Elder/Staff Retreat Part Two

Our Elder/Staff retreat held this past weekend was about as good as it could possibly be. I could definitely sense the prayers people were praying for the weekend. When I got home Saturday night I told Donna (my wife) that I honestly could not imagine a single thing about the retreat that could have been better. Everyone came. Everyone participated. No one held anything back. We all shared our life stories, including our personal testimony. Everyone had read the Simple Church book and done their homework in advance. Our staff was prepared with exciting well-done reports on their ministries and plans for the future. There was plenty of laughter, tears, good food, great worship, and amazing fellowship (including a few odd bed-partners, but that's another post for another day).

Things we accomplished:

- We thoroughly went over Clarity - Movement - Alignment - and Focus from the Simple Church book. We know our work is cut out for us; mainly in properly communicating the "why" we need to do this to our congregation. As Vicki Eitel reminded us, Jesus never said anyone "had" to do anything. But "if" one wants certain things to happen then he or she "must" make certain changes or do certain things. We need to make our process crystal clear to everyone and in time, hopefully it will become a part of our church's DNA.

- Our staff leaders gave overviews of their respective areas including their mission, lens, target audience, and what constitutes a "win" for them.

- We raised the commitment level for leadership at NewSong by agreeing on what is expected of a "Level One Leader."

- We simplified our organizational structure so everything we do fits under the "Five Things We Do at NewSong" These five are: Weekend Worship, Small Groups, Missions, Youth, and Children. Existing ministries that do not "fit" will be phased out as an act of stewardship of our resources and faithfulness to God and His mission through us.

- We reduced our number of leaders from over 50 this year (2008-09) to less than half that number for the upcoming ministry year (2009/10). We also came up with a concensus list of leader candidates to fill those positions.

- We decided we will handle our ministry sign-ups differently this year (in August). We will still have sign-ups but we will try to have many people already recruited and signed up by ministry team leaders relationally.

- During the chapter reviews from Simple Church and the staff reports we kept a running list of significant changes we have recently made (or will make soon). These include:

1) Worship (Love) as our "Front Door" at NewSong. This is part of our new evangelistic focus, which is our number one strategic ministry priority in 2009. Our services are now being designed and targeted more towards non-believers so when our members invite their unbelieving friends, relatives and neighbors they will be able to more easily connect to God. We believe we can do this and still satisfy existing believers' needs for engaging worship and relevant, biblical teaching. What believers miss out on in "depth" in worship they will now get in their small groups.

2) Small Groups will become our main discipleship (Grow) vehicle, rather than traditional Sunday School. True life change happens best in small groups which will hopefully all eventually meet in the more intimate setting of a home rather than in sterile classrooms. Besides, we have many more homes available to us at NewSong than we do classrooms. We are planning a church-wide small group emphasis in the fall built around Saddleback's "40 Days of Love" campaign where we hope to launch 10-12 small groups.

3) In Missions (Share) our focus going forward will be "to serve Christ so others see him." We we will no longer artificially divide this area between "ministry" (inside the church) and "missions" (outside the church) but instead will focus on doing everything for Christ so that those we are serving will see Him in our service. We believe you can hand someone a worship guide, or prepare refreshments, or operate a sound board as though you are doing it for Christ Himself. Doing so would constitute a "win" for us in this area.

4) In our Children's Ministry our focus will be on developing a parent-church partnership to help our children come to know God instead of parents simply taking their children to church for the church to teach them "about" God. A win in this area would be when the families in our church are intentional about teaching biblical truths in their home on a daily basis.

5) One final noticeable difference will be an emphasis on being intentionally relational in our worship, grow groups and recruiting for our share ministries. This is a shift from our former "warm body" method where we were just looking at numbers, having multiple ministries, filling slots and always having impersonal sign-up sheets in the back. Strong churches are built on solid, godly, peer relationships. We plan to take full advantage of the strong relational ties that already exist at NewSong and to strengthen them further.