About Encompass Ministries

01 CONNECTION

Part of our vision as a church is to work together, creating spaces of common life experience can help facilitate this.

Encompass aims to connect singles and create a safe space in which they can express themselves, exchange experience, support and have some their needs met with the goal of living Christ fulfilled lives as intended by God John 10:10.

Encompass will help singles grow in faith and build friendships that create support networks within the church which make us stronger as the body of Christ.

The ministry will serve over 18’s

• Who have never been married (and have no children)

• Who are single parents (with children of any age)

• Who are divorced

• Who are widowed 

02 PURPOSE

As a single person each one of us is called in some way to complete God’s purpose for our lives, a lot of time this gets lost in a world that focuses so much on relationships such as marriage and this can have the effect of making someone single feel incomplete or lacking in a way that prevents them from contributing to the body of Christ.

Encompass is a means to validate the single Christian in our church and equip them to first recognise that they are complete in their singleness and can be used to do great things for God. By engaging in charity projects as a group this reduces the burden on each member but allows us to strive of targets we couldn’t fulfil individually.

Through fun social activities, the ministry will also be a relaxed environment that helps identify individual talents as well as nurture potential marriage relationships within the church, for those seeking godly partnerships. It would be nice to connect to other branches of AOG once established.

It’s important to understand the challenges / considerations single adults over 35 have, such as – children; infertility, future planning e.g. retirement as a single , finances (alimony or child support), ex partners boundaries, blending families, dating / inter church dating.

03 SUPPORT

As we have life groups singles are connected to the Encompass Life group could meet once or twice each quarter to discuss issue specific to singles.

Also to have in place Pastoral support team to help with prayer, mediation and defined support structure when assistance is needed e.g. accountability /temptation, guidance with dating, abuse.

Teachings/ seminars on singleness & purpose, Marriage, dating, healing (healings could cover various topics – death, divorce, relationship breakdown, rejection etc.) annual singles retreat.

Outreach and fundraising activities e.g. sponsored walks / marathons to raise funds for a nominated charity and at the same time brings together Christians on a social capacity while building servitude and / or identifying giftings.

If any specialist skills exist regular clubs or a class can be taught e.g. cooking session, languages, music lessons, book coffee & cake club monthly a get together discuss the book of the month. For those into fitness it could be a weekly park walk/run.

Annual events like an annual Christmas ball for those who don’t have the benefit of family close .