Alabama churches are putting their trust in a plan to revitalize their congregations called FAITH. And their belief in the program seems to be having an impact.
“In the churches where we’re seeing it implemented, it is making a remarkable difference,” said Daniel Edmonds, an associate in the office of Sunday School with the State Board of Missions.
Edmonds said FAITH is an ongoing, comprehensive, evangelism, ministry and assimilation strategy process that functions through a church’s Sunday School. He added that FAITH is an acronym representing five principles:
–Forgiveness, which believers must express toward others to enter heaven.
–Availability of forgiveness through God.
–Impossibility of God to allow sin into heaven.
–Turn away from sin.
–Heaven.
“The point they’re building to is, by trusting Christ and turning from sin you can go to heaven,” Edmonds said. “Faith is a restoring of evangelism to Sunday School, which was the original design of Sunday School anyway.”
Edmonds said more than 550 Alabama churches have participated in FAITH since January 1998.
Explaining FAITH, he said pastors and staff members from individual churches attend a clinic in which they learn how to serve as instructors in a program. He said the pastors then conduct a 16-week program with two individuals from their respective churches, who subsequently serve as instructors with two new students from their Sunday School classes, and so on.
“It’s a process of building Great Commission Christians,” he said.
The curriculum stresses spending time with God, studying the Bible and sharing an individual’s faith, according to Edmonds. He said churches can have multiple teams participating in the program at the same time, with churches encouraged to create mixed gender teams — preferably from the same Sunday School class.
“This allows the ministry to be implemented for both men and women,” he said.
Churches said the impact on their congregations cannot be ignored.
“I’ve seen a vision and a passion for reaching people,” said Banks Corl, minister of education at Shades Mountain Baptist Church, Birmingham. “It’s been very good for reaching people in Sunday School.”
Corl said Shades Mountain had 10 teams formed in January, following training by staff members and lay leaders. Another 38 teams were initiated in August.
“Our goal is approximately 80-90 teams (each semester),” Corl said. “That would be one team for every Sunday School class.”
Corl said teams led by Sunday School members in youth through adult classes are planned, with adults leading the curriculum in classes for children.
But while FAITH is having an impact in large churches like the 6,000-member congregation at Shades Mountain, its effectiveness in also being realized in smaller churches.
“We’ve seen astronomical growth in our church,” said Joyce Manning, minister of education at Hephzibah Baptist Church, Troy. “When we began FAITH (in April 1999), we were having an average of 127 people in Sunday School.”
Since then, she said enrollment in Sunday School has jumped to an average attendance of 252 each Sunday.
Manning said the church recently began its fourth semester of FAITH, with 54 people participating, either as team leaders or students.
Edmonds said Alabama is currently ahead of goals set for FAITH churches and is the first state to reach the 500 mark.
The next goal is to reach a ratio of one out of five Alabama churches trained in FAITH by the end of 2001.
“This would represent approximately 640 churches and we are on target to reach that goal,” he said. “Reaching people for Christ is the No. 1 priority for the Alabama State Board of Missions, and FAITH has been a great strategy for re-establishing this (reaching people) as the priority of Sunday School.”
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