At least two threads have appeared on the blog this week: community and evangelism. I spoke about the fact that often people don’t want to leave the cell because the community is so so rich (how to set boundaries on departure times). Rob spoke about transparency and honesty in the cell. Steve reminded us that we need “new dogs.” Fellowship and community can grow stagnant and we need to be reaching out.

As I’ve led cells over the years, I’ve been so blessed by the transparency and community that takes place. Yet, if we don’t actively reach out, that same community and transparency can grow stagnant. But how do we promote evangelism in the cells? Last Sunday night, for example, I fully intended to use the fourth W (Witness or Works) to ask each person who they were developing relationships with in their oikos network. Yet, I over-extended the WORD portion of the cell and basically “slid” into the 4th W, with barely enough time for it. And I think I can generalize by saying “many” cells don’t sufficiently emphasize the 4th W (I can say that this is very true at Wellspring).

Then on Wednesday in our pastoral meeting at Wellspring we were talking about how to emphasize evangelism. Justin Mulder, the associate pastor, made a brilliant suggestion. He said, “why don’t we change the order of the 4th W for the next several months. Let’s do the WITNESS time before the WORD time to make sure we have enough time for evangelism.” I thought Justin’s comment was excellent. Why not change the 4th W to the 3rd W for a while. In this way, the cell can concentrate on evangelism more, without negelecting the WORD. So we’re going to do this for the next several months. If you’d like to download our last cell lesson as an example of what we do at Wellspring, click here. If you’re not sure about what the fourth W looks like, I include a lot of suggestions in:

Share: Make Christ Real to Others

and

How to Lead a Great Cell Group.

Comments?

Joel