Are they joking about reaching our Diocesan Mission goal of 10% of the population in Bible believing churches?

Then impossibility of the task forces us all to now do what we should have been doing the whole time. This is especially true in the need to constantly turn to God in prayer, and in recruiting and training the people God has given us in our own churches for the task before us.

Let me give you an example. Our churches often conduct school holidays kids clubs on the church grounds. Now take a normal Sydney street with fifty houses in it. If 10% of the residents were Christian, and the Christians were scattered through the families in the street, something like ten houses in the street would be home to a Christian. That means that instead of running a kids club on church property, we could run street clubs in a home in every street in the parish, inviting our neighbours to join with us. Then we are talking real gospel impact!

Impossible you say? Insufficient resources? How can we ensure quality? Not if we have recruited and trained our congregations properly. But how do we recruit and train so many people.

There are a number of issues here that we need to explore, but I want to think about just two this time.

Firstly; who conducts the ministry? We live in an age where we employ professionals to do things- and it has crept into our churches. We employ the youth pastor to minister to kids. But that is wrong. We all have the responsibility to minister and employing someone should help us do it rather than absolve us of the responsibility. So, the vacation kids clubs needs everyone's help. Why not take a couple of days leave from work to labour alongside others in this ministry?

You may respond that you are not adequately equipped or trained. That is where the youth pastor fits in. It is their job to equip you for this task. Their job is not to do it in your place.

This leads to the second issue; who recruits people for ministry? It seems to me that in recent years we have moved to self recruiting, where someone decides to take ministry seriously and goes off to theological college to get trained. Again, this is fundamentally muddled thinking. We need to be recruiting each other in our churches to ministry and training, so that we are well armed to take the gospel to our world.

In order to help us all minister better we are exploring a new course at Moore College where people are recruited in their home churches, and study while working in the church or part time employment, in order to continue in their church better trained to train others. It seems like this is a great opportunity for many people to make the transition from workforce to ministry, so that many more of us can engage in ministry. But again, the responsibility for recruiting lies in our churches.

The Diocesan Mission goal of 10% requires us all to be involved: in prayer, in recruiting and in training- for the sake not just of the goal, but because it is Christian.