English
Korean
Spanish
‘It helped us do it better and do it right’
The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s Equip Conference is designed to provide ministry and volunteer leaders with practical, trusted training and resources to effectively lead and disciple others. This year’s event will be held July 26 at Houston’s First — The Loop campus and will feature more than 70 speakers and 200 breakout sessions.
Charles Draper, associate pastor of family ministries at Spring Baptist Church, has brought hundreds of leaders and volunteers to Equip over the years, and he has led breakout sessions himself. He recently spoke with the Texan about why he has continually funneled so many people to this one-day resourcing event.
You’re the associate pastor of family ministries at Spring Baptist Church. What all does that entail?
Charles Draper: I’m basically the education minister or discipleship pastor by another name. We call our Sunday school ministry from preschool to senior adults life groups, so I’m over all our life group ministries. I like the intentional family ministry aspect of what I do, that it’s not just education ministry. We go beyond serving the Sunday morning age group ministries and try to offer more. We also have a very strong discipleship ministry on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. We have GriefShare and DivorceCare. We offer a variety of deeper Bible classes, not just in doctrine and message, but in spiritual maturity and hands-on ministry training.
The good thing is, I’ve got a lot of good volunteer leaders who help us in all those areas. It’s hard to keep all the plates moving, but part of it is discovering and enlisting the right people and then getting them equipped and trained.
How does the Equip Conference help you in that task?
CD: Equip gives me an easy way to say to our volunteers, “Hey, I’m not going to get you to say yes and enlist you [to serve] and then leave you hanging.” This conference will help you get some of the tools you need to do ministry better. It makes my job even easier to offer the best training we can offer, because it’s hard to do all of that in-house on your own. I’ve done it before at this church and at the previous church I served, and we had age-group speakers that I brought in for one day, but there’s only a few topics we can cover when we do it that way. Equip has so many more speakers and so many more topics that people can choose from.
When you bring groups from your church to Equip, what are you hoping they carry away from the experience?
CD: The age-specific groups—from teachers in preschool, children’s grade school, pre-teen, fifth and sixth grade, student ministry, and all the adult ages and demographics like singles, senior adults, young adults, etc.—they come away with a more intentional approach to ministry.
I also love the intentional strategies of not just how to teach the different age groups, but how to do ministry 24/7—inreach and outreach. That’s the missing piece for many people. Some [leaders] may come on a Sunday [with the mindset to] check the box and think, “OK, my job’s finished,” but it’s not. It’s 24/7. So I think the biggest value to my volunteers is that Equip helps them catch hold of that idea, that ministry is 24/7.
How has Equip helped you grow personally, as a church leader who is raising up other church leaders?
CD: When I go and attend and am not presenting, I pick and choose the topics and age-group ministries that I need some current help with. For instance, we needed to start some college and young adult ministries. We had a life group, but we didn’t really have a ministry. So I attended the college and young adult breakout sessions that year to get some ideas on how we could take that to the next level. And I’ll tell you—since then, over the last three years, we’ve started several young adult classes. Equip wasn’t the only thing that helped us launch those, but it helped us do it better and do it right.
So personally, Equip has helped me in my ministry to those younger age groups. Those breakout sessions I have attended have always been beneficial to me. I’ve got two seminary degrees, but I’ve never stopped learning. I realize there’s new ideas, cutting-edge strategies, and some different ideas for how to maybe do ministry better. I always want to learn from others about things maybe we don’t know about. Equip is the best thing the SBTC does to offer our local churches a way to train and equip our volunteers for ministry. And you can’t beat the cost.
