Group Four: Reaching out to the Nonbelievers (again)
The first of the three groups that resulted from group two was to meet in the house of a new coworker from the States. We intentionally made it a small group with the intention of taping into the relationship she was building with lost people in the neighborhood. We started with a core of three: the host, our strongest potential leader from the new believers and me. At times it was just the three of us. There were also times when five to seven people showed up.
After several months, however, we decided that we were doing something wrong and dissolved the group into another one to rethink and retool. More on the results of this later…
Group Five: The Battle
The second of the three groups we established was the core that continued to meet where we had started group two. This group was led by our national partner. Just before we had split, this partner had moved from her apartment into a building where she intended to do a refugee ministry for drug addicts coming off the street and receiving Christ. We quickly established a clear line of demarcation between the ministry of this building and the church planting work we were doing. However, this group quickly became a group mostly for the people living in and working with the building ministry. This was also the place where we conducted our monthly joint meetings as there was enough room for all 30 of us. (When we initially divided, we lost several people who didn’t want to do church, but gained more over time.)
We began to experience a lot of problems in Group Five. The leadership was constantly reimagining the vision of the building ministry. They also quickly began to balk at the idea of really being a church. Over the course of the next year and a half we regularly battled a lot of false doctrine that guests from around the world would bring in as they were invited to stay at the building for their time in Dresden. As is often the case, such traveling ministers all brought their own agendas, ideas, and frankly, scams. It was a battle to keep this group focused on the goals and Biblical teaching we had founded it on. In the end, in January of this year our national partner declared that she was no longer going to do Church planting, and she kicked everyone out of that group that wanted to continue in that direction.
As of this writing, this group is no longer working with us. Most of the people we work with have moved out of the building and a new group has moved in. They are made up of people who were kicked out of a local church here in town and they are starting a very narrow, legalistic church for people who are willing to live in and work the ministry of the building.
In this group, we learned that the biggest enemy of new work comes not from outside and people who profess no belief; but rather from within and from false teaching seeking to take over and use a group as an outlet for their own means…
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