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:: Personal Discipleship
As a LifeChangers team member, you will faithfully pursue your own relationship with God and take advantage of scheduled quiet times, group activities and training sessions. Your aim should be to better understand and more closely follow the teachings of Jesus.
DBA coordinators and the team captain will meet with you regularly to offer personalized direction and support as needed. Also, weekly readings and group discussions will introduce you to a host of new and relevant ideas about discipleship and ministry. Our goal in this effort is for each team member to become more available to God, more aware of themselves and more capable of making a difference in the world.
Specifically, you will be involved in activities like cross-cultural worship and Sunday School, personal Bible time, group devotions, individual book study, group discussions, and tons of experiences that will stretch, challenge and feed your growing relationship with Jesus.
:: Christian Community
Living and working together, you will faithfully and enthusiastically participate in team devotions, family times, team dinners, curriculum, and team business meetings. Team members pursue the best possible relationships with each teammate. While they may or may not become your best friends, your aim should be to understand, appreciate, and love your teammates, and to actively seek God’s best for each one of them.
:: Service
In pairs or as a group, you will serve faithfully and enthusiastically at several urban churches or ministries each month, seeking to strengthen the church, encourage the staff and laity, and serve the churches’ communities. Team members take their service at least as seriously as any other missionary appointment.
:: Church Partnership
You and your teammates will spend time each week participating in the life of your host churches. You are simply temporary members who are highly motivated to get involved. Besides Sunday morning service you may become a part of a Bible Study, join a choir, help with Sunday School or work with the youth group. Your objective is to become part of God’s family in the neighborhood. While you may or may not feel entirely at home in your host church, you will learn to understand, appreciate, and encourage the pastor and church members.
Your home congregation will support you as their missionary. In addition, some relationships may develop between your home church and your host church.
:: Relational Impact
You will faithfully pray and prepare for spending “unscheduled” times throughout the week initiating and pursuing relationships with as many church neighbors as possible, trying to develop a handful of potentially transformative friendships. Your aim should be to understand, appreciate, and love your neighbors, and to actively seek God’s best for them.
Team members intentionally build relationships with their neighbors in order to move them closer to who and where God wants them to be. In the beginning there may just be two or three of you walking around the block, introducing yourself to people. Later on you may stop back by to ask for prayer requests, to share opportunities, or just to hang out with new friends. You will try all kinds of things over the summer until you find ways of connecting with people that work best for you. The process is not always easy and seldom moves as fast as we would like, but it will work out. Meaningful relationships develop over time. Eventually you might find yourself involved in your neighbors’ lives, helping to meet all kinds of practical needs and sharing your faith in a very natural way.
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