Volume 1, Number 14
MAKE THE MOST OF NEW BEGINNINGS IN THE FALL
What an opportunity! The end of summer brings a sense of back-to-school excitement and back-to-work motivation. As spiritual leaders, you can take advantage of this momentum, harnessing it to call your parishioners to much higher levels of service than they have been giving during the summer. Fall is also a great time to build new power and creative imagination into your ministry. Consider these possibilities for POWER-ing up:
P=Preaching
¯ Develop a three-month preaching plan. It’s not too late to create an October-through-December preaching calendar. The structure will give you increased freedom during December, when schedules are toughest. Begin with your Advent sermons. Start by choosing themes or subjects along with the scriptural passages.
¯ Sketch a sermon series. Series preaching can be thematic, built around a book of the Bible, or a response to some contemporary issue. This kind of preaching allows you to create continuity and build interest from week to week. It’s best to keep your series to not more than six weeks, and to try to make every sermon stand alone. In these days of mobility, not many people will be present for all six sermons.
¯ Craft your Christmas sermon carefully. If you expect your largest attendance on Christmas Sunday, doesn’t it follow that this should be your most significant message of the year? Prepare well, and prepare a message the Lord can bless. Remember that the birth of Christ, His resurrection, and the sending of the Spirit are at the heart of the gospel. Don’t harass people for coming only on Christmas. Don’t let special programs steal your chance to present the gospel message. You may need to shape or tailor your message to fit the occasion. Still, a well-crafted, inspiringly delivered, ten-minute sermon can be a very effective tool.
¯ Encounter God before preaching. Wait with a holy hush and a listening heart before the passage you plan to preach until you hear from God. Once you have really heard the passage in your own heart, you are ready to deliver God’s message to your folks.
O=Outreach
¯ Evaluate the effectiveness of your current evangelism methods. Are they producing results? If not, consider changes.
¯ Schedule revivals or spiritual renewal weeks or weekends. Plan the event well. Get your people so involved in giving and praying for the times of refreshing from the Lord that they develop a holy anticipation about what God will do during the meetings.
¯ Rediscover a “Day per Week for Outreach.” Take the idea seriously. What adjustments would you need to make in order to devote that much time and energy to outreach?
¯ Schedule one outreach event every 60 to 90 days. The ideas are endless: Friend Day, Homecoming, Everyone Present Day, Harvest Celebration, Best Venison Sausage Feast; let your creativity flow! The purpose is to have a continual flow of new people attending your church, thus providing prospects for all forms of outreach.
W=Worship
¯ Give your worship leaders a new rule for evaluating the kind of music you do. “Everything we sing will need to say something grand or lofty about the Lord.” How many songs would disappear from your regimen if you eliminated anything that wasn’t Christ-centered?
¯ Plan the prayer. Work out the details of your pastoral prayer before you go to the pulpit. If your services are recorded, listen to your own prayers. The ACTS model is always appropriate: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication/Service. Your public prayers serve as models of praying for your people.
¯ Consider the whole. Is everything that happens in worship appropriate to the throne room of the King of kings?
¯ Eliminate shoddiness. Worship needs careful planning and deserves the investment of great energy. Filling in blanks in an order of worship form may be efficient, but will lead to stale, uninspired services. Trueblood was right: “Holy shoddy is shoddy still.”
E=Enrichment
¯ Read a new book. Consider “Relational Holiness: Responding to the Call of Love (Lodahl/Oord), or Sacred Space (Barefoot Ministries), or The Power to be Free (Frank Moore).
¯ Renew the common touch with your people. When in doubt, get out . . . out of the office and into the homes of your people. Call them, write them, love them to greatness. Contact every person in your congregation early this fall. Let them know you expect their lives to be enriched by every service.
¯ Develop intentional accountability. Develop same-gender relationships that push and pull you to holy excellence in your ministry and purity in your character. Tell the truth about yourself to those people. Wesley reminds us that we were never meant to travel the road to heaven alone.
¯ Invest heavily in your marriage. Have you been carefully tending your relationship with your spouse? Ask your spouse what kinds of investments would be most meaningful to them . . . and then make those investments. Renewed friendship, closer intimacy, and daily affirmation will make your marriage great and provide a positive impact on your ministry.
R=Renewal and Revival
¯ Create an intercession team. Pick five folks to pray for your church and for you every day. Don’t overlook your shut-ins, who may be exactly the folks you need to have praying for you. You will both be rewarded for your efforts.
¯ Rekindle prayer meetings. A strong prayer ministry is vital to any growing church. The bottom line is this: get groups of people together for prayer weekly. Do more than talk about praying; pray! When you are tempted to shame people for not praying more, ask yourself if you and your spiritual leaders have helped people learn to pray.
¯ Consider your own need for renewal. Ask the Father what area of growth is most needed in you. Consider a prayer retreat. Two days away every three months will transform your ministry. Plan periods of silence into your week, to create space for God to speak into the busyness of your life.
¯ Scan the horizon. Look beyond the borders of your own church and find a way to breathe encouragement into your sister churches, your district, your denomination. As renewal occurs on various levels, everyone will enjoy the sense of newness the Spirit brings through your ministry.
—NBW
ADVICE FROM AN ESTEEMED MENTOR:
Here is some timely advice from Dr. Raymond Kratzer, former Superintendent of the Northwest District, and now with the Lord.
Demonstrating the Validity of Our Preaching
Truth is powerful when declared by one whose inner nature reflects the truth. That is why the message of holiness, proclaimed by holy lips from a holy person, makes such an impact.
Let us examine our inner life to be sure there is no slackness in our commitment, or in our message. Paul could say, “Follow me as I follow the Lord” because no one could contradict his message on the basis of his conduct. He lived what he preached and so can we.
There are times when the minister is called upon to demonstrate the validity of her/his preaching. It happens when the minister has preached a gospel that purports to hold one steady when the storm is on, and enables one to return good for evil and love for hate. But then when we are misused it is easy to forget and return kind for kind. Someone said, “It is manly to resent it, but it is godly to forget it.” The minister must always react in every situation from the strength of what she/he has preached.
GENERATING INVOLVEMENT IN AN APATHETIC WORLD
Christians who do not serve will either vegetate or defect. Team members who are always on the bench and never in the game miss the joys of sharing in the victories. In his book How to Build a Magnetic Church, Herb Miller addresses issues surrounding “incorporation,” how to get those newcomers involved in the life of the church. To stimulate your thinking and to develop strategies to get people involved in the work of your local church, try asking yourself these questions:
ü Is the ministry of your church worthy of massive time investment?
ü Do you expect people to find involvement in the life of the church by accident?
ü Can you create positive gossip? When members are happily involved, they speak positively about the church.
ü Do you have efficient ways to discover the talents and interests of all your people?
ü Do you overwork experienced members and overlook newer ones?
ü Do you find ways to divide assignments so people are not overwhelmed with the demands and lengths of commitments?
ü Do you allow new persons to be nominated or named to significant decision-making groups? If yes, how and when. If no, why not?
ü Is your organizational structure so demanding that it keeps members busy running the machinery so they have no time for personal spiritual growth?
ü Do you see to it that leaders have ministry assignments as well as leadership tasks?
ü Do you highlight ministry commitments as much as administrative faithfulness?
ü Are you programming to reach the 25-40 age group?
ü Do you start at least one group each year to serve an unreached population?
ü Are singles welcome? A church willing to be an extended family is very attractive.
ü Is your ministry to children focused on outreach as well as nurture? How do you encourage children to reach out to others?
ü Do you have planned fellowship times? At least three annual, all-church fellowships are needed in the smaller church. The need may not be apparent to the well-connected, but growth occurs along the fringe.
ü Are you pursuing men’s and women’s ministries? These ministries create “jobs” for folks. In other words, they create new avenues for caring.
ü Do you give careful attention to visitors? Enlisting the help of newcomers to reach out to visitors helps you welcome warmly those who visit. Your regular folks may be too busy to keep up.
HERE’S A STRONG WORD FROM THE LORD FOR THIS DAY
Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:16-20, NIV).
Be sure to notice:
Ø all authority has been given to me: is that power enough for you?
Ø all authority in heaven and on earth: does that reach far enough for you?
Ø surely I am with you: is that a strong enough companion for you?
Ø I am with you always: is that consistent enough for you?
Ø to the very end of the age: is that long enough for you?
All the best to you as you minister in the strong and sustaining name of Jesus our Lord.
—Dan Whitney and Neil B. Wiseman
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