My Story

"I want to look at how I believe Jesus created an empowering culture with his disciples"

The Methodist church I began attending at 16, seemed to function on the principle that if you had a vision you had a job. Although I was a very raw and new Christian, I threw myself into reaching teenagers. By the time I was 18, the youth leader had moved to a new area and I found myself running a large youth work.

• Once a month we would run an outreach coffee bar with over 200 attending, where we saw many saved.
• Friday night we would have up to 100 teenagers coming along to the youth club.
• We were also running weekly bible study groups for new converts.

Finance was none existent. I found myself learning how to raise money from the local authority and earning money by running the best discos and jumble sales in the area. Once a month a number of the teenagers would spend the day down at the church building praying and fasting for God to do amazing things. It seemed the only permission we needed was to make sure we did not trash the building.

The teenagers loved the midweek stuff but were bored in the Sunday meetings, even though the meetings were fairly short. A cigarette break after 20 minutes seemed to alleviate the tedium for most of the teenagers on a Sunday morning!. On the whole these were very heady, amazing and also vulnerable days where we had very little oversight or accountability.

By the time I was 21 I qualified as a heating design engineer which doubled my salary. However, as soon as I had qualified I handed in my notice. My plan was to live by faith and enrol at a Methodist bible college in the Peak District. I needed to learn more of the bible, which I had been teaching and preaching with very little knowledge for the past 4 years.

After going to Bible College and working in a Methodist church, Mary and myself moved to a Baptist Church as the full time youth pastor. The leaders were endeavouring to bring the church life into line with New Testament principles. It was great to be a member of a church where the leaders were interested in what you were doing and actively looking after you. I was thrilled to watch young people not only becoming Christians, but also enjoying attending the Sunday church meetings.

Although there was so much of this new environment I was appreciating, I began to notice that a lot of people seemed very passive. They often waited for the elders to give them an instruction or a job and showed little initiative. This was very different to my past experience as a young youth leader. I realized that this passivity was a potential negative response to good caring leadership. The motivation of these leaders was at best to protect people from making stupid mistakes and at worse to keep control of the decision making process.

In my early years as a Christian I had longed for fathering and to be led by leaders who were seeking to follow the Spirit, lead wisely, care and disciple. Now I had it, I also wanted people also to have the personal motivation to take risks and to step out in faith, just like we did in my Methodist Church. I was eager to bring these two philosophies together which I believed would produce a great foundation, enabling a church to have a secure empowering culture.

I want to look at how I believe Jesus created an empowering culture with his disciples. We will Journey through his initial meeting with the disciples to see how he built an empowering culture with them.

My Story

The Methodist church I began attending at 16, seemed to function on the principle that if you had a vision you had a job. Although I was a very raw and new Christian, I threw myself into reaching teenagers. By the time I was 18, the youth leader had moved to a new area and I found myself running a large youth work.