The Seminar

Purpose:
Becoming Redemptive is a seminar for local churches empowering them for evangelism at home and for missions throughout the world. My wife and I conduct about one of these seminars every month depending on our other commitments. We have seen significant change in almost every church with whom we have worked. We have seen churches begin new evangelistic programs to reach unbelievers in their own communities. Some churches have written a missions policy and sent out their first missionaries in order to open other areas of the world to the gospel. Missions-sending churches have gone beyond sending to becoming redemptive in their very hearts, at their very core. They become what Darrell L. Guder calls missional churches (Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, Eerdmans, 1998).

Becoming Redemptive gives practical answers to these questions:
• Why have many churches become stagnant?
• How can a stagnant church become a redemptive fellowship?
• How do redemptive churches organize themselves for outreach at home and abroad?
• How do churches select effective missionaries?
• How do redemptive churches strategize for ministry at home and throughout the world?

The seminar is divided into four parts (click on a section for more information):
1. From Caterpillar to Butterfly: (Becoming What God Intends You to Be)
2. Becoming a Redemptive Church: (What is its spiritual fabric?)
3. Organizing the Church for Evangelism and Missions: (Mission ministry and mission guidelines)
4. Strategizing for Missions as a Redemptive Church: (Six strategies, wise use of money, short-term missions)
 

Arrangements:

Frequently one church sponsors the seminar and invites areas churches to participate. The seminar typically occurs on a Saturday followed by a Missions Sunday at the local hosting congregation. The Van Rheenens conduct these seminars free of charge in order to equip local churches in local evangelism and world missions but hope that traveling expenses to and from the conference can be met by the local hosting congregation.
 

Heritage:

The Becoming Redemptive seminar was developed during the Spring semester of 1999, Gailyn Van Rheenen was on faculty leave to write a book guiding churches to become redemptive fellowships. Before beginning to write, he and his wife Becky did research by surveying a random sample of local churches (with Bob Waldron of the Missions Resource Network), interviewing leaders of 75 local churches, reading a wide array of literature in the areas of spiritual nurture and church development, and teaching seminars in eight congregations transitioning to become evangelistic, missionary churches. This book, authored along with Dr. Bob Waldron, is now at the press and will be Status of Missions in Churches of Christ (ACU Press, 2002).

Mission is the lifeblood of the church. As the body cannot survive without blood, so the church cannot survive without missions. Without blood the body dies; without missions the church dies. When Christians live out and articulate their faith, they establish their rationale for being--their identity and purpose. An unexpressed faith, like an unused part of the body, atrophies. A generation that does not teach others soon forgets the significance of turning from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan to the kingdom of God.

"A Church exists by mission as fire exists by burning."
- Emil Brunner

A redemptive church perceives the mission of God as the core of her identity by understanding, prioritizing, and implementing God's purposes. Believing that the world is lost without Jesus Christ, the church equips itself to communicate the gospel both locally and globally.