Church Army New Zealand
February 2024
This week is the start of Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on Holy Saturday. As Christians this is a perfect time to reflect, repent, and prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday. As a way to deepen their relationship with God, many people often practice fasting during this time while others may participate in daily prayer and refocus on their faith.
Church Army offers various materials, such as study guides and prayer prompts to help people engage with the Lenten season in a meaningful way and equipping individuals to serve their communities through acts of kindness and love. We also offer a number of resources and training for people to explore faith and become involved in ministry throughout the year. But did you know that these resources reach people right across the globe?
Our Faith Empowered resource has recently been delivered to our partners in Church Army New Zealand, we spoke to Monika Clark, National Director of Church Army New Zealand.
Meet Monika
Evangelism is our focus here at Church Army New Zealand. We want to train people and develop their evangelistic skills for them to help others follow Christ. We equip churches, faith groups and individuals and the resources from Church Army UK and Ireland helps to enable us to do that. We are a small team, with the majority of our people being volunteers and we are working hard to develop fresh expressions of church which is relatable for local people. We equip people to go and pursue ministries in areas they feel passionate about and help them to make their traditional churches more effective and fruitful.
Different people respond to different methods and we facilitate training of all denominations of Christianity as the culture and landscape is so diverse. We want everyone to feel God’s love. We want people to love God, love people and make disciples and we give them the tools to do this. We all have special giftings and talents which can enable us to reach people in different ways, we can train people to use their giftings effectively to make disciples out of people in their contexts. We need to embrace the diversity, different ways of doing things, different approaches in different areas.
As Paul says ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some’ (1 Corinthians 9:22 (NIV)).
Having access to the Church Army resource Faith Empowered has been incredible. We are so grateful. It is perfect for us and enables us to empower others to make disciples of people in their own contexts. It is a wonderful tool and I would encourage others to explore it.’
To find out more about Church Army New Zealand you can visit their website at www.canz.kiwi
To find out more about Church Army resources – visit www.churcharmy.org/growing-faith
