A multi-speaker YouTube discussion among Petra church leaders about recruiting and training leaders for Pure Desire groups. Key practices: require leaders to first participate in a group, progress from co-leader to leader with approval, hold monthly leader groups for training/accountability, and use Pure Desire materials (group training, membership content, "New Betrayal and Beyond"). Petra also sends trained leaders to other churches (multiplication) and frames the work as a church-wide mission to be a "hospital church" providing healing ministries.
How have you recruited and trained leaders? Especially when you have so many people who are joining groups that are outside of your church. What does that look like for Petra?
We still use the model you need to go through a group to lead a group. So we stick to that Pure Desire recommendation that you need to go through the group and then you can, pending approval from myself and Matt and Ken, you can be a co leader and then you can go on to lead. And I just have to say we each have leader groups. So I lead any women who are leading groups. I lead a group with them every month. And then Ken and Matt have a men's leader group, so they're meeting with them every month. And it's partly for training, partly for accountability, partly for group check in and prayer. And we have been using the Pure Desire group training and it's just excellent. Like we all watch it together, we're all listening to it together. And even it's great because we have some who are new leaders, but that those who have even been leading groups multiple times, we're all hearing the same material again. It's good reminders that you have to stick to those group guidelines. We cannot emphasize that enough. So that's just really important one way that we're training and recruiting. So yeah, it does take some time to get leaders. I think that's something that we're always searching for. Like you say, we want to have safe environments, but we also need competency. And so we want men and women who are in a good place on their journey and are really being transformed by the Lord and just can work with a group setting. Let's see, what else did I want to say about the training? Oh, and I did want to give a shout out for the New Betrayal and Beyond material because I have a group of women who are potential leaders and current leaders and previous leaders going through that material so that we all just have a sense of what's different as we go to launch new groups with that. And we all just really love it. We love the old material too, but just some different approach that they're taking. We've really been encouraged by that. So I think that we're just always learning as well. You know, we try to take advantage of all the resources that you offer. The podcast, your church membership, our leaders have access to that. So just trying to. We have you guys come for training, so that's always an important piece too.
That's good. I want to give a shout out for the membership, the Pure Desire membership also that gives us access to have many of our leaders receiving the material. They can listen to it at home, especially new leaders. They really, they like that access. So thank you, that's well done. I want to say also, as Marcy was mentioning, a lot of our, we've been talking about a lot of the, the students, the participants not being from Petra, we do train them up and we send them out. That's why I said the three churches this year, we have sent leaders back. It's always hard to give away, but we have been blessed because we're constantly getting more and we have gotten great feedback from those that have gone out. But we do use them here. They do train, they usually operate as a co leader or as a leader of a group. And then I encourage them to speak to their pastor and start groups there. So it's happening. We are multiplying. So I guess we've thinking about today that it's really a mission that we're on. We want to see churches in our region heal, provide healing ministries. And so we're, I'm really grateful for an eldership and pastors and exec team who are supporting our vision to heal the community and that environment of grace though that's who we are.
I wanted to say too, I think, you know, as a, as a Petra community, we've embraced the fact that we're that hospital church, you know, that model. As Pastor Ken has mentioned before, we, you know, we deal with substance abuse and you know, there's lots of things that addictions deal with. So I think we've embraced that. You know, our exec team, our elders have embraced that, senior leadership has embraced that. And that's certainly helped us, us given us authority, that spiritual authority to speak into people's lives, to train people up. And it's not easy. It's not all rainbows here, but it certainly is something that we've embraced and I believe we're walking in the calling that God has given us as a church.
