1. Pastoring of Pastors: creating small groups of pastors and their spouses that get together to support, encourage, and build up each other’s lives and ministries. A church can only grow as much as its pastor. Without the stimulation and accountability that pastoring of pastors provides, pastors easily become stagnant and thus vulnerable to temptation, to the tyranny of the urgent, and to not being teachable.
2. Pastoral Team: the pastoral team, led by the pastor, is the heart of the church. It models and lives out the vision of what the church wants to be. It is small, made up of three to six people. They support the pastor and lead the ministry and pastoral networks of the church. The ministry network is led by the coordinators of various types of ministry teams. The pastoral network is led by the coordinators of various types of pastoral groups. MAPI, specifically, works with three types of pastoral groups: leadership groups, pastoral family groups, and support groups for restored lives.
All of this can be better visualized through the diagram below.
3. Ministry Teams: every person is a minister with spiritual gifts and a divine calling. However, people do very little for the Kingdom by themselves. After joining a family group, they should be attentive to the types of passion that develops in them as they serve and love others, thus discovering the area to which they are called. The pastoral leaders should keep their eye out for those who demonstrate the gifting and anointing of leaders. These people are key to beginning new ministry teams. Ministry team leaders normally should not also be pastoral group leaders.
4. Discipleship Groups: there are a variety of levels of discipleship: that of new converts, of new members, and of leaders. The discipleship groups to which we refer here focus on the need for discipleship (pastoral covering and training) for leaders and potential leaders. The discipleship of leaders is the backbone of the church, as it was in the ministry of Jesus. In this group people learn the basic disciplines of a follower of Christ (and leader), thus drawing closer and becoming more like Jesus, as well as learning to hear his voice better.
5. Family Groups (churches in miniature): every church member should be in a family group, unless they are already in a different pastoral group. Family groups are where the church becomes real in the life of individuals. It is the context in which people’s gifts are discovered and put in practice; Christian love and fellowship flow; people are in an environment that makes growth possible; pastoral care becomes real in the church; and the church starts growing numerically through evangelism and integration of new converts. Young adults and teenagers might have distinct family groups for their own age groups.
6. Restoration Ministry: the great majority of people in the church deal with the results of emotional problems or relational difficulties of some sort. This restoration ministry can include a variety of teams, such as those of pastoral counseling, support for couples, support for singles (divorcees, widows, etc.), support for handicapped people, professional counseling groups, and others. The foundations for all these ministries are the small support group and spiritual dynamics that allow people to experience Jesus as never before. REVER (acronym in Portuguese for Restoring Lives, Equipping Restorers), a MAPI ministry, offers training in the area of restoration.
7. Participative and Transformative Celebrations: the great weekly celebration (church service) is foundational to maintaining the unity of the body and allowing God to communicate and make himself known to all at the same time and in the same setting. There should be moments of fellowship during the first part and at the end of the service, so that people feel connected with each other. The two main parts (worship and the message) should be dedicated to bringing everyone in attendance into the presence of God to hear from him what he wants to communicate. The worship needs to flow in such a way as to help people draw closer to the Lord, open their hearts, and feel his presence. The message should flow as much from the heart of God as from the preacher, through practical Biblical teaching, in a way that allows everyone present to actively respond in some way.
8. Administrative Network: This network serves the other two networks and the pastoral team so that the church can function well. The administrative team is like the spokes on a wheel, supporting all the areas of church life, starting in the center with relation to the pastor, and reaching outside the church through serving ministry teams. It is foundational: without it, both the pastoral team and the church as a whole have their hands tied behind their back. One of the characteristics of a high-performance team, as well as of a high-quality church, is effective administration. It allows more and more of the church’s energy to be dedicated to ministry instead of lost on administrative issues.
9. Mission and Missions: Missions mobilizes the church to reach lives that do not yet know Jesus, and to take her life and health beyond her. The church cannot be healthy without a practical vision of extending Christ to the world. The same way our body generates new cells and blood, we need to generate new members of our church body. Without this, we begin to die, and after a while, we can even become dead without knowing it. Both the Great Commission and the Great Commandments of Jesus about love lead us beyond the confines of the church to reach the lost world.
Many may ask, why nine strategies? Why not ten? Twelve? What about social justice issues, couples ministry, teaching ministry, and other great ministries related to a healthy church? All these ministries are important, and in any specific church may become as important as the nine mentioned here. The reason we did not place them on this list is that we include them in the category of ministry networks. Even so, we repeat that in any local church they can appropriately reach a level of importance so great that they should be considered a fourth network, beyond the ones in the diagram above. The Holy Spirit blows where it will. He directs each church as he desires to make adaptations and modifications to the nine strategies listed above.
