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Relational Orientation
Most of what it means to be truly human and to be genuinely spiritual has to do with the nature of our relationships with God and with other people. We think of the great commandments -- to love God with all of our heart, mind, and strength, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love one another as Christ has loved us.
Jesus teaches us to grow in what we might call "gift love" – love which seeks the good of the other; love which seeks to bring blessing to the other.
For the Christian longing to be like Jesus, learning to love in this way is the deepest, hardest, and most difficult challenge of all. It is a lifelong process. It involves nothing less than a re-creation from the inside out.
It is so hard to learn to love God and others. Not only do our hearts, inclined towards self love and self interest as they are, resist this change, but our culture feeds our inclination toward self gratification. Increased mobility mitigates against that commitment which is such a central part of love. Both frantic lifestyles and physical isolation from one another give us fewer opportunities to develop real relationships.
For this reason Covenant fellowship seeks to have a relational "extended family" approach to ministry within the body. We do not like to think of ministry in terms of church programs. Thus we do not have an organized and structured women’s ministry, men’s ministry, teen ministry, children’s ministry, outreach ministry, or whatever. And so when we think of something we might like to do in ministry we don’t think of organizing a program as a way to do it.
Say for example that a person had a heart for reaching out to young couples. We would not start a reach-out-to-young-couple’s program, but would simply encourage that person to invite over and get to know various young couples. Say a person had a heart for working with children. We would not build a program around that interest but would encourage that person to sign up for nursery, to teach in our limited Sunday School, to participate in a small group where there are lots of children, and to get involved with families who have children.
Say a person had a keen interest in evangelism (as we hope everyone would). Rather than organize an evangelism program, we would work with that person to develop a personal approach to sharing about Christ with people in his or her sphere of relationships. We would pray for them, pray for opportunities to arise for them, and otherwise thrust them back into real relationships with people out there in their life sphere. Thus as you can see we try to put the energy and emphasis back onto the building of personal relationships.
We strongly encourage folks to be involved in the community as volunteers and participants in various ministries and organizations. We have ways of informing each other of what we’re up to without organizing a movement or a formal program. We pray for one another’s community ministry in our public worship. Again the goal is to get people involved relationally with other people.
This is what we mean by relational rather than program oriented ministry. |
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