I love my church - I mean the people. I know this sounds weird on the heels of last night's late-night post (this one is even later!). But tonight at the Christian Life and Witness class at FBC Cumming, NewSong had what had to be the largest group there (except for FBC) I'm certain of that. The people who were there really care about lost people. People at our church are hungry for Jesus - and hungry for God's Word. I sat next to Michael Smith and he spent the whole time underlining every verse the speaker mentioned. Michael also handed me his "counselor" application before the event was even over. He is ready to help someone come to Jesus! I'm excited about what God is going to do in Forsyth County and at NewSong through this event. I love NewSong. I love my job. I love the Lord Jesus.
Yes, pride is a sin - but I confess it. I was proud tonight; proud of my brothers and sisters in Christ. All of them, from all 25 churches that were there - God bless you!
Showing posts with label Evangelism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evangelism. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Come Together
I went to a Christian Life and Witness class tonight at First Baptist of Cumming. The event was led by a representative of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. It was great. It was even greater to see so many believers from so many churches come together in one place. There are 24 churches in our local community coming together for an evangelism event that will be held in September. It has been amazing to see us all come together under the banner of Jesus and tonight was the best yet; Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, non-denominational churches like ours, and others all together for the same reason – to win people to Christ.
At one point the speaker asked everyone to call out the name of their church on the count of three. The result was a cacophony of noise; some names were short, others long, but you could not make out any single one. Then he asked us to call out the name of the Savior on the count of three. The result was a clear and resounding JESUS!! – our voices became one. What a great illustration about what can happen when we put aside our differences and come around him instead of remaining isolated and divided in our little “tribes.”
Lord, help us to see this issue the way you see it… Amen.
At one point the speaker asked everyone to call out the name of their church on the count of three. The result was a cacophony of noise; some names were short, others long, but you could not make out any single one. Then he asked us to call out the name of the Savior on the count of three. The result was a clear and resounding JESUS!! – our voices became one. What a great illustration about what can happen when we put aside our differences and come around him instead of remaining isolated and divided in our little “tribes.”
Lord, help us to see this issue the way you see it… Amen.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Easter 2009
Easter Weekend 2009 at NewSong began on Friday night as a small crowd braved a tornado warning to attend a Good Friday service. Luckily we had John’s Creek Police Chief Ed Densmore with us who remained in constant radio contact with Fulton County authorities about the weather as we worshipped. We delayed our service about 30 minutes as we enjoyed time together downstairs in the church in a room with no windows. Then we went upstairs for the service. We had a great acoustic worship set led by Jordan C. and then just as I was wrapping up my comments we heard the tornado sirens start back up. Allison asked if we could do one more song at the end of the service and Ed responded, “Now might not be such a good time,” and we all scurried back downstairs. After another 20 minutes or so in the windowless room below we all headed for home.
Sunday’s sunrise service was amazing (the two photos in this post are from that service). By the time Amy and I arrived at 6:15am volunteers had everything well in hand. The chairs were all set up in the parking lot, the tables were being prepped and the food cooked by a bevy of volunteers led by Karen & Jesse Rivera and Dave Allen (thanks everyone!). The sun rose right on cue through purple and pink skies as the gorgeous wisteria vines covering the trees glowed in appreciation of the rising sun. We had about 75-80 Jesus-lovers who braved the 45 degree temps to honor our Lord. Thank-you Jesus!After a sumptuous pancake, egg, sausage, bacon, and hash brown breakfast we finally we held our Easter Worship Celebration at 10:30am. Many of our members brought guests as requested, all our volunteers were “spot on” as they “served as if they were serving Jesus.” The praise band was rocking. There was an air of excitement in the air as we celebrated Jesus. As one staff member said, what happened today is a good example of what a “win” looks like at NewSong. I tried my best to bring the gospel and to make it plain and not churchy. I spoke on the hope that Jesus’ resurrection brings that is so much better than the hope the world offers. I did get slightly off track at the end and forget a simple acronym (BASE) but I covered well, making things up as I went. I also went off on a rabbit trail about “dead dog parties.” I suppose you had to be there to appreciate that. What can I say, I was excited. It was Easter!
Bottom line, we prayed that people would bring their friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors to church. They did. We prayed that God would show up. He did. Were lives changed for eternity? I believe so. We may not see them right away; we might never get to see them ourselves. But I believe the Holy Spirit did His work and will continue to work in hearts that were exposed to God’s truth and His unfading and unfailing hope yesterday at NewSong.
Thank you NewSong Church for being faithful to invite others to hear about Christ! Through your commitment to our vision to see people who don’t know Christ get the opportunity to know Him, we have reason to celebrate! Let’s keep it going now. God is amazing and He certainly blessed us with an awesome Easter this year. All glory and honor to Him!
Bottom line, we prayed that people would bring their friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors to church. They did. We prayed that God would show up. He did. Were lives changed for eternity? I believe so. We may not see them right away; we might never get to see them ourselves. But I believe the Holy Spirit did His work and will continue to work in hearts that were exposed to God’s truth and His unfading and unfailing hope yesterday at NewSong.
Thank you NewSong Church for being faithful to invite others to hear about Christ! Through your commitment to our vision to see people who don’t know Christ get the opportunity to know Him, we have reason to celebrate! Let’s keep it going now. God is amazing and He certainly blessed us with an awesome Easter this year. All glory and honor to Him!
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Successful Evangelism
In Craig Groeschel’s blog today he writes,
“Just because people attend your church, serve, and give, don’t assume they are saved.
My father-in-law was a deacon in his church for years before truly understanding the grace of God.
One of my greatest fears is that many of our churches are full of people with a false spiritual confidence.
I like to tell young preachers, you don’t fail when you invite people to repent and follow Christ and no one responds. You fail when you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ.”
Groeshel's comments really struck home with me. At NewSong we’re about to start intentionally reaching out to nonbelievers in ways we’ve not done before. We’re going to make it a priority. We’ve been planning for it, preaching about it, and praying about this for several weeks now. Easter Sunday is almost like a “re-launch” for us as we make this, I believe, bold move.
Reading Craig’s blog makes me wonder if maybe we'll even see some of our own folks really “get it” when we do get intentional about preaching salvation. Wouldn’t that be awesome!
By the way, what a great quote he closes with. I couldn’t agree more: You don’t fail if people don’t respond. You fail if you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ. We need to remember this if we don't see immediate results as we preach more boldly and invite a response.
Thanks Craig!
“Just because people attend your church, serve, and give, don’t assume they are saved.
My father-in-law was a deacon in his church for years before truly understanding the grace of God.
One of my greatest fears is that many of our churches are full of people with a false spiritual confidence.
I like to tell young preachers, you don’t fail when you invite people to repent and follow Christ and no one responds. You fail when you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ.”
Groeshel's comments really struck home with me. At NewSong we’re about to start intentionally reaching out to nonbelievers in ways we’ve not done before. We’re going to make it a priority. We’ve been planning for it, preaching about it, and praying about this for several weeks now. Easter Sunday is almost like a “re-launch” for us as we make this, I believe, bold move.
Reading Craig’s blog makes me wonder if maybe we'll even see some of our own folks really “get it” when we do get intentional about preaching salvation. Wouldn’t that be awesome!
By the way, what a great quote he closes with. I couldn’t agree more: You don’t fail if people don’t respond. You fail if you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ. We need to remember this if we don't see immediate results as we preach more boldly and invite a response.
Thanks Craig!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
God's Mission for NewSong II
How did NewSong go from chasing after “lead chickens” (see the post “God’s Mission for NewSong I) to being a church that is gaining clarity for its unique calling and mission? That’s what I’ll tell in Part Two of our “mission story.”
In October 2003 NewSong moved across the street from Forsyth Central High School and we felt as though the sky was the limit. After 3 ½ years we finally had our own place to worship without setting up and taking down all our equipment each week. We had brand new leased worship center that seated over 225, classroom space, a kitchen, real nurseries and a space for our youth. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We were averaging about 160 a week in attendance when we moved in. We fully expected to shoot past the 200 threshold very quickly in our new “digs.” We were surprised to discover just the opposite occurred however. We finished the next full year (2004) averaging 156 a week. By the end of 2005 we had dropped to 148. We ended 2006 at 146, and by the end of 2007 we had slipped to an average weekly attendance of 138. I remember being totally discouraged at the end of 2007. In the previous 18 months we had lost our youth pastor (Lee), our worship leader (Allen), and our children’s director (Tidwell). We had also lost other key leaders and seen ministries fold. God seemed to be winnowing us down. That December (2007) we lost still another youth pastor (Sanders). Things looked grim. But God was already moving.
During 2007 I began teaching an adult Sunday School class using books from Dallas Willard and John Ortberg to guide the class. Willard has written several books and is probably best known for a somewhat difficult read called The Divine Conspiracy. It was actually another of his books titled The Spirit of the Disciplines that helped me see something really important though. In the back of that book there is an appendix, which is also the first chapter of a subsequent book titled The Great Omission. The “great omission” Willard refers to is stems from what he views as an “historical drift” since Jesus commissioned the first disciples to “go and make disciples.” This great omission is actually two-fold. Instead of making converts to a particular faith and practice, Willard contends that somewhere along the way we began simply enrolling people on a church roll with no repentance, and no real change in their lives. They just added Jesus to their lives but nothing else changed. The second part of the omission is that instead of enrolling these “converts” as students or apprentices to Jesus who intend to progressively reorder their lives in order to follow him; there is no change in subsequent behavior either. According to Willard what that means is that our churches are filled with what he calls “undiscipled disciples.” He says much, much more, but he finally concludes that most problems in churches today can be explained by the fact that our churches are filled with people who have not yet decided to follow Jesus!” Ouch!
Willard wasn’t picking on individual Christians in his critique though. He says that it really isn’t their fault. The real culprit is the church. Most churches, he contends, allow this “easy-believism.” Furthermore, most churches don’t have a process in place to help people move from being new believers to mature disciples.
This is when my ears perked up. I was convicted by that thought. We certainly didn’t have a process to do this in place at NewSong. Our mission statement at the time (“borrowed from Northpoint) was “Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.” But the question was, “How?” The answer certainly was not to ask them to come to church once a week, make them feel guilty, and then work them to death with busyness at church.
Once I saw this I began to really pray about our mission statement. It didn’t describe who we were or what we were doing (or not doing). In time God impressed three things on my heart as being important to Him and important to us at NewSong. He gave me three words/concepts: “Kingdom Relationships” (with God and others), “Spiritual Formation” (becoming students of Jesus Christ), and “Missional Focus” (looking outward to serve).
Fast forward a few more months and I stumbled across yet another book (actually my daughter Amy suggested I read it) called Simple Church. When I read that book I felt as though authors Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger had read my mind. As I read the stories of Pastor Rush and his ministry schizophrenia and as I compared notes with “First Church” and “Cross Church” I began to realize that they were describing something very important, and something very real to us at NewSong.
I asked our Board of Elders if we could read the book together and they agreed (we have a wonderful Board of Elders at my church!). From July to September 2007 we used the book as a guide to craft a new mission statement – one that was built around a three-step process for making disciples: “Love God, Grow to be like Jesus, Share with the world.” Eleven words which we often shorten to only three: "Love, grow, and share." Not surprisingly, our new mission statement reflected what God had given me a few months earlier, “Kingdom Relationship” (Love God), “Spiritual Formation” (Grow to be like Jesus), and “Missional Focus” (Share with the world). We now had the mission statement that I believe God intended us to have to fulfill our unique calling to the world. We now had a process in place to make disciples, our “product,” if you will. What’s more, it is our unique process for fulfilling the unique calling God has given us.
It was a great moment. We announced the new mission to the church with great fanfare. We changed our website and letterhead and business cards to reflect the new mission statement. We plastered it on the wall in our worship center. More importantly, people began to “own it.” Almost immediately we began to grow. We saw a bump in attendance of about a dozen people a week in the fourth quarter of 2007. As we began 2008 we gained a few more attenders. We also got a brand new youth pastor and saw an influx of younger families (“twenty-somethings”).
By Easter, 2008 the Elders felt we had gained enough momentum to start a second service. Almost overnight we added another 10 or so to our worship attendance, and the spiritual momentum was growing. In June we hired a new worship leader and in July we hired a children’s director. People were getting excited, we had a focus, and our mission was finally being grasped and understood.
By the time one year had rolled around with our new mission it began to be apparent that we hadn't gone far enough or deep enough in adopting the new mission. Instead of focusing, clarifying and aligning ourselves through the lens of our new mission and process we had simply gotten excited about it and then dropped down on top of what we were already doing. Why? Perhaps we were tired or lazy. Maybe the time wasn’t right, or maybe we just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
And so by the fall of 2008 we had begun to drift again. After an initial burst of momentum, we began to lose our momentum and coast. We lost our focus. But things were about to change again.
During this fourth quarter God impressed upon me that we were really dropping the ball when it came to evangelism. Two incidents stand out in particular. A church member who was attending a Christian college used our church as a case study for a paper and she us asked for some statistics from the church. When we pulled them out for her we realized our congregation was made up of practically 100% transfer growth (Christians either switching churches locally, or else moving into the area as Christians and choosing to affiliate with us). The second incident was more convicting. A pastor friend of mine subtly (and not so subtly!) challenged me about the issue of reaching nonbelievers for Christ. I remember getting exasperated with him in a restaurant one day and saying something along the lines of, “We’re just not the kind of church that reaches new people!" I practically choked on the words as I spoke them. God chastened me about my poor leadership at NewSong with regards to evangelism. Reaching people who don’t know the Lord isn’t an option; it must be a priority for us because it is a priority for Him.
As I did my planning for the coming year through the holiday season at the end of 2008 it became clear to me that we needed four strategic ministry priorities for 2009: 1) Evangelism. 2) Involvement (more connecting and growing), 3) Facilities, and 4) Empowering Leadership. I announced these priorities our my annual “State of the Church” sermon which I give every year on the first Sunday of the New Year. I used the image of an open door that God had opened that no one could close (Rev. 3:3-8). It took us eight years to figure it out, but God wants us to reach the lost. God wants us to get involved in the process of discipleship, God wants us to take seriously the challenge of building His church at NewSong, and God wants us to start empowering one another in our leadership. We can no longer function, leadership-wise, like we did when we started with me being a bottleneck to our growth because I was still leading the church as I always have from the beginning.
Thankfully, God already knew we needed to make these changes and was preparing for it all along, especially the leadership piece. During 2008 God brought us a new youth pastor (January), Worship Leader (June) and Children’s Director (July). In December God sent us the person who is now the staff volunteer leading our Grow ministry. For the first time ever we have someone leading discipleship at NewSong. I'm embarassed to admit that, but honestly, I think that for whatever reason, we've only now gotten the right person for the job.
What an answer to prayer. In one year God provided someone to take ownership and lead all five of the main areas we now have at NewSong: Love, Grow, Share, Students and Children.
We also expanded our facilities at the beginning of this year, taking in and remodeling the dance studio next door to us. This gave us much-needed growing room.
In January 2009 our Board of Elders also approved giving our youth pastor additional responsibilities as an “Assistant to the Pastor.” Momentum has begun to build in our staff and we have begun to gel as a unit. We meet as a staff on a weekly basis. With these other leaders now in place to lead the five areas, their vision and leadership has begun to complement my own and has allowed us to have more intentional focus in each area. This has allowed us to examine what we’re doing and to formulate ways to go about accomplishing our mission.
Today
And that brings us up to the present moment (March, 2009). Our staff and Elders are now reading the Simple Church book, some for the first time, and others are re-reading it. We’re reading it this time with emphasis on focusing, clarifying, and aligning our mission and ministries. We have also recently come up with a set of leader guidelines to help us underscore what is important to us in terms of leadership at NewSong (character, competency and calling). We want to get the right leaders on the bus at NewSong and get them in the right seats.
I’m also very excited about a retreat we have coming up in May where both our Elders and our Staff will be together for the first time ever in this kind of setting. The goal for this retreat (in my mind) is synchronization so that all our leaders have a shared understanding of our church’s values, priorities, goals and objectives. It’s very important for us to have the same assumptions about what constitutes a “win” for NewSong. In fact I believe it is essential if we are going to accomplish what God wants us to accomplish.
In the meantime, God continues to reveal things to us in our weekly staff meetings. In recent weeks I believe he has shown us the following in our Love, Grow, and Share areas.
In October 2003 NewSong moved across the street from Forsyth Central High School and we felt as though the sky was the limit. After 3 ½ years we finally had our own place to worship without setting up and taking down all our equipment each week. We had brand new leased worship center that seated over 225, classroom space, a kitchen, real nurseries and a space for our youth. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We were averaging about 160 a week in attendance when we moved in. We fully expected to shoot past the 200 threshold very quickly in our new “digs.” We were surprised to discover just the opposite occurred however. We finished the next full year (2004) averaging 156 a week. By the end of 2005 we had dropped to 148. We ended 2006 at 146, and by the end of 2007 we had slipped to an average weekly attendance of 138. I remember being totally discouraged at the end of 2007. In the previous 18 months we had lost our youth pastor (Lee), our worship leader (Allen), and our children’s director (Tidwell). We had also lost other key leaders and seen ministries fold. God seemed to be winnowing us down. That December (2007) we lost still another youth pastor (Sanders). Things looked grim. But God was already moving.
During 2007 I began teaching an adult Sunday School class using books from Dallas Willard and John Ortberg to guide the class. Willard has written several books and is probably best known for a somewhat difficult read called The Divine Conspiracy. It was actually another of his books titled The Spirit of the Disciplines that helped me see something really important though. In the back of that book there is an appendix, which is also the first chapter of a subsequent book titled The Great Omission. The “great omission” Willard refers to is stems from what he views as an “historical drift” since Jesus commissioned the first disciples to “go and make disciples.” This great omission is actually two-fold. Instead of making converts to a particular faith and practice, Willard contends that somewhere along the way we began simply enrolling people on a church roll with no repentance, and no real change in their lives. They just added Jesus to their lives but nothing else changed. The second part of the omission is that instead of enrolling these “converts” as students or apprentices to Jesus who intend to progressively reorder their lives in order to follow him; there is no change in subsequent behavior either. According to Willard what that means is that our churches are filled with what he calls “undiscipled disciples.” He says much, much more, but he finally concludes that most problems in churches today can be explained by the fact that our churches are filled with people who have not yet decided to follow Jesus!” Ouch!
Willard wasn’t picking on individual Christians in his critique though. He says that it really isn’t their fault. The real culprit is the church. Most churches, he contends, allow this “easy-believism.” Furthermore, most churches don’t have a process in place to help people move from being new believers to mature disciples.
This is when my ears perked up. I was convicted by that thought. We certainly didn’t have a process to do this in place at NewSong. Our mission statement at the time (“borrowed from Northpoint) was “Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.” But the question was, “How?” The answer certainly was not to ask them to come to church once a week, make them feel guilty, and then work them to death with busyness at church.
Once I saw this I began to really pray about our mission statement. It didn’t describe who we were or what we were doing (or not doing). In time God impressed three things on my heart as being important to Him and important to us at NewSong. He gave me three words/concepts: “Kingdom Relationships” (with God and others), “Spiritual Formation” (becoming students of Jesus Christ), and “Missional Focus” (looking outward to serve).
Fast forward a few more months and I stumbled across yet another book (actually my daughter Amy suggested I read it) called Simple Church. When I read that book I felt as though authors Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger had read my mind. As I read the stories of Pastor Rush and his ministry schizophrenia and as I compared notes with “First Church” and “Cross Church” I began to realize that they were describing something very important, and something very real to us at NewSong.
I asked our Board of Elders if we could read the book together and they agreed (we have a wonderful Board of Elders at my church!). From July to September 2007 we used the book as a guide to craft a new mission statement – one that was built around a three-step process for making disciples: “Love God, Grow to be like Jesus, Share with the world.” Eleven words which we often shorten to only three: "Love, grow, and share." Not surprisingly, our new mission statement reflected what God had given me a few months earlier, “Kingdom Relationship” (Love God), “Spiritual Formation” (Grow to be like Jesus), and “Missional Focus” (Share with the world). We now had the mission statement that I believe God intended us to have to fulfill our unique calling to the world. We now had a process in place to make disciples, our “product,” if you will. What’s more, it is our unique process for fulfilling the unique calling God has given us.
It was a great moment. We announced the new mission to the church with great fanfare. We changed our website and letterhead and business cards to reflect the new mission statement. We plastered it on the wall in our worship center. More importantly, people began to “own it.” Almost immediately we began to grow. We saw a bump in attendance of about a dozen people a week in the fourth quarter of 2007. As we began 2008 we gained a few more attenders. We also got a brand new youth pastor and saw an influx of younger families (“twenty-somethings”).
By Easter, 2008 the Elders felt we had gained enough momentum to start a second service. Almost overnight we added another 10 or so to our worship attendance, and the spiritual momentum was growing. In June we hired a new worship leader and in July we hired a children’s director. People were getting excited, we had a focus, and our mission was finally being grasped and understood.
By the time one year had rolled around with our new mission it began to be apparent that we hadn't gone far enough or deep enough in adopting the new mission. Instead of focusing, clarifying and aligning ourselves through the lens of our new mission and process we had simply gotten excited about it and then dropped down on top of what we were already doing. Why? Perhaps we were tired or lazy. Maybe the time wasn’t right, or maybe we just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
And so by the fall of 2008 we had begun to drift again. After an initial burst of momentum, we began to lose our momentum and coast. We lost our focus. But things were about to change again.
During this fourth quarter God impressed upon me that we were really dropping the ball when it came to evangelism. Two incidents stand out in particular. A church member who was attending a Christian college used our church as a case study for a paper and she us asked for some statistics from the church. When we pulled them out for her we realized our congregation was made up of practically 100% transfer growth (Christians either switching churches locally, or else moving into the area as Christians and choosing to affiliate with us). The second incident was more convicting. A pastor friend of mine subtly (and not so subtly!) challenged me about the issue of reaching nonbelievers for Christ. I remember getting exasperated with him in a restaurant one day and saying something along the lines of, “We’re just not the kind of church that reaches new people!" I practically choked on the words as I spoke them. God chastened me about my poor leadership at NewSong with regards to evangelism. Reaching people who don’t know the Lord isn’t an option; it must be a priority for us because it is a priority for Him.
As I did my planning for the coming year through the holiday season at the end of 2008 it became clear to me that we needed four strategic ministry priorities for 2009: 1) Evangelism. 2) Involvement (more connecting and growing), 3) Facilities, and 4) Empowering Leadership. I announced these priorities our my annual “State of the Church” sermon which I give every year on the first Sunday of the New Year. I used the image of an open door that God had opened that no one could close (Rev. 3:3-8). It took us eight years to figure it out, but God wants us to reach the lost. God wants us to get involved in the process of discipleship, God wants us to take seriously the challenge of building His church at NewSong, and God wants us to start empowering one another in our leadership. We can no longer function, leadership-wise, like we did when we started with me being a bottleneck to our growth because I was still leading the church as I always have from the beginning.
Thankfully, God already knew we needed to make these changes and was preparing for it all along, especially the leadership piece. During 2008 God brought us a new youth pastor (January), Worship Leader (June) and Children’s Director (July). In December God sent us the person who is now the staff volunteer leading our Grow ministry. For the first time ever we have someone leading discipleship at NewSong. I'm embarassed to admit that, but honestly, I think that for whatever reason, we've only now gotten the right person for the job.
What an answer to prayer. In one year God provided someone to take ownership and lead all five of the main areas we now have at NewSong: Love, Grow, Share, Students and Children.
We also expanded our facilities at the beginning of this year, taking in and remodeling the dance studio next door to us. This gave us much-needed growing room.
In January 2009 our Board of Elders also approved giving our youth pastor additional responsibilities as an “Assistant to the Pastor.” Momentum has begun to build in our staff and we have begun to gel as a unit. We meet as a staff on a weekly basis. With these other leaders now in place to lead the five areas, their vision and leadership has begun to complement my own and has allowed us to have more intentional focus in each area. This has allowed us to examine what we’re doing and to formulate ways to go about accomplishing our mission.
Today
And that brings us up to the present moment (March, 2009). Our staff and Elders are now reading the Simple Church book, some for the first time, and others are re-reading it. We’re reading it this time with emphasis on focusing, clarifying, and aligning our mission and ministries. We have also recently come up with a set of leader guidelines to help us underscore what is important to us in terms of leadership at NewSong (character, competency and calling). We want to get the right leaders on the bus at NewSong and get them in the right seats.
I’m also very excited about a retreat we have coming up in May where both our Elders and our Staff will be together for the first time ever in this kind of setting. The goal for this retreat (in my mind) is synchronization so that all our leaders have a shared understanding of our church’s values, priorities, goals and objectives. It’s very important for us to have the same assumptions about what constitutes a “win” for NewSong. In fact I believe it is essential if we are going to accomplish what God wants us to accomplish.
In the meantime, God continues to reveal things to us in our weekly staff meetings. In recent weeks I believe he has shown us the following in our Love, Grow, and Share areas.
Love
Through discussion, prayer, and our current series on evangelism we have come to see that our worship services have been geared too much for “us” and not enough for people who don’t know Christ. We believe worship should be viewed as the “front door” to our church since that is typically the first place a visitor encounters us. We are under deep conviction that our services should be planned and executed with the nonbeliever in mind. Since it is our desire (and God’s!) to lead new people to Christ and we are not looking for transfer growth, our facilities, bulletins, media, music, and teaching should intentionally be “nonbeliever friendly." We want our members to feel comfortable inviting others to our church and make sure that once they get them here we present the gospel clearly.
A "win" for us in worship has been clarified as people bringing friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors to church and having those people have a non-distracting, intelligible worship experience that would encourage them to commit to, and then go deeper in, a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Grow
We agree that we would really like to see our members get jump-started in the Love, grow, share process. Thus we have come up with our NextSteps classes. We've taught one Love class and will be teaching it again in April. In May we'll teach our first Grow class.
We have also established what GROW stands for:
• G: giving (of time and talents to others and God)
• R: relating to others (Connecting)
• O: oneness with God (Prayer)
• W: word of God (Bible Study)
A “win” for us in Grow would be for our members to get moving through the love, grow, share classes and to be be involved in a small group that meets regularly for prayer, Bible-study, accountability and prayer. We would like to our members growing in their own faith and reproducing other disciples.
Share
We have also had some clarification of what “Share” means at NewSong. We formerly divided Share into “ministry” (service within the church) and “mission” (service beyond our walls). Ministry was what we did for “us,” and mission was what we did for “others.” What we’ve come to see through our new evangelistic lens is that all serving should ultimately be evangelistic. Even if we’re doing something mundane or internal like ushering, greeting, sound, or bringing refreshments, we should understand ourselves to be serving Jesus and doing it in such a way that lost people encounter him. We have also come to understand Share as more of a lifestyle instead of just something you do on Sunday morning or when you go on a mission trip somewhere. Can you serve coffee or sweep a floor for Jesus so people will come to know him? Can you speak to your waitress at Waffle House or the person in line next to you at Wal-Mart so that they can see Jesus? We believe you can.
A “win” for us in Share would be to see everyone adopt this lifestyle and begin praying for nonbelievers, interacting with them, and then looking to start spiritual conversations with them with the goal being to share the most important thing anyone can ever know or understand; that God loves them.
God is definitely pouring out his vision for us at NewSong. My prayer is that He keeps it up, and that we keep on obeying Him and trusting Him.
It's late again...until next time...
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