In this section you will find a range of articles intended to assist you and the church as you begin to reflect upon engaging your local community. The articles are intended to lead you through a process where you begin to think generally about the vision to engage, then the rationale for doing so, before starting to think about how you actually go about the process of engagement. It then examines how you recruit the church to engage and what you do with some of the common objections to connecting with your community in this way.

There are four questions that come up again and again…

• Why should we engage? “Why isn’t it enough to keep doing what we’ve always done?”
• How do we engage? “College equipped me for lots of things where the ministry was concerned, but it didn’t equip me for this.”
• How do we recruit the congregation to engage? “With the best will in the world, there are already not enough hours in the day.”
• How do we help those who want to, to take the journey back to church?

This section seeks to reflect on these questions as together we develop answers.

Introducing Envision

It always seems easier just to get on with something. These articles encourage you to think through the issues of engagement; to take a step back and then to go forward effectively.

Why Engage?

These articles start you thinking about your own rationale for wanting to engage. They also encourage you to think about why family is a great means to do so.

How are we going to Engage?

These articles aren’t about the practicalities of how to engage - these will be looked at fully in Explore. Here the articles will look at the big picture, and paint for you in broad brushstrokes the things that need some initial reflection.

Recruiting your Church to Engage

If we are to be effective in engagement, we must harness the vision, passion and enthusiasm of the church. The articles in this section give fresh thoughts as to how we might go about this.

Common objections

It’s amazing how often we can be faced with comments like “We tried that once and it didn’t work!” The articles in this section are designed to help you think through the common objections to engagement ahead of time.