STATEMENT OF
EXPECTATION
Transforming Congregations exists to come alongside the United Methodist Church and Global Methodist Church with empathy and compassion, providing supportive and guiding structures for long-term restoration and growth toward transformation.
Our goal is to help Christian leaders and the Church develop healthy environments of safety and transformation for the enormous number of men, women, and youth struggling with secret sexual sin and brokenness, empowering Christ-followers to become far more effective in our mandate to go and make disciples of all nations.
We will train you, your teams, and your community to be effective facilitators of God’s powerful and healing love.
We help Christians become more aware of their own hidden needs, as well as the needs all around them. Transforming Congregations equips the UMC and GMC to offer love and a journey of transformation to Christians experiencing relational and sexual brokenness (the majority of us). We come alongside pastors, leadership teams and congregations to develop specific and relevant healing solutions for themselves and those they serve.
Through long-term partnership and pastoral support, we will help your community identify and let go of dysfunctional or unproductive ways of addressing sexual sin and relational brokenness. After assessing the needs and strengths of your particular environment, we will work with you to develop your plan for becoming a supportive and transformational healing community. This may include:
Structural changes
Accountability systems
Confidentiality/basic respect/honoring one another agreements
Clarification of values
Evaluation of stubbornness vs. willingness
Relevant teaching
Highlighting testimonials/personal stories/congregant involvement
Inner-healing models
Repentance and humility
As we seek the Lord together, a new culture of safety, transparency, love and transformation can emerge.
Whether you’re a Christian leader in need of personal support or your desire is to help the sexually and relationally hurting people in your community, we can offer you hope and help.
Sexual and relational wounds cut deep into the core of who we are and develop over a long period of time from a variety of sources and relationships. Therefore, when dealing with these wounds, it will take time and many different positive relationships to become more and more whole.
It is important to maintain realistic expectations when dealing with the bent places in our identities. God can do great things, but He wants to heal us through experience and community over a period of time, in part so that our hard-won freedom is not taken for granted.
We must have patience and trust God to work in His way and time. And while we must hold on to expectancy (the trust that God is working in us), we must often let go of expectation (our idea of what that work will and should look like). God has paths and plans for us that exceed anything we could imagine and often baffle our sense of how and when things should unfold.
For most of us, our surrender to Christ in how we steward our sexuality and attractions will be a life-long journey of sanctification. Thankfully, over time as we grow and experience greater wholeness it becomes easier for most of us to bring our sexual inclinations and attractions in line with God’s revealed design and protective boundary.
But we can be sure that God wants the best for us. He has already prepared our path toward wholeness within the healing framework of His community, and He will see us through the journey as we cry out and depend upon Him.
But we can be sure that God wants the best for us. He has already prepared our path toward wholeness within the healing framework of His community, and He will see us through the journey as we cry out and depend upon Him.