Our training ministry is all about equipping the saints for works of ministry for the building up of the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12). Like everything else this past year our plans for training have been disrupted by a chaotic year. But since our last AGM there have been different things happening. 

In Term 4 of 2019 we were running a Sunday evening Training Time at Reforming House. I wrote and ran some material on the historical reliability of Jesus’ resurrection since the whole of Christianity rest on this being true.

In January of 2020 we had a group of Reforming members attend the Engage Leadership Conference at Belgrave Heights in January. This conference is specifically designed to train and equip people to handle God’s word. It was a helpful time away hearing from the book of Joshua together and being trained to understand God’s word and to teach others to engage with it.

We planned to restart our Sunday evening training time in term one of 2020 but due to everything that transpired with COVID this was put on hold and we haven’t run one this year, but we have been able to have a couple of breakfasts at Reforming House, and God-willing we will kick these off again now that restrictions have been lifted again and we’re able to. 

Looking forward to our plans and prayers for training; my strategic thinking around how we can best do training at Reforming is to incorporate it into our men’s and women’s ministries (which we plan to run every other month). While training courses are helpful, the unintended consequences of running some specific courses can be that it lead us into thinking that we need to do a course before we’re able to start doing ministry. 

My feeling for where we’re at as a church is that we need to equip our men (especially) to have the confidence to simply open up God’s word for themselves, with their spouses, with their kids, with their unbelieving friends and family, and with our church. This is where everything starts when comes to making disciples. If you feel like you need to do a training course before you’ll open up God’s word for yourself, or with your family, or your friends, you’ll never do it. But I want us to have confidence that if we have God’s word and we can pray to him to ask for his help to understand & apply it… then we have all we need! I want us to believe 2Timothy3:14-17… that God’s word is able to lead people to salvation through faith in Christ and that it equips us for every good work.

I want to equip us to open up our bibles. I want us to have a tool that empowers us to do this. It needs to be simple enough that it’s easily implemented, with no prep. If we have to spend an hour prepping to study the bible before we know what to do, we’re not going to be able to do it daily for ourselves. or with our spouse, or with our kids. We need to be able to sit down and do this in the moment.

If you want help doing that, well that is going to be what we’re doing with our men’s ministry now that we’re able to start gathering again! And we’ll all be doing it! Every man who joins us for our upcoming men’s breakfasts will all have the opportunity to lead us in God’s word. If this sounds scary, it’s not. It’s simple. And you can do it. And you can do it with anyone!

Please join me in praying that God would see us all equipped to do this as a church, heading forward.

Make Leaders Article by Ryan Smith | Elder & Teams-Training Coordinator

Ryan loves the Bible and is passionate about seeing blokes loving the Bible too, and leading others to Christ in the Bible.