It was never our intention to write a book for the Church. Both of us were fully engaged in our respective roles in marketing and service delivery of the remarkable teaming methodology known as Method Teaming®.
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But our shared Christian faith had become a source of frequent discussions between us as we went about earning our crust. St Paul’s image of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 was a constant reference point. We came to realise our God-given talents are part of the astonishing lifeform known to us as the human soul. We always felt that spreading the virtues of Method Teaming, which focuses on those varied dimensions of human life, was doing God’s work.
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The tale of this workbook starts in 2011. At that time Ian was a director with Hewlett Packard and well versed at applying Method Teaming to the commercial world of sales and marketing. While on holiday, Ian was lying by the pool and reading Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. When he got to Chapter 12, a light bulb went on in his head. Could Method Teaming be used by the church for outreach? He was seeing huge areas of overlap between Method Teaming and evangelism.
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Over the following years, Ian prayerfully pondered the idea and started to piece together how this might happen. However, it was not until the beginning of December 2020, shortly before another crushing Covid pandemic lockdown was announced in Britain, that Ian first suggested writing a handbook on Method Teaming for Christian outreach teams. By now his ideas were in place.
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This was entirely logical. The Church is a global organisation with “retail” outlets in almost every country, is it not? These retail outlets (churches) serve their local communities and are on a constant mission to offer salvation and hope to those who are about to hit the rocks or who have already been shipwrecked by the storms of life. Churches need to be as well organised as any business - perhaps even more so.
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Dan readily agreed to take the lead. Surely, it would only take a few weeks to put together a book, wouldn’t it? Twenty months later after dozens of re-writes and edits, we proudly finished the task. But this is a longer project. We are creating learning videos that complement the workbook. We also have supporting documentation, which is free to download, that help you facilitate Unlocking Outreach in your church.
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Make sure you take the first step and buy your own handbook. To do that go to Amazon and simply search for ‘Unlocking Outreach’ and get filling those empty chairs in your church.
There is a wonderful side story about the inception of 'Empty Chairs'. The book was originally published with a different sub-title. A Christian friend of Dan’s, who is a business advisor, said the sub-title was not interesting enough. We decided to find a better one. But what?
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At the same time, Amazon told us we needed to create a publishing name. Dan explained how these can often be quite random and off the wall. We were talking over the phone at the time and Dan said, “For example, there's an empty chair right next to me. How about Empty Chair Publishing?" The name was chosen there and then and we thought little more about it.
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That was until a couple of weeks later when the Rector at our church, in one of his sermons, referred to the challenge of ‘filling the empty chairs in our church’. Suddenly, we both had clarity. As a result, we immediately changed the subtitle of the book to... 'The key to filling the empty chairs in your church'. Many people have told us this sub-title draws them in. We both believe very much that this was the Holy Spirit at work.​
If you are interested in Unlocking Outreach for yourself, we have published the book on Amazon as both a Paperback and Kindle version. We’d also be very pleased to hear from you and your passion for filling the empty chairs in your church.
