LITTLE ROCK – Multiple associational missionaries, pastors and church planters gathered this past weekend at the Arkansas Baptist State Convention (ABSC) building for Heart and Four Fields evangelism training.
The two-day training focused on effective evangelism and disciple-making strategy. It was led by Wynne Baptist Church Senior Pastor Matt Dunavant.
“Heart & Four Fields is an evangelism, discipleship and church planting framework that intends to equip us in our churches to think beyond the normative ways of thinking about church life and ministry,” Dunavant said. “In Southern Baptist life when we think about the harvest field we think about evangelism. While many churches think about evangelism, talk about evangelism and practice evangelism, most of our churches often times struggle to think strategically beyond that.”
According to ABSC Cross Cultural Specialist Jamie Naramore, this was the third time in five years this training was held at the ABSC building. Several other similar training courses have been held throughout the state. The goal of the training is to help churches and individuals broaden their strategic outlook and explore ways to multiply ministries, disciples and evangelism. The training is solely based on Scripture.
“It’s straight out of the Bible. It becomes a Gospel sharing movement for not just churches in general but individual believers,” ABSC Church Planting Team Lead Vince Blubaugh said.
Naramore said this training has been used by missionaries all over the world for several years.
“A lot of folks have gone to work with our missionaries, got exposed to (this training) and started to ask the question, ‘Why can we not do this at home? Why do we see these things working and happening internationally and we don’t always see that happening here?’ Maybe some of the reason why is because we’ve made evangelism, discipleship and church planting too complex in our culture. When we take it overseas, we try to simplify it so it can be reproduced,” Naramore said.
Several Arkansans who have utilized the training internationally have begun incorporating it locally. Naramore said the hope is for attendees to leave the weekend training with a clear pathway of how they are going to multiply the kingdom.
“A clear pathway for how they as a church are going to do evangelism, discipleship, church, develop leaders and how they are going to multiply that in their ministry setting,” he said.
More than 60 people attended the training on Friday and Saturday.