Our Church is not a social club – we have a purpose. We are part of God’s great plan, helping people to find Life in Christ. This plan is urgent and vital. Without Christ we will face God’s judgement and condemnation. Jesus offers, not just forgiveness, but peace with God, hope and purpose.

Life in Christ comes primarily by the work of God’s Word and Spirit in our lives as we encourage each other to repent and trust in Christ. This is the heart of all of the activities and groups that we run.

Our core activity is the Sunday gathering of God’s people in our three Church congregations. But as these congregations grow, its hard to facilitate deep relationships of trust and accountability. Our mid-week Bible Study groups are a great way for these deep relationships to form and for deliberate discipleship and encouragement to take place.

At present, less than 50% of our Church members are in Bible study groups. Some people aren’t in groups because they don’t have time, some because they fear groups will be too academic and boring (they have ‘study’ in the name after all), and some for other reasons. We believe these groups can be really helpful and so we want to make a deliberate effort in term 1 2025 to invest in the leaders of our groups and to encourage more of our members to join a group.

The plan looks like this:

Rest of 2024 – PREPARE: Survey members to understand the barriers to joining a group and investigate how to make the groups the best they can be with the outcome of Christian growth, not just ‘bible study’.

February 2025 – TRAIN: a month dedicated to training current and potential group leaders, and encouraging everyone to consider joining a group.

March 2025 – RELAUNCH: We’ll relaunch our groups with more support for leaders and hopefully a greater participation rate.

Please pray that this plan to relaunch groups will help us in our purpose of people finding Life in Christ. We look forward to hearing your feedback on all this and working together as God’s people in Picton and Wilton.

Yours in Christ,

Ben

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