Subtitle: Mainly focused on 'the movement of serving and sharing with love' of Shinsoungbuk Presbyterian Church.
This research is about a way to revitalize a church located in developing area in a metropolitan city and is written out with the intention of practising service for local community effectively in which all the church members participate through the movement of serving and sharing with love led by cells. There are lots of people around Mia-dong, Gangbuk-gu, who were refugees during the Korean war and has lived poorly. Recently, the area is being developed. The church this writer serves has fifty year old history and has been somewhat passive in serving the local community.
The vision of our church is to extend the role of church members in the whole church ministry by practising to love neighbors actively like the early Christian churches. The problem is to overcome the lack of the consciousness of serving and sharing, uneffective organization, the lack of service man power and professional training, burden for the new ministry and the difficulty to get cooperation with the fellow ministers. For this, this writer made the fact known that the essence of church is a community to take the mission of serving and asserted the followings; The basis of serving the local community is to serve on Agape love and the basis of serving led by the cells is to share the roles rooted in the chief system by Moses and to serve with love by Jesus when He trained twelve disciples. The history of churches has been the history of pursuing the dream of the early Christian church which practised to serve and share with love. The serving and sharing led by the cells that are small groups and spiritual love communities is a desirable way to inspire life into the ill culture of modern society in which the individualism and the alienation caused by losing the sense of community are widespread.
For performing this mission, this writer introduced and practised the theory of change, in the unfreezing stage, as 'the Goal-Formulation Process Theory' this writer presented the vision and task to reach the ideal situation, this writer composed a mission committee, made a norm, prepared how to secure human and financial resources, developed the prayer meetings, seminars and public information based on sermon and let the cell group leaders have the leading role through training them. In the changing stage, this writer tried to do the change with 'The theory of Organizational Renewal,' and 'The Small Group Theory.' In the refreezing stage, this writer tried to settle the mission of service with 'The Participation and the Activation of Church Theory.' In this stage, 'the movement of serving and sharing with love' was embarked, the sharing Sunday was kept, the person who would be served was selected in each cell and practised to serve, and the church members experienced service with the mobile bathhouse.
As a result from the mission, the church members has more interest in the poor neighbors in the local community than before and the mission of the cells and the church become revitalized. Through this mission, this writer experienced the way to check out the ministry spot systematically and find the alternative plan. It is a starting stage for this mission but this writer expects what will be done next year, believing that the Holy Spirit will be the subject of the change and the leap.
