On a role

I am 10 months in to my new role as Minister of Education and Assimilation and it’s been a challenging and rewarding process.  At the beginning I hadn’t really gotten traction because I was still doing the youth thing. But at the end of December, David Parrish came on board as my intern and he has done a great job with the student ministry, and has freed me up to focus on what I really love doing – training and coming up with strategies to bring people to the next level from where ever they are.

So in the last 5 months we’ve been able to accomplish several things through my new position and I’m pretty stoked about it.

• We now have SS teacher training meetings where teachers share what’s working for them and bring up issues that need handling.
• We have also started a resource accountability program where the teachers are reading books, listening to CDs and podcasts or going to Associational/state training and getting credit for it. There’s a new excitement among our teachers who are running with this.
• We have also started discipleship at the church. Our first discipleship group was Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. We had 120 register to take the class and the group reduced their debt by $162,000 and saved about $35,000 in the 12 week period that we took the class. We’ll be offering this again each year and starting up more discipleship groups in the fall.
• We began a Discovery class that meets for four weeks and takes place during the Sunday school hour. It is for new members and interested guests. We’ve had two sessions so far and had about 30 people go through the course. We’ve had 7 folks join the church through the program and great feedback from all who have taken the class. It’s probably one of my favorite things that I do. I enjoy meeting new folks in our congregation and helping them understand what it means to be a Christian, Southern Baptist, and member of our church and Sunday school.
• And we’ve revamped the church website.  It has a ton of great apps and interactive ministry helps. Check it out when you have time. http://www.fbcvr.com/