LM2DM Project - Lee Clowning Ministry
Effective church leaders and church members do not occur by accident. Deliberate planning and providing quality training opportunities are necessary for a church to develop effective church leaders and members. Is it possible that the absent of the deliberate and quality training efforts limit many churches from advancing to the next level of the church being influential in their community?
Training church members and leaders should be important goals of the church family. Budgeting money to providing effective timely training classes should be important enough to be a budget line item. This includes providing financial support to the people that develop the training classes and conduct the training classes. Developing customized training classes for church leaders and members is a time-consuming process in addition to requiring an experienced trainer or teacher.
Developing effective training activities requires content knowledge, teaching skill, experience, and time. Developing effective training activities is more time consuming that preparing to teach a Sunday School lesson. Churches do not seem to have a problem with purchasing Sunday School teachers’ resources, pupils quarterly, and additional resources. Purchasing the material is the same thing as paying the company for their employees to develop the material. Paying a person to develop customized training material for church sponsored training classes is similar to paying a company for resource material.
A training class developer may be able to find a book that can be used as the foundation for the training material. This can make the development of the class’ content not as difficult as developing the material from scratch, but it can add additional challenges to the developer. Using a book as the foundation of the class may not actually reduce the overall development time, because the developer has to invest the time to study the book. When using a book, copyright of the author has to be honored when preparing handouts. If a book is used as the actual text of the class and each class member receives a copy of the book, there will typically not be any copyright problems.
If a church wants the results of high quality training classes, the church will typically have to pay to get the high quality classes. It is like going to a department store and buying a suit. The cost of the suit reflects the quality of the material used and the craftsmanship involved in the assembling of the suit.
The future of a church depends on its members.
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