Training church

I caught up with Chuck and Debbie Wood recently and hear Chuck mention the concept of a “training church”. I wanted to know more, here’s what Chuck wrote back,

Steve

We’re doing Training Churches and Timothy Churches.

The training church focuses on people who are already believers who want to be trained on how to plant churches. It’s usually an existing church that has attended one of our training events. Once we identify a group of people who are serious about training, we pick a house in their target neighborhood and begin to meet together. We start off by explaining what the training church is and how we plan to conduct the training. The second week we model the first of the Seven Stories of Hope and have them practice. The third week we’re out knocking on doors looking for houses of peace. We then start an every other week training scenario. One week they are being trained in the training church. The next week they’re training others in the new house of peace that they have found. We work our way through a couple of Stories of Hope and then we begin to work through the Commands of Christ. We do just enough to get them started. Once they feel competent and confident we launch them and then check back occasionally to see how they’re doing. It really goes at the pace of the church that has requested the training. Often leaders take over the training process within 5 to 8 weeks.

The Timothy Church consists of the budding leadership of the next generation of laborers. They are found either in existing churches or the harvest. The primary purpose of the Timothy Church is to model church and to encourage and coach Timothy’s as they plant their own churches in the harvest. If you look it Ken Blanchard’s leadership model this is a great way to get people through the discouragement of a lack of competence in the skills (C2 all the way to C4). It is not uncommon to see Timothy’s plant churches that fade away out from underneath them. Them Timothy Church gives them a consistent source of fellowship and coaching whiles persevering through the process.

Both Training and Timothy Churches use the Three Thirds Process and the primary value is modeling and encouragement.

Chuck

If you want to know more, connect with Chuck.

BTW that’s Chuck on the left. I think the others are two gang leaders he was witnessing to.