This month sees the launch of a new ministry in our church called Band of Brothers. The aim of this new ministry is to build fellowship between the men in the church, to train them for the role(s) they have to play and to send them to outreach to other men and women in the community around us.

We are starting small with a number of social activities such as breakfasts, which have in truth been running for some time but will now come under the ‘Band of Brothers’ heading, film nights at The Durham Centre showing films such as Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, 300 etc, and other activities such as walks, paintballing, curry nights and visits to breweries.

These events will be open to our non Christian friends as a means of giving them access to more of our Christian friends so many different friendships can be built and therefore exposing them to more of the love and grace of Jesus.

We will then follow these up with some ‘boot camps’ which will be aimed at training us for the role(s) we have and equip us to go out into the community we serve.

The first of these ‘boot camps’ is in the planning stage and will take place hopefully in November, the title is “Reading the manual – How to study the bible”. We are often told TO study the bible but we are rarely taught HOW. Based around three or four seminars with guest speakers this event will be open to all the men in our church plus those from the surrounding NFI churches and churches in our city of Durham. Possible subjects for these seminars, which will include some form of practical work are Context and Culture, Genre, How to Apply to Today and ‘tools’ the equipment that will help us.
The day will cost something like £10 a head and will include a bacon sandwich / coffee breakfast, the seminars, two coffee breaks and a buffet lunch.

We have already had interest from a Christian book shop that are willing to provide a book shop on the day if we can get 50 people attending which will add another.

This ‘boot camp’ will form the basis for future camps based around such topics as “How to be a biblical husband” and “How to be a biblical father” we will then look at something about outreach but not sure how this will be done yet.
So if you’re from my church and a man I hope you will sign up for the events and pray about which of your non-Christian friends you can invite (and invite them) and pray that it will be successful in reaching out to more men in Durham and seeing their lives changed by the love and grace of Jesus.