Thank God for encouraging husbands!

Alec read yesterday's blog entry and suggested I was selling myself short. He reminded me that the emerging ministries in our church had been along time coming, and was often a long and painful journey for those involved. He reminded me too that I did have a passion for those people in the shop to meet Jesus and maybe I just needed to start by getting to know them better. My own 'soapbox' that has characterised my ministry for the past 15 years came back to haunt me through his words! And that particular soapbox is? - That we should get to know people's real needs rather than working on perceived ones. When working with other agencies I am always banging on about identifying what people actually need rather than providing programmes that fit a criteria set by someone who thinks they know what they need (if that makes sense). This is no different. I have identified what I think these ladies need, but do not know them well enough to establish what they themselves want. Working with the group's agenda rather than the church's has marked both the success and the struggle of the groups I mentioned - success being measured in transformed lives. My new challenge is therefore to get to know them better, rather than trying to get them together in a group. One person I do know is the manager, (my lapsed Christian from a previous entry) who wants the project to work because this way of doing church could be beneficial to her.