CTT

The past three days, Randy and I have attended Community Transformation Training. For those of you that think we are crazy for moving into the hood of Memphis, at least we have now had training! The lecture/discussion/training was led by a man named Chuck who spends his entire life (with his wife and two kids) going to the most unreached people groups in the world. He sees the most dangerous places on earth, and it is all because of the Great Commission where we are commanded to go, preach, and heal. To give you an idea of how much of the world still remains without hearing the gospel, here is a map showing the progress. Green is where there are growing churches, yellow is where there is formative or nominal church, and RED is unreached. Some people call this the 10/40 window because they mostly sit along the 10/40 longitude, latitude location on the world map.

85% of the world's poorest people are in these red, unreached areas, and they only receive .5% (that is POINT 5) of "missionary" money!

(This image is from www.joshuaproject.net which is a great website to learn about these unreached areas.)

So although we were getting our training from someone who deals with places like North Africa and Afghanistan (and you wouldn't believe all the stories he shared...absolutely incredible stuff), we learned so many practical ways to spread the gospel to the urban areas of Memphis. Here is the basic CTT Strategy that seems most effective (the ABC's)

-A: Access the community (You can imagine this is much harder to do in remote Afghanistan than it is in Binghampton, Memphis. But this is definitely the first step.)

-B: get Behind closed doors

-C: Care for the Needy (we brainstormed many, many ways we can do this in our new neighborhood)

-D: Make Disciples

-E: Empower the church (church is simply a group of disciples, not a big fancy building, so this is where encouragement and strengthening takes place, and then leave to let that group of disciples grow while more can be reached)

Another thing we talked about that I want to mention very briefly is an authentic disciple. First of all, disciple is used 295 times in the New Testament, while the term Christian is only used 3 times. So why do we label ourselves Christians and not disciples? Probably because the word disciple means something so much stronger. The bottom line is this: You have to BE a disciple to MAKE a disciple, and being a disciple means readily giving up everything you have to follow Jesus.

I wish I could share the six pages of notes I took from the past three days, but I won't. We learned many practical ways of talking about the gospel with those who either do not know it, or do not want to hear it (those who are burned from it). I now have nine lessons in my bag of tricks for spreading the word of God.

The encouragement we received in short was this: It is always right to share the gospel.

"For the harvest is plenty but the workers are few...therefore, I am sending you out as lambs among wolves..."