Unbinding the Gospel
The Unbinding the Gospel Process (UTGP) is a resource to help churches grow in an area they feel most discouraged about and most ineffective at: sharing the Good News that God adores us and everyone else. It is intended for members of churches that want to start living a more exciting life with God and with each other. It is intended to help these members of churches share God’s joy and excitement with those that don’t know it. Unbinding the Gospel avoids gimmicks, stereotype, and evangelistic fads inviting Christ’s followers to a deeper, more intimate relationship with Christ: through prayer and study, that naturally overflows the bounds that have held the power of God’s love in reserve. It is a clearly thought out methodology that slowly prepares us to do authentic outreach in a simple and stress free manner.
“Unbinding the Gospel Project” is based on a grant from the Lilly Endowment that was awarded for two purposes:
- 1. To support 1000+ churches to use the books of the Real Life Evangelism Series (Unbinding the Gospel, Unbinding Your Church and Unbinding Your Heart by Martha Grace Reese) in the most systematic and effective ways possible for their own contexts, and
- 2. To help pastors and lay leaders in these 1000 churches to work together as “communities of inquiry,” in essence as field researchers, as they discover, evaluate and work with the dynamics of congregational transformation through faith development and faith sharing.
The primary goal is to deepen the faith of a church and to enable the members to share that faith.
We are in the process of studying Unbinding the Gospel and planning to move to the all church 6 week prayer and study of Unbinding Your Heart during the 2010 Lenten season. Unbinding the Gospel helps us work on the instruction found in Matthew.