Tomorrow in our student Access Ministry, we are going to start a series in the Book of Nehemiah. This is one of the best books in the Bible on the topic of leadership. The need for training and equipping is increasing as our church is trying to send out more Kingdom workers into the different spheres of society.
The pastoral staff and I are excited about sharing God’s Word at Access Ministry.
Our Access Ministry is our gathering on Friday night for undergraduate and graduate students. As I have written in my previous post about the tension between the church’s and para-church’s role, it is important to explain why we have a Friday night gathering for students.
We have always believed that our Friday night gathering was a place for training. It is where we go in greater depth in God’s Word. It is where we spend more time in praise and worship. It is where we spend extended time in prayer and ministering to one another. We believe that a specialized gathering for students to focus on these components will help in bringing transformation in a person’s life.
Our Friday nights are connected to our small group ministry, since a lot of the small groups would come to learn things together and even do things together afterwards. Our small group ministry is then connected to our Sundays, where we spend time celebrating all that God is doing in our biblical community, hence, we call it Sunday Celebration instead of Sunday Service. Sundays helps us to focus on what God is doing in the bigger picture and it gives people a window to experience our community.
This is why if people just come out to our Sunday Celebrations, they will not get a complete picture of our church. If anything, they will misunderstand what we are trying to do. In the past, people have complained that our Sunday Celebrations have lacked certain things. It is always interesting and quite amusing that these people are usually the ones that don’t come out to our Friday nights or some of our other gatherings. We do everything with a purpose and each gathering is purposely connected to everything else.
It is my hope that there will be many students who will catch a vision for not just coming to “church” on Sundays but they will get a balanced diet of celebration, training, and community so that they will be ready to “transform the world.”