Partnering with local churches to find Generals

Ray Vaughn shares what it looks like to turn local churches into centers for training and mobilizing ordinary believers:

So we start training at Sugar Creek, we meet this guy named Otis, he’s maybe in his 50s, really sweet African-American guy with a real good heart for the Lord but has been in the church for about thirty years. We trained about who to share with and what to say, with lots of repetitions and practicing the 3Circles gospel presentation. After this he’s just in tears and says, “I’ve been in the church thirty years and nobody’s ever actually showed me how to share the gospel.”

So we set a small goal: go share the gospel with five people this week. He calls us three days later and says he’s already done that, what else should he do? So we say share with more people, so he shares. He ends up leading ten of his family members to the Lord, baptizes four out of the ten, trains them and now some of them have actually led two others to the Lord and possibly getting baptized in the next month. They meet now in a church in their home; Otis is leading a church with that family and some of his friends every other week, and they’re committed to planting more churches. As a result of this training we’re finding guys like this Otis and just want to release and equip them.

Ray’s always looking for “Generals” who can build teams.

I’m training at Woods’ Edge and all of a sudden this young guy comes out of the training, Angelo and his wife Brianna. They come to me and say hey, we already have a group in our home, in fact when we moved into this complex we knocked on every door. He’s got every hour of his week mapped out, he knows exactly what he’s doing but he has no idea what process to go by, how to multiply.

So you get this general type, the ones God’s already got...now we’re giving Angelo lots of time, even outside of training, because it’s not classroom, it’s relationship. We want to make sure Angelo really gets it, and he’s got it so we’re giving him and his wife a lot more time. Now he’s identifying that group in his home as church and putting 3Thirds into that and now they’re going out sharing every week and getting now an idea of how to multiply.

Listen to the whole interview…