Leadership

Shalom! I'm Izzy Avraham and I started Yeshua Groups in 2017. As Director at Holy Language Institute I've had the joy of teaching thousands of students and also have years of experience leading a community, managing volunteers, and creating effective systems. I'm pleased to now bring those skills to our growing Yeshua Groups network. Here's a little of my story.

I'm from Saskatchewan, Canada and now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My Dad and my Grandpa were both pastors and I grew up in a very strong believing home, but I got bored with my faith by my mid-teens. Sermons started to sound the same rehashed stuff, I was insulated and wasn't getting to make disciples and change the world, and the fact that I'm kind of ADD and can't sit still and be quiet for very long didn't help either, especially when it came to church services. Two things saved my faith. One was that I reclaimed my family's Jewish roots and started learning about the Hebrew context of the Bible. The other was that I got involved with the house church movement. Even though my Dad was an ordained minister he was interested in simpler and less institutional expressions of Christianity, and as far back as I can remember I also felt a passion to get back to being like the early church. My Dad had a book by Ralph Neighbor called "Where do we go from here?" about cell church, and it sparked my imagination. I realized there were other ways of doing church than what I'd experienced, possibly even ways that were closer to the early church, and it excited me. For the next decade I experienced the joys and challenges of getting together with other believers in homes and non-churchy locations to do real life and discipleship together.

In my early thirties I found myself in a crisis. I was leading a Messianic congregation, but we weren't making disciples or growing. That really bothered me because, wasn't that the mission? I read somewhere that "your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you're getting" and that insanity is "doing the same thing and expecting different results", and that didn't make me feel any better. I spent the next year intensively studying movements around the world, both past and present, that were actually making disciples. Then I blew up my congregation. I moved us from traditional Saturday morning services, to getting together in homes and in the park to tell the stories of Scripture and talk about them. I also started a "Jesus & Wings" group at my favourite pub where I'd tell a story from the Gospels and we'd have a spiritual conversation over wings and beer. The results were incredible. People started showing up that reminded me of the parable about the lost sheep. Non-religious people, church dropouts, some of my MMA training partners. We were actually changing lives and helping people go from 0 to 1 - like from no relationship with God, to that beautiful beginning.

That's the story behind Yeshua Groups. The stuff I learned about organic church and Bible storytelling saved my faith. And it changed the lives of the people I started meeting, because it gave me a way to get out there and make disciples without having to come across as a weird religious person or try to get people to go to church services. But I don't want it to end there. I've come to realize that if you really want to change the world, it's not enough to just do the stuff. You need to train other people to do the stuff too, people who will spread the idea and inspire still more people. That's what Yeshua Groups is all about. It's me taking my years of intensive research and experience and giving you the best of it, the things that actually work. I hope you take it and run with it!

You may also enjoy reading the sequel to this story detailing how our network was created and my personal reflections on our journey so far.