Reframe Conference
Our second Reframe Conference has come and gone. It was a great time of being in God’s presence and learning from him through his servant Bruce Bennett. Bruce helped us to see hospitality in a new way, pushed us to keep seeking persons of peace as the foundational way to start new churches, and taught us his Membership Mobilization system.
Bruce’s system has produced 9000 new churches and 1.3 million new believers in the past twelve months. In conversation with Bruce I realized that this system has reached many more people than the 1.3 million people that he talks about. He said to me that they have added 1.3 million new members but they have reached many more people in their churches that that. The 1.3 million number includes only those who have joined his churches.
Bruce told us that most of those 1.3 million new members have come through his Member Mobilization program. This is an eight week program that assists people in your congregation to gather their own group that can become a church plant. This material is available on the Reframe website, including the power point presentation that Bruce uses to teach Member Mobilization.
Bruce also met with a small cohort of persons who wanted personal coaching in creating their own plan for multiplication. This was a group of about 12 people who met with Bruce early in the morning and through the lunch break.
We were honored to hear from Bruce again. The purpose of Reframe Conference is to give God an opportunity to reframe our vision and thinking so that he can use us for rapid Kingdom expansion through creating a church planting movement among us. We have much to learn from Bruce about this.
I also got to spend the three days after conference driving Bruce around New York State so that he could meet with potential ministry partners. This was a great opportunity for me to spend time with Bruce and to serve him. I am thankful to God for that opportunity.
Strategy Coordinator Training
What is the next step for Acts 12:24 Churches in producing a church planting movement (CPM)? The next step is to train several Strategy Coordinators (SC) in the strategies it takes to produce a CPM and to identify the resulting behaviors that we need to produce in believers.
Strategy Coordinator training will take place August 19 – 21, 2013 at the Peach Orchard Retreat Center in Burtonsville, MD. The expectation for each person in the training is that after the training they will form their own class of 2-5 people and coach them through starting their own church by teaching how to implement the nine strategies. At least two of the people in your class should be people that you have identified through a person of peace strategy.
If you are interested, please contact David Harvey at Dharveymar@aol.com.
Family Discipleship
Christian households are a necessary part of the CPM in the US. I made this case in my presentation at Reframe Conference. Godly households are the place where we learn the values that make a CPM possible such as faith, faithfulness, encouragement and hospitality. Godly households precede the church and even the nation of Israel. They are God’s primary plan enabling us to live out his holiness on earth. We will develop this further in future editions of this update. Here are some places to go to begin to understand this concept:
The book I referred to at Reframe is: “The Spontaneous Spread of Home-Discipleship Christianity,” by Henry Reyenga. The theme of the book is how parents can disciple their children into a daily reproducible walk with God. The book is available on Amazon.
Here are a few quick links from a search on “family discipleship:”
http://www.familydiscipleshipjournal.com/index.html
http://familydiscipleshipchallenge.com/
https://familydiscipleshippath.wordpress.com/
http://heartofthematteronline.com/precept-family-discipleship-plan/
Be with Him
I came home from Reframe with a deep sense that God is doing something significant among those who have a passion for Rapid Kingdom Expansion in the U.S. But I also came home with a sense of the necessity of being prepared for opposition in the spiritual realm. The Bible says that we have to put on the full armor of God so that we can take our stand against the devil’s schemes (Eph. 5:11). I am certain that as we get closer to a breakthrough that will enable us to see Rapid Kingdom Expansion the devil is in fact scheming against us. When the day of evil comes, we will need to be prepared to stand our ground.
The suggestion of the Scripture is that we need to be prepared in advance for spiritual attack, not wait until it happens. I want to encourage everyone to spend more time in prayer; taking time to pray for one hour and to be involved in prayer groups through the Acts 12:24 prayer initiative. If you want to discuss doing a regular prayer conference call you can contact Al Sones at AlSones@aol.com. Al has been doing this for several years with the pastors of the Wilkes-Barre district.