DISCOVERY – Helping Churches reach their communities

How do you connect with your community?  What is the process for determining and responding to the needs in the community God has placed your church?  TEAR Fund is offering a tool that can help churches in this process. It’s easy to have an idea to reach your community but much more challenging to figure out how to do it. TEAR Fund NZ has partnered with Tearfund UK to offer Discovery, a training resource developed to enable churches to do community development in their own areas.  

Discovery uses the same methods Tearfund UK uses in poorer communities in the developing world.  TEAR Fund’s commitment is to partner with churches in order to train two facilitators to champion the programme in their local church or denomination and to offer ongoing support.

Discovery is an interactive process offered over seven sessions across six to seven months (one session each month) with a group picked from within a church. Within the Discovery process, the group learns the spiritual foundations for community development, identifies their gifts/talents and the problems/needs in the community.

Discovery offers the tools necessary to develop and run a project specifically designed to address problems unique to a church’s community. It teaches how to research, develop, grow and monitor a project and is designed to be fun and hands-on. It has been a success in the UK and we already have a number of groups enthusiastically using it.  

Is Discovery right for your church?

TEAR Fund is offering Taste of Discovery gatherings at its Auckland office on Monday evening (6:30 – 8:30pm), 23 April and Saturday morning (9:30 – 11:30am), 28 April.  These are two-hour sessions that introduce participants to Discovery sessions and methodology. We will also be hosting a training session in Christchurch for churches already interested in the programme. 

To sign up, request a session in your area, or learn more, please email rob@tearfund.org.nz .