This episode is introduced by Jeff and Jonny, together in the 200churches Podcast Studio for the first time in a month! Jeff's son Doug is still in rehab for a Traumatic Brain Injury on October 18. Doug is doing really well in his recovery.
The meat of this episode is Jeff's conversation with "John Smith", a pastor/missionary in a country where he must remain anonymous. Parts of the episode that may identify our guest are "beeped out". This episode will encourage and challenge you as a pastor! In this episode we mentioned Dave Jacobs' book - Mile Wide, Inch Deep: Experiencing God Beyond the Shallows, Soul Care for Busy Pastors and the Rest of Us. Dave's book is all about soul care for pastors, and Jeff & Jonny highly recommend it!
(Editor’s Note: Jeff and Jonny are both on vacation this week, but they prerecorded this episode with Dave Jacobs just for YOU! Enjoy!)
For episode 82 we talked with Dave “the Coach” Jacobs from SmallChurchPastor.com about how to help our churches be more outward focused. It’s a tension that we always have to manage as pastors.
We care for our people, we put them in small groups so that they can develop deep and significant spiritual relationships, and we train them to discover their gifts for service. Then we also try to get them to think about others and look outside the church. We don’t want the old “us four and no more” to be true of our churches.
Also in this episode we talk about the difference between having an outward focused church, and simply designing our worship services with outsiders in mind. Those are really two separate things, related, but separate. A church service is not the same as a church. One is an event; the other is a group of people. So while we might fashion our services to be thoughtful of outsiders, we want to shape the hearts of our people to care deeply about the people who live in their community. Dave shares some examples of churches being outward focused. He talks to pastors every day, and he’s heard of some things recently that they’ve done to reach out to their communities. Again, this is an episode you just have to listen to – print just does not do it justice! When Jonny asked Dave what things pastors should focus on to help their churches be more outward focused, Dave shared four things:
We hope that you enjoy this episode – that it is both encouraging and helpful. Recently Jeff talked with Dave about what he has to offer small church pastors and their boards, as a professional small church pastor coach. He is one of the few people who has vast experience coaching both pastors and their boards. You can hear that conversation here on Episode 77 - How Pastoral Coaching Could Really Help You. You’ve heard it before: you can’t just accumulate followers, you must also develop leaders. How true that is. If we only accumulate followers, we will wear ourselves out. Followers have needs and demand attention. The more followers we have, the more energy we must put out. In order to build our ministry and multiply our efforts, we must develop leaders. It sounds strategic, businesslike, and difficult – but it need not be! The reason why we want to develop leaders is to gather a team to help us in the work of ministry. When Jesus fed the 5,000, he had them sit down in groups of hundreds and fifties. He then had his disciples help him pass out the fish and the loaves. There were doubtless leaders in each of these groups of people, who stepped forward and assisted in the serving of the meal.
You had Jesus, his disciples, volunteer leaders in the groups of fifties and hundreds, and then the people themselves (followers). If every pastor of a 200church developed a dozen leaders who would oversee portions of the ministry, so much more pastoral care, ministry training, and outreach could be accomplished. If you are going to develop a team of leaders, you want to make sure you start with people who have potential. How can you determine who has potential? Here are four qualities to look for when searching for leaders to develop: Spiritual Interest – A man or woman could have outstanding credentials and abilities, but unless he or she also has an interest in their own walk with God, they will not pass the sniff test of leadership in the church. Too many church leaders are organizationally equipped on the outside, but unspiritual on the inside. Look for a spiritual person who loves the Lord and desires personal spiritual growth. Personal passion – This is not the same as an outgoing personality. Any personality: a phlegmatic, melancholy, choleric, or sanguine can be passionate. They will reveal their passion in different ways. Passion is about drive and determination to reach a goal or desired outcome. It is about someone believing in something so much that it pushes them to do whatever it takes to get it done. Passion picks up when energy runs out. Natural or spiritual gifting – There must be some natural or spiritual gifting present for ministry to be effective. Ideally a person would have gifting aligned with their desired ministry involvement. An instrumentalist on a worship team would be helped by some natural musical gifting. A worship leader would be more effective if they truly worshiped, and were about to relate well to a crowd of worshippers. Don’t confuse willingness with gifting. What a person wants to do is not always what they are gifted to do. Mission alignment – Look for leaders who want to take a ministry in the same direction that the church leaders want to take it. Their philosophy should align with the mission of the church. If the church’s mission is to reach lost people, a youth worker who only wants to work with churched youth will not be a fit. Their interests, passion, and gifting should align with the vision and mission of the church. What leaders are you developing right now? Could you immediately write down three names if you had to? Do those people have the previous four qualities? If you are not developing any leaders right now, could you write down three names of prospective leaders? We would challenge you to develop leaders who could team up with you to work on the ministry of your church with you! Part of pastoring a 200church is to raise up leaders who can join you in the work of ministry. If we equip people to lead, we can accomplish so much more with them, than if we tried to do it all alone. Develop leaders to multiply both yourself and your ministry! How are you developing leaders in your 200church?
In Episode 20 of The 200churches Podcast, Jeff and Jonny are joined by Rob (not his real name), a recent attender to their church. Rob has a bunch of new-fangled ideas as a twenty-something pastor’s kid who got very disillusioned with the church, and walked away from it.
In this episode he talks about why he left the church, how he thinks twenty-somethings think about the church’s relevance in our society, what attracted him back to the church and why he actually wants to be a part of it now, and what his generation hopes the churches of today would do in their communities – what excites them about the Kingdom of God.
This is a very revealing conversation outlining some alternative thinking about the Kingdom of God, the church, and the society we live in. We hope you enjoy the podcast. Please leave any comments below, we’d love your feedback! Also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes by simply searching for 200churches, or click on the link on our About page.
No leader wants to admit that their church is selfish, but unfortunately many churches out there are. A selfish church is one that is inward focused, always worrying about internal issues and situations, completely forgetting the surrounding culture and their Biblical mission to be the hands and feet of Jesus into the world. Selfish churches are scary places and most of the time have a toxic environment. Luckily, there's an antidote.
This week on the Podcast we talk about the mission trip that Jonny led to Des Moines last week, and how service projects and mission trips are pivotal to moving a church away from being inward facing to being outward facing. We broke the types of projects that a church can do into two categories that, although different, should be integrated with one another: social and evangelistic.
Social projects or trips are primarily focused on serving a person or community without any explicit evangelism. Evangelistic projects or trips are focused primarily on sharing the good news of Jesus. We at 200churches believe that churches must be focused on BOTH of these missions and we believe that Matthew 25 and 28 point us in that direction. We must make disciples, but can't forget physical needs in the process. So why aren't more churches focused on missions? We believe the answer is that changing a culture feels like too daunting of a task! To go from no service projects or missions trips (aka being a selfish church) to being an outward facing church is a big jump, right? Well, not necessarily. - This week we are going to tackle the topic – What Real Ministry Looks Like. In light of the technology revolution of the past twenty years, giving us podcasts, blogs, Twitter, online video, streaming church services, Facebook, and YouTube channels, what does real, grassroots, rubber meets the road ministry really look like? Last month we read an article in the March online edition of Leadership Journal by a young pastor named Chris Nye. We call him Chris Nye the Ministry Guy! In his article, titled The New Televangelists, he talked about how the Internet was forming his vision of ministry when he said “But as I soaked up podcasts and sermon videos from famous pastors, I was unwittingly forming an inaccurate vision of the life of a pastor.”
Our purpose for 200churches.com is to affirm and encourage the pastors who lead and shepherd churches under 200 people – especially lay, bi-vocational, and solo pastors in churches under 100. These men and women are the real heroes of ministry, serving faithfully in rural, suburban, and urban churches where there is little recognition or notoriety.
As we begin this discussion, we have to admit that there are many Ideas, both in the church and in society, that work to divide us, to separate people in their Monday – Saturday world, from any reality in their “Sunday” world. Many, of course, don’t bother with Sundays because they have ideas that make the integration of church life into their real life unsustainable. They just cannot see how faith could ever plug into real life. What are those ideas that divide?
Here are five ideas that discourage integrating:
All of these ideas and more exist in our culture to deeply divide the two realities of religion, and real life. It would be good to ask that age-old question: If your church closed, would anyone even notice? Would the community miss your church, or would they simply be glad to rezone a property to receive more tax revenue? If you would not be missed, your church is likely living up to those above bad ideas. When we talk about our church integrating into our community, we really have two ways this happens. First, we can refer to the individuals in our church being dispersed throughout our community when they are not engaged in corporate worship or mission. Second, we may refer to the corporate expression of our church when we gather for worship, service, or mission. In today’s podcast, we are referring more to the corporate expression of our church in the community. Three challenges to integrating: We have to decide if we even want to integrate. We need to count the cost, and honestly ask the question – Are we really ready to make church “not about us”? For most churches, what they do, the programs they develop or adopt, the services they plan, and the way they spend their money all point to a group of people who are making it all about themselves. This is hard to admit, and even harder to recognize in your own church. To be fair, this is normal and natural for how groups and people cycle. But we cannot accept it if we are to make a difference in our community. Let’s also be truthful about the fact that to integrate into our community is going to be hard, will require intentionality, and necessitate long term perseverance. As we said on Monday, it should be viewed in terms of years, not weekends. Are we willing to put in the time and make a church-wide, lifelong commitment to the community? Can we make the investment that will be needed to move the ball down the fields in terms of making a difference? We just cannot think that our corporate investment into the community on Sunday mornings is going to be enough. It won’t be! Five steps toward integrating:
This is going to be an ongoing conversation on the 200churches Podcasts. In the coming months we will return to this discussion from time to time. Read Matthew 28:17-20. We must integrate into all communities in order to make disciples. Let’s just start with the one we’re in! One of the hardest things for a church to do is actively participate in the life of a community. Churches are excellent at creating communities, at drawing the community in, at building programs targeted at a specific community, but the task of actually going out and integrating into a community is a tricky thing. Our "church" is in the community in the form of people, but how are we corporately involved? Our starting place this week is the cliche question: if your church closed tomorrow, would anybody outside of it notice? Last week, our podcast guest talked about how important it is for church leaders to recognize the leadership that their church members demonstrate in their everyday lives. He challenged us to think beyond "church" and see people as fully integrated; to break down the divide between church on Sunday and living as the church every day. We believe that our corporate body should be as integral to the community as our individual members are, but we recognize that it's difficult to accomplish.
As leaders, we often want to start our planning, by planning our programs. But programs are usually designed to bring people into our buildings or onto our properties, not to take our body out into the community. It's tough to admit, but we can't programmatically approach our desire to be a part of the community. We need to practice a relational approach, and be emotionally invested in people. We should be comfortable up front with a commitment not measured in weekends, but in years. We hope this week to start a conversation that won't get wrapped up by Friday. This is an issue we want to continually wrestle with here at 200churches, because we believe that the church should be an integral part of the community. Corporately and individually, we are called to be salt and light in this world. We want our 200church to be missed if it closes, and we want yours to be, too. So we hope you enjoy the Podcast and blogs this week, and please chime in about your own struggles and triumphs integrating your church into your community.
One issue that faces all church leaders is determining the standard for how things should be at your church. We all face a reality in our churches that there are areas and ministries that are not operating in the way that they need to and the way that we would prefer. This could be as simple as having hideous curtains in the sanctuary to as serious as having the wrong people on your staff. In either of those scenarios, and every imaginable one in between, there is a disconnect between how things are and how things should be.
What we've realized is that one of the biggest hurdles between moving from how something is to how it should be is the dreaded phrase "it's not as bad as it used to be." This "not as bad as it used to be" mentality can show up in any area: is the person teaching Sunday School not getting the job done? At least they're not as bad as the last person used to be. Is there a room being used for storage now that could be used in better ways? At least what it's storing isn't as useless as what used to be in there.
The truth is, as long as something is "not as bad as it used to be" we're often content to leave it the way it is. If this is a hurdle you're struggling with right now, here are some questions to ask to help you move forward: 1. What is the mission and vision of our church? 2. How is the person/room/resource in question moving our church closer to our mission/vision? 3. How could this person/resource be used more effectively in moving our mission/vision forward? These can (and will) be tough questions, but they're questions that need to be asked in order to determine how something should be. If we set the standard for how things are at "not as bad as it used to be," eventually our churches will be "worse than they've ever been"! So what are some areas/people/ministries in your church that need to be re-evaluated? Where can you begin to move from "not as bad as it used to be" toward being mission and vision focused? |
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