Child Evangelism Fellowship

Question: How familiar are you with the ministry of CEF? How do you see the ministry we do through CEF fitting into the "Simple Church" model?

Response: I am more familiar with CEF (Child Evangelism Fellowship) than most parachurch ministries. I helped out a small church for a while when their pastor resigned. They were connected to CEF and I had several discussions with their CEF missionary. I think it is a wonderful and important ministry doing great things. I particularly like the Bible Club idea. I think that approach is much more effective in reaching kids, and parents, than most of the outreach things we do in children’s ministries. I am thrilled that RCF obviously has a relationship with CEF.

How does it correlate with a process-based ministry design? First of all, we would have to have our process defined before we could identify where and if any particular ministry fits into a model. We don’t, so that makes it difficult to answer. However, we are talking about a model for defining how we will function as Ranch Community Fellowship. Parachurch organizations, by definition, are organizations that function alongside of but outside the structure of a local church. Therefore the model we define to organize the church will not directly impact CEF. Obviously, though, both want to bless the other, so how does that happen?

Even though we have yet to define a process that RCF will commit to for making disciples, we know that every disciple needs to be in ministry. Ministry is not optional, so part of the process we define will consider how we move people into hands-on ministry. To help people embrace ministry, we might find ourselves putting together a menu of ministry options that would be put before people, with one of those options being to join a team of people who are working with Child Evangelism Fellowship.

I am not sure how RCF and CEF currently relate to each other. However I am confident about this. The more intentional we become in defining and implementing our process for making disciples, the more people we will see getting involved in ministry. That means there will be an even greater number of people that will come alongside those already involved in CEF to help with that ministry.