Sam Farina

      Sam is the national leader for training and coaching in the Assemblies of God. Sam has been an evangelist, pastor and preached in many different events. He coaches people now not only in a church but also in a corporate level. He coaches on conflict and dealing with it. After going through a tough time in his life he was driven towards coaching. He had only been exposed a little bit to coaching before this and he really went towards it after this situation. There are two different types of transitions in life which are reactive transitions and developmental transitions.

      The first activity we did in class was to have four cards that had quotes on them. We were instructed to try and trade our cards with other class mates in order to find our favorite quote that we would later on read to the class. This activity was done to help us communicate with others when there is something that we want and they do not want to give up.

      We then started to list several positive things that may come out of conflict and negative ones. A big positive result was that it provides an opportunity to grow. A book Sam highly recommended for us to read about conflict is "God Meant it for Good" by  RT Kendall. In this book Kendall talks about how when Joseph spoke against the people who were involved in the conflict is cost him two more years in jail. So Sam never spoke out against those who he had a situation with a long time ago.

      A way to have positive conflict is to turn it into a win-win instead of a win-lose situation. When we are true disciples of Christ then we decide that we are going to live our lives looking to have win-win in our conflict resolutions. So that each side can have a win. When we can take someones perspective or ways of how we can reach out to them we can have solutions to problems or conflict. The greatest way to reach out is to ask for forgiveness.

      Opinions to someone who is speaking them is the fact to them. When you can speak back what someone has said in terms or fact and opinion so that you can show them that you were listening. When we let someone know that you see and hear their emotions is takes all the energy out of the emotions and it diffuses it.Values and beliefs are what produce behavior. To see what values they have and acknowledge them you will understand what will drive their actions. To recognize what is important to them will bring about positive results to conflict.

***Anything that we can make cognitive we can take the energy out if it.***

      Whenever we can hand something back to the other party then we can show them that it did not sit well and they should have done something in a different way.

When we are dealing with conflict we want to move it towards positive conflict. If we can teach the people we are discipling

Perspective taking
Creating solutions
Expressing emotions
Reaching out

Pastor Rodney

      Pastor Rod grew up in Ohio and in a small baptist church. While at a party in high school he felt the Lord calling him to live a life of ministry. He was going to go to Akron university and study business but God called him to come to VFCC. He got a degree in pastoral studies and minored in youth. He knew that whatever God wanted him to do he would do it so he felt more of a generic calling to do ministry. Out of college he went to work as a youth pastor back in his hometown where he went to high school and he ministered to students in those schools. From there he went to Lancaster, then Reading and then finally in Hazleton Pennsylvania where he took his first senior pastorate.

      His first passion has always been people and even though he ranks as a lion on the animal scale of personality he is very graceful. He loves to show that grace to people even when he has to be in peoples faces.

      When it comes to discipling people he believes that one on one is the best way to minister. This could be with two or three other people also but he always wants some person in his life that he could mentor and pour into them. Leaders have grown from within his church by doing it this way. He beleives this is the most effective method to disciple. One of the programs that he uses to disciple people is called Follow. It was written by Daniel McNaughton and Bryan Koch. One of the important things to teach people is that there is a difference between being a church attender and what it means to be a follower of Christ. In this book there are seven attributes of what it means to follow Christ:

The first one is to learn to be with Jesus, meaning spending time with Him.

The second attribute is to learn to listen. We need to listen to God and follow Him. Not doing our own thing.

The third attribute is learning to heal. Everyone has something they have to heal from and until they do so they won't be able to help others.

The fourth is called learn to influence. We are called to be influencers and this will be towards Christ or away from Christ.

The fifth point is to learn to love. If we don't love everything we do is worthless. Love for people is what will motivate your ministry.

** Ministry is not about your personality or your abilities, it is about do you love people. In order to do pastoral ministry you have to love people. It takes a divine love to do ministry.**

The sixth attribute is learn to pray. Prayer is the key. Unless we have a relationship with God then everything is all rhetoric and social.

The seventh attribute is to learn to manage.

       One book that pastor Rodney recommends for us to read is called Just Walk Across the Room by Bill Hybels.

      ** If we can get people just one step closer to God then we are discipling people. **

      We are going to either bring people closer to God or lead them away from God. Leading them to God is called discipleship. This doesn't start only when people give their lives to Christ but it is along the journey. It happens along the way of bringing someone to Christ.

Philip of Bethsaida

            Hi my name is Philip of Bethsaida. I am a follower of Christ, also known as one of the disciples. I actually was the first disciple who was asked to follow Christ by Jesus himself. I will never forget that moment it changed my life forever. I was in Galilee when he approached me. This was finally Him, the one we had been waiting for since Moses wrote about Him in the book of the law. The prophets wrote about him also. This was Jesus of Nazareth; he was going to be the ruler of Israel. At least this was what I only thought at first. I thought that Jesus was going to take His rightful place on the throne and rule like the prophets had said. So he walked up to me and simply uttered two words that would draw my interest and lead me on a path that would cost everything. Jesus came up to me and said, “Follow me”. This was the promised messiah and I could do nothing else but follow him. I immediately ran to my friend Nathanael and told him that I had found Jesus of Nazareth. Now my friend Nathanael was a bit skeptical of this and he asked me if this could be true, if something good could even come out of Nazareth. I told him all I could say which was come with me and let’s see if this is true. This was the first time that Jesus did something that would astound me. Jesus said things to Nathanael that no one else could possibly know. Jesus told us that if we thought that was impressive we were going to see things even greater than that. This was such an important day for me. Once I knew I had found Jesus I had to tell my friend and invite him along for the journey.

            I witnessed one of the greatest miracles to happen ever in history. Not only was I amazed at what Jesus had done but also it taught me a lesson for my future ministry. Jesus had been preaching on a mountainside to thousands of people. You could see people all over and Jesus asked me a question that confused me. Jesus asked me where we could buy bread for all of those people to eat. Where could we buy bread? What was he talking about? There is no way we would have enough money to feed all of those people. I told Jesus it would take over half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each to get one bite. You see I was already considering how we could take care of all of these people. This is something about me that Jesus knew and he was teaching me a lesson by asking me how we could feed them. It is important to take care of others. Jesus then did the unthinkable. He then took five pieces of bread and two fish and multiplied it to feed everyone there, it was 5,000 men plus the women and children weren’t even counted. What an incredible miracle. Jesus promised Nathanael and me that we would see incredible miracles and this was certainly one of them. What a lesson I learned about faith and trust. Jesus took his time to include me in that miracle by asking me about where to buy bread for everyone. I was from that area and I thought he was asking me because I might know where the bread would be. He was showing me that he could provide the miraculous. This would come to help me so much later on in life when times seemed difficult and I wasn’t sure where provision would come from.

There were times in my life when I would have different people coming to me looking to meet Christ. There was one time when a group of Greeks came to me during the Passover festival and they wanted to meet Jesus. I made sure to care for people when I was around them and this allowed me to develop relationships with people. All I could do was to bring them to the Messiah when they would come to me.  If they weren’t coming to me then I would go to them. This was what would drive me. I wanted people to know the Messiah.

There was this time very soon before he died when he taught me the greatest lesson I ever learned. Jesus would take time to teach me directly and everyone else around me. I asked him to show us the father and that it would be enough. That is all we wanted. You see this whole time I thought that Jesus was simply the King of the Jews who had come to rule over the earth. I didn’t realize that he was God that whole time and now Jesus would bring me to God like I had done for others. Jesus responded to me by saying that he was God. I was taken aback by his direct answer to my question. It made my question almost seem foolish. See It is important to see God for yourself and not just bring others to him. I was expecting to rule with Christ and forgot to acknowledge that God had been walking with me, performing miracles and teaching me this whole time. I was amazed that I had missed something that was so apparent and right in front of me. My focus was on the wrong thing the whole time. In his way of teaching Jesus opened my eyes to the truth. His answer was almost like a rebuke to my question but the time was coming where He would leave us and He needed me to understand that He was God. I dedicated the rest of my life to leading people to coming to know Him. To see the God I had walked with and who was the Savior of the world. Jesus was Christ the Messiah He was God.

Pastor Interview about Discipleship Making and Equipping Ministry

            I sent an email to an old friend who is a youth pastor at my church back home in Boston. I still call Boston home even though I live here in Audubon, PA because that city is always in my heart and I plan on ministering to the people of that city and dedicating my life to that. I emailed him because I wanted to know what some of the strategies he had in place were for making disciples and equipping them for ministry later on. I asked him some questions because things had changed since I was last involved with the youth ministry about 3 years ago. He has had time to grow and place some programs in place to reach the young people of the North Shore of Boston. My friends name is Clark and he is the youth pastor at Calvary Christian Church in Lynnfield, MA. Lynnfield is a suburb of Boston. I went to church there but drove out from the city.

           

            The first question I asked Clark was what the process he had in place for making disciples. This is a real basic question that is at the foundation of how he is helping people live their lives as followers of Christ. Clark shared with me that once a student gives their lives to Christ on a Friday night at youth group or on a Sunday morning they are presented with the opportunity to join one of the ministries and classes they offer at the church. Some examples of these ministries are drama team, worship team, Sunday school and Wednesday bible study. An up front ministry like worship team is not something that is for a new believer. The students are encouraged to join either the bible study or Sunday school as a place to start for them to learn about Christ.

            The next question I had for Clark was dealing with what he biggest challenge he faces on making disciples. The biggest challenge he said that he faces is consistency. The students have a tough time going on a consistent basis to these ministries. The reasons may vary from not being able to get rides to having prior commitments to other things. The students may be parts of sports teams at school or another extra curricular activity that they are a part of. This can be frustrating at times because they may not place the priority on discipleship like Clark does he says. He still reaches out to them though even when they cannot make it out every week. This lack of consistency creates difficult in running some of the student ministries also because only a few are committed and end up doing a lot of the work and burning out a bit.

            Some of the ways that Clark prepares the students for ministry is through coaching a resources being made available to the students for whatever they need. One of the ministries that are highly encouraged is the bible clubs in the local schools. Clark has a program established to train leaders to run bible clubs at their schools and whatever materials they need the youth group provides it for them. This can include Bibles and workbooks. Students who want to be involved in the audio/visual dept. get a full training on running the lighting and sound board. They are never put into a situation where they do not know what is going on and thrown into ministry. Students are given the resources they need to excel and grow in ministry.

            When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of making disciples and equipping students for ministry Clark says that the quality of the disciples are the ultimate measuring stick. He said “If our students are passionate about Jesus, falling in love with the Word, and ministering to people...we are being effective.” The fruit that the students begin to bear is the way to see if the ministry is doing its job of making disciples. When they are inviting friends and true change is apparent in the way they live their lives.

            These are some of the ways that Clark disciples his students at Calvary Christian Church. It is interesting to note that numbers was not one of the criteria he states as what is success. The youth group though has continued to grow and it has been a result of the processes that have been put in place to minister and disciple to students.

Who is Jesus to Us?

            This past week in our class we did an activity, which involved writing down on a piece of paper real quickly who Jesus was to us. This was meant to show us how all of us have a different perspective on parts of Jesus person. Typically this has to do with our own personalities and things that we seem as important traits and characteristics of a human being. After seeing how different the two other guys in my group’s responses were I thought to myself this would definitely affect the way I preach from now on in my life. Just because I see Jesus, as having certain traits that stand out does not mean the person right next to me see those as standing out. This is very good knowledge to know and not a bad thing whatsoever. This will help me to do a better job of describing different aspects of Jesus to different people. Everyone in a different circumstance and problem looks to Christ for an answer that may not necessarily be what I need.

            We watched a video that Philip Yancey put out that is called the Jesus I Never Knew. This video is based on a book that he wrote and it talks about the ways that we see Jesus. Media has done a big job in shaping our view of the man who walked this earth over 2000 years ago. Along with artwork that has been painted over the centuries we developed a bit of a western view of who Christ was and what he looked like. This short clip showed different movies that portrayed Jesus in different ways to demonstrate how people might view him n a certain way because of what they saw in a movie. It was an interesting display of how different our views of Christ could be because of movies and such. This needs to be taken into account when we teach about Jesus because we can become stuck on a certain view. The activity and video did very much to help me see this and be very careful not to only show Jesus the way I see him but to look beyond my worldview and look to what others may see.

Certain stereotypes of Jesus need to be broken because of what people have seen and deemed to be who Christ was. I hope to be able to do that through correct teaching. This class we just had helped me to see this.