trust and environments of grace to grown in as we seek God together learning to live the life God intended for us to live.
I'm really excited about this ministry. It's a place where people can build one another up in love and reach out to those who have yet to experience the love of Christ in their own lives. The two main purposes of the vine group is edification and evangelism, all the while keeping Jesus as the center of our group.
In my research for doing this training I came across an article by Outreach Magazine that stated the following, which I thought was very interesting,"According to surveys conducted by Lentz through Smallgroups.com, there is a 10% chance that a church visitor will become a member, but if the visitor is invited to a small group, the likelihood of his becoming a church member increases to 50%. These percentages show that new members need to connect with the church community or they won't stay."
That statistic alone is enough or should be enough to get through to some people/churches out there that people need to feel the sense of connectedness or the sense of authentic community for them to be part of the church body and to be functioning or the better word here would be "living" the life God has called them to live.
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