Our heart at Word of Life is to see young people in New Zealand impacted with the Gospel. We recognise that we ourselves don’t have a very wide reach, even our local churches don’t have a very wide reach, but it is youth themselves that have the greatest opportunity to reach youth! So we want to equip young people to reach their friends for Christ. Here is our mission, vision, and goal as a ministry:
VISION
Every young person in our nation impacted by the Gospel through a friend
MISSION
Partner with local churches to evangelise and disciple youth
GOAL
Cultivating Gospel Advancing youth ministries
The Advance Programme has been birthed out of this. We want to partner with you, the local church, to evangelise and disciple youth, by helping you to cultivate a Gospel Advancing youth ministry, in order to see this bold vision become a reality!
The thing that excites us is to see a youth ministry empowering their young people to be outward focused, to be intentional in sharing their faith to the people around them, and where week in and week out new unsaved friends are being invited into youth group. That is what we would call a Gospel advancing ministry. We believe that that this kind of culture has the power to impact many lives with the Gospel!
From working with youth ministries around the country, we have put together the three components which make up our Advance program. We believe that these three components have the ability to transform the culture of your youth ministry, and would be excited to partner with you to do this.
THE ADVANCE PROGRAM
THE TRAINING
We know that our culture is determined by what we value, and so we have created a training which focuses in on three key values that are essential to creating this Gospel advancing culture.
- Intercessory prayer fuels it
- Relational evangelism drives it
- Leaders fully embrace and model it
We come to you and run this session with your youth leadership team in a conversational style, expanding on this structure, and exploring how it could practically look in your specific ministry environment.
We love this training and know its positive impact on leaders and youth. We have seen that when a leadership team catches this vision and is excited by implementing these values, God does amazing things in multiplying their youth ministry.
THE LEAD UP
This part of the program is key. It is the lead up to the event we will come and run in stage 3. This is where your youth leadership team will take the values from the training and begin to bring them into your youth ministry. You will lead your youth to begin thinking about Gospel advancement, who of their friends they could begin praying for and then invite to the upcoming event.
We see this step as vital, and from our experience it is the youth leadership teams who do this most effectively that see the greatest results in shifting their youths thinking toward Gospel advancing, and have many unsaved friends being invited to hear the Gospel!
THE EVENT
We love running events. We work hard to create events that are fun, new, exciting, and easy for youth to invite friends to! Our events can cater to your venue and size, and we will make sure we do what is best suited for your youth group. But the Gospel is the priority. At every event we bring a clear Gospel message aimed at youth, with an opportunity for them to respond at the end and chat with a youth leader.
We see our events as a tool for you to use to begin implementing a culture of inviting friends, a tool for youth to use to allow their friends to hear the Gospel, and a tool to start faith conversations between youth and their friends.
But we don't want the event to be the end. Our desire is that our event would just be the catalyst to something you can keep building on in the weeks and months following, so that all year round your youth are excited about the Gospel, praying for their friends, being intentional in sharing their faith and inviting unsaved friends to youth group or anywhere they might hear the Gospel. This is a Gospel advancing culture!
“My team and I thoroughly enjoyed the training provided by the Word of Life team. They make relational evangelism relevant and practical; the training is simple but really profound. Left us with a lot to think about.”
Sean Schutte, Matamata Baptist Church
ENQUIRE
If your youth ministry would benefit from the Advance Programme, get in touch with us!
28 Dinsdale Road
Dinsdale, Hamilton 3204
office@wol.org.nz
07 846 2101
PO BOX 15-242
SUPPORT US
Word of Life is a non-profit charitable trust. We rely on the generosity of supporters to continue serving. If you would like to partner with us through support, get in touch.