Equipping the local church leadership to involve membership in mission focused activities of the Amakhandeni Seventh-day Adventist church

Abstract

Emakhandeni Seventh-day Adventist Church was experiencing the problem of low involvement of membership in evangelistic activities that lead to the accomplishment of its mission. Despite this, it seems there was no intentional member focused mobilization strategy that had been developed to address the issue. After reviewing literature on membership mobilization towards involvement in evangelistic activities and after having scrutinized questionnaires that were completed by the surveyed group, the researcher embarked on an intervention program to alleviate the problem of low involvement of membership in mission focused evangelistic activities at Emakhandeni Church. The program was done in one year and nine months beginning from May 2011. It was a leadership development program which aimed at equipping local church leadership to mobilize church members to get involved in mission focused activities of the Emakhandeni Seventh-day Adventist church. The researcher developed and implemented this program in the church. A year after the intervention program had been developed and implemented, the church realized an accelerated rate of involvement in evangelistic activities that saw 243 baptized at the end of 2012 as compared to 124 that were baptized in 2011. This meant an increase of membership from 711 to 1078.