How to start Soul Purpose in your Church

If you are a church that is looking to use Soul Purpose at your church in the future, here are a few steps we have learned over the years to ensure a good start and finish to the process.

1. Find a Coordinator for the Ministry – Before any new ministry is started there needs to be a person who will coordinate the effort. This person should be spiritually mature and able to develop a team of people to carry out the ministry.

2. Build a Soul Purpose Team – This group of people will be responsible to carry out the ministry at your church. There should be people on the team with the following gifts: administration, shepherding, organizing, and leading. They will be responsible for:

• recruiting and training leaders
• publicizing the group start ups
• taking care of registration
• handling the kickoff
• shepherding the group leaders

This team will want to meet for several months on a regular basis to take care of all the planning and preparation for a good launch.

3. Recruit Leaders – In looking for leaders you will want to have people that are spiritually mature, have a vision for disciplemaking, are willing to be a facilitator and not be a teacher, and have a shepherd’s heart. You will only want to use experienced leaders for Soul Purpose. The worst thing you can do is put a person in a leadership position who is not qualified to lead. It is better to have people wait to get into a group then have someone lead who should not be leading. We have found the number one reason for groups to fail is the lack of leadership.

4. Leaders Go through the Training – In order to prepare to lead a group, the leaders will have to do the following: 1. Read through the book, Transforming Discipleship by Greg Ogden and, 2. Listen to the four messages available on the Soul Purpose web site. These are found in the Leader Training section. When completed it would be good for them to get together with the other leaders and discuss the book and the messages.

5. Leaders Pray and Invite People to Join them – We have found that the best groups are those where the leader invites people from their sphere of influence to join them, rather then just having people sign up. The leaders will have already received instruction on how to pray for and invite people and will now need to do it.

6. Announce Soul Purpose to the Church – You will want to use every means possible to let the people of your congregation know about Soul Purpose whether that be a brochure, bulletin announcements, informational meetings, testimonies from up front, posters, etc.

7. Order your Materials – Once you have your groups filled and you know how many people are going to be using Soul Purpose you will want to order your materials.

8. Group Kickoff – This can be done with all the groups together or by a single group. The kickoff is a time for relationships to be established, for the participants to get a fuller understanding of what Soul Purpose is and how the process is going to work. We have a DVD prepared for you to view at the kickoff that will give the participants a clear view and vision of what Soul Purpoe is about. You may order the kickoff DVD any time. It is located in our Module 1 Materials section. View the document under Leader Training that details the kickoff.

9. Leader In-Service – Once the groups are up and running, we would encourage you to put in place some type of coaching for the leaders. It may be a periodic call to check in with them, a monthly meeting, or even a quarterly gathering of all the Soul Purpose leaders where you talk about any problems, provide further training and pray together.

10. Commissioning Service – At the end of the process you may want to have a commissioning service for those who have completed the four modules. This is a time to celebrate their hard work and to commission to their area of service. There is a document in the Leadership Resources that details what this could look like.