Ebook
Pastors and church leaders genuinely want to care for people in
their congregations and communities. But pastors cannot care for an
entire church, and most laypersons don’t have the training to do
it. The Caring Congregation Ministry is a model for
person-to-person care that’s been proven to work in small and large
churches across the U.S. It is a laity-centered ministry, where
laypersons receive rigorous training and then are commissioned to
serve as Congregational Care Ministers, caring for others in their
own congregation and their extended community.
This remarkable approach to congregational care was first developed
by author Karen Lampe and her team at The United Methodist Church
of the Resurrection, in Kansas City. It has been tested, refined,
and strengthened, and is now being adapted in all sorts of
congregational settings. One early adapter was co-author Melissa
Gepford, who launched a Caring Congregation Ministry in her own
rural church. Together, they have created this immensely practical
guide for any pastor or leader seeking to create a congregational
care ministry.
This Implementation Guide is the main book for
getting started. It introduces the ministry model and explains the
Five Essentials which form the ministry’s foundation. It is
extremely practical, full of checklists and other tools to help
pastors and other leaders understand (and explain) this way of
providing congregational care.
The Implementation Guide also includes a section focused on
the crucial component of this ministry–the Congregational Care
Minister, or CCM. This section fully describes the characteristics
of CCM’s, how to recruit people to this ministry, how to discern if
candidates are a good fit, and how to conduct the CCM training over
a multi-week period. It details the critical information CCM’s must
know, and the behaviors and habits they must practice in order to
be effective.
Note that the companion book, The Caring Congregation
Ministry: Care Minister’s Manual, is required for the CCM
training. It serves as a training workbook, which then becomes
the CCM’s personal reference manual.
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