Lost in Translation

Next Wednesday is the first night of our new small group ministry, Grupos Agape. I am very excited about this ministry. If you can believe it, the only experience I have in a small group of a church was in San Antonio, Texas back in 1995, where I attended a small group led by some students who had just gotten back from missions trip in Russia.

It was a great experience. Of course I felt lonely in San Antonio, and the group helped me feel like I had someone my age with whom to talk. I still remember something funny. One night the leader said, "Let's just say that the next 30 minutes is prayer. We're just going to chat, but we'll consider that it's prayer. Maybe we can intersperse (of course I'm sure that was the exact word he used) random thoughts for God." I still get a laugh out of that! It's almost as good as one of my roommates who said that he used the snooze button to measure how long he'd prayed in the morning (yikes, his prayer life was spectacular... from about 4:45 a.m. to about 6:45 a.m.).

At any rate, we're starting the small group ministry with two groups. Pastor Jose will lead one, and I'll lead the other. We'll both have an apprentice whom we'll prepare to lead a group in the future. The goal of this ministry is that we grew in fellowship with our brothers and sisters.

We've come up with a basic vision statement for the church along the same lines as the authors of Simple Church advocate. In other words, each purpose of your church has one ministry that corresponds to that purpose, or to put it in other words, your vision is your process. Our statement (roughly translated) would be: "Growing in commitment... to God in worship, to our brothers and sisters in fellowship, to the church in ministry, and to the world in evangelism." To God in worship corresponds to the Sunday services; to our brothers and sisters in fellowship to the small groups; to the church in ministry to ministry teams (which don't exist yet), and to the world in evangelism permeates every aspect of our church life.