Following our first service held
on May 23, 2004, every day has been an exciting
one!
Bread of Life Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
is a
worshipping, studying, praying, and serving faith community.
We’ve said that we will
invite people to do ministry but never recruit or coerce. We will
issue a call to particular visions of ministry, and ask our participants
to pray about them, weigh their spiritual gifts and passions, listen to
the Holy Spirit, and then to express their Christian love in ministry.
If no one has the spiritual gift, and no one hears the call to a
particular ministry, then we will not provide that ministry until
someone is called by the work of the Holy Spirit.
For Bread of Life
Christian Church to be all that it can be, we have a vision of some
“essential” ministries to develop. Each of us is asked to carefully
consider these areas of ministry, pray about them, listen to what the Holy
Spirit might be saying about them, weigh our own spiritual gifts and
passions, and determine if we are being called to be a part of
one or more of them.
|
For Bread of
Life Christian Church to be all that it can be, we have had a vision
of some “essential” ministries to develop. |
Outreach Ministry:
This is a group of people who are willing to explore how Bread of
Life Christian Church will express Christian love to the rest of the
world, locally and globally. This ministry leads us in making decisions about our
financial support for local missions and global missions – and opens us
up to opportunities for hands-on ministry, that we might witness to the
healing power of the Christian gospel in the lives of the neediest of
the human family.
Worship Ministry:
This group helps the minister to plan our order of worship,
encourage lay leadership in our worship services, make arrangements for
music and music leadership in worship, explore ways to make our worship
spaces more sacred through symbols and decoration, coordinate the
physical facility of our worship place, and lead us in making decisions
to boost spiritual growth.
Come and See Ministry:
This group has responsibility for the church’s web site, encourages
our participants to invite others to come and experience our
congregation’s life and ministries, keeps before us the privilege of
telling others about our personal Christian faith, and lets greater
Kansas City know about our work and worship.
Congregational
Nurture Ministry:
This ministry is concerned with internal support of Bread of Life
participants in crisis, including the provision of meals. There is
also an ongoing need to encourage participation in Spiritual Life Groups,
to plan fellowship activities, to keep participants informed
through a newsletter (Email for now – maybe
paper for later),
and to lift prayer concerns to the congregation regularly. Also, promoting other small group opportunities for our congregation, such as
marriage enrichment, parenting classes, and spiritual life retreats
helps to keep us “connected.”
Spiritual Formation
of Children:
This group is responsible for the Children’s Moment
during worship,
for Children’s Church during the last half of the worship services, and
it explores future spiritual formation opportunities for our children
(such as Sunday school, youth groups, and camp participation).
Gifts Ministry:
This group helps us to discover and develop our own spiritual gifts
and ministries. They help us to understand what “Covenant Discipleship”
is, and challenges us to live it. They care for our financial gifts,
giving the Leadership Ministry counsel on being good stewards of those
gifts, and disburses them as the Leadership Ministry requests.
There you have it ... a
vision of a living and ministering faith community has begun to take
form. Has God given us the gifts to undertake all of these ministries?
Some areas have progressed more than others. We continue be in prayer
about what God wants
each of us to be doing and what God is calling
Bread of Life Christian Church to be.
On June 18, 2005, the
following ad ran in the Kansas City Star newspaper in the
Progress Section: Focus on Growth!