Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Wagner Kuhn

Second Advisor

Nancy Vyhmeister

Third Advisor

Boubakar Sanou

Abstract

Problem

The Hill Portuguese Seventh-day Adventist Church is a community composed of immigrants from Portugal, who were well established in Angola and Mozambique and who moved to South Africa after escaping the independence wars in the 1970s. Despite their professional success, they have not been successful in personal ministry outreach during the past years, resulting in a clear decrease of membership.

Method

This project sought to create, implement, and evaluate a strategy to help bring about inner healing and discipleship in order to increase the number of members witnessing creatively and reaching out to the Portuguese neighborhood of immigrants in the southern urban area of Johannesburg.

Results

An inner healing-discipleship cycle was implemented and brought excellent outcomes. Members were assessed in many ways and exposed to sermons and seminars on healing and discipleship. The overall goal was reached for the fact that most of the members are enjoying being involved in mission outreach and are currently planting a new church.

Conclusions

The goal of every sincere Christian is to have a growing and satisfying spiritual life. The inner healing-discipleship cycle has helped the members to experience each phase of it through spiritual activities at the church and through personal communion with God. They have faced the truth about themselves and realized how great the grace of Jesus is. Through the spiritual assessments they were able to better understand themselves, their neighbors, and God. The most effective way to bring a change in a church is from within to outside, and this start in our hearts and ends in our hearts and minds when our heart is "strangely warmed" and the gracious touch of God constrains us to decide to follow him.

Subject Area

Discipling (Christianity), Hill Portuguese Seventh-day Adventist Church (Johannesburg, South Africa), Church work with immigrants--South Africa--Johnnesburg

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/266/

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