Building a fire: growing a group of people who ‘get it’. (Part One)
Next week is The Geneva Push National Conference in Melbourne. Both Renae and I are really looking forward to it. We’ve made some good friends through the Geneva network and it’ll be a great time to catch up with some of them. It will also be a good time listening to God’s word in Acts as Mikey Lynch preaches along with some helpful workshops and seminars on matters pertaining to planting.
One of the things I’m involved in next week is a panel on growing a “core group”. I put together a paper for the conference that talks about some of the things we did and some of things we wouldn’t do again. I thought it might be helpful to share some of it here piece by piece.
Plus I’ve always wanted to be cool and do a ‘blog series’ so this is my chance!
Building a Fire: Growing a group of people who ‘get it’
In 2008 we first started thinking about the possibility of starting a new church in Wollongong.
We began the whole process by getting together a group of people who really got why we wanted to do this and who were willing to give their lives to seeing a flood of disciples across the Illawarra. We wanted a group of people who ‘got it’.
This has happened in four stages. It has seemed to me a lot like how you would build a fire.
We started with tinder, key people who caught the spark of what it was we wanted to do.
Adding kindling meant finding any person who breathed in Wollongong who would meet us.
Then putting on logs meant laying down foundations with those who we had gathered over the year leading up to our launch.
Finally, burn… Launch. Something we haven’t seen yet, but are praying that under God he would cause our church to be a place that burns with a passion to see real, mission-hearted, gospel-gripped, bible-driven disciples right across the Illawarra, Australia and the world…
Dan Godden
Married to Renae. We have a little girl named August. Click here to visit Dan's blog