Sermon Tone Analysis

Launch Day

Welcome to our launch day.

So this part of our service is going to look a bit different to what a normal church sermon looks like.

Today while sharing this message, I will be sharing some of the data from the survey we asked everyone to fill in and talk about how that we will change things up as a result of your feedback.

On that, I wanted to thank you all for providing feeback through the survey.

We got 88% of our active adults filling in the feedback, which means that we have a very good idea of exactly where people are at and what we need to prioritise.

So thanks for that.

So yes, we will be sharing some of that data together today and talk about what that means for us in the year ahead.

As I have indicated a number of times now, our plan is going to focus on what we believe the best way is for us as a congregation to take the next step in sharing the gospel with people outside our congregation.

How we are going to strategically help other people take their first step toward Jesus.

So as we do that, I want to reflect on a number of scripture passages that have shaped how we have moved as a congregation.

So firstly lets reflect on Acts 2:42-47

This is a picture of what the new testment church was all about.

They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer… then jumping to v47, and Every day the Lord added to their number, those who were being saved.

This is a vision of how the church should ideally work.

This is how the early church functioned, and this, I think, is how we have come to function as a church too.

Let’s take the apostle’s teaching first.

Apostle’s teaching

The early church devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching.

That is a kind of short hand for studying scripture, sitting under the teaching of the apostles and the elders of the church at the time.

It is prioritising God’s word.

It is making God’s word central to the lives of the people within the church community.

Now this is a historically strong point for most Reformed churches, and I think Wonga Park too.

We stick to the Word of God.

We want it to be the authority by which we live.

We want it to shape our lives.

And our survey results showed that too.

I don’t know how well you can see this slide, the text is probably too small for you.

But the top line there is the desire for 2 thirds of this congregation to hear preaching on God’s Wisdom for our lives.

We want to know how God wants us to live our lives and we want to be taught that.

The three items that follow are God’s heart for people, how to practice forgiveness, and The Reformed Confessions.

The people of this congregation want to devote themselves to the apostle’s teaching, and to the implications that has on our lives.

And that’s great!

So how are we going to be doing that?

Church council talked about this at some length this week, and what we decided we will do with our Worship service teaching is that each month we will preach on 4 things, focussed on Head, Heart, Hands, and Holy worship.

Each Lord’s Supper sunday, we are going to tackle a deep truth of what we believe, using our reformational documents, like the catechism, like the confessions and we will think about what we believe and how it impacts our lives.

This is “Head” stuff.

Then the week after we are going look at the heart stuff.

How does God’s word instruct us to live?

Here we are going to tackle the various parts of scripture that deal with say Forgiveness, or Relationships.

We will be preaching through proverbs and through other sections of scripture that deal with these issues - so this is still firmly “The apostle’s teaching”, and it will come straight from scripture.

So that’s the heart stuff.

Week three will be “hand” stuff.

This will be a bit different to what you might be used to.

The idea here is that we will use these weeks to grow in our Christian skills.

For example, we might focus one week on “How do I invite someone to church?”.

OR “how do I answer someone when they say: “If God is good, then why is there so much evil in the world”.

The aim here is to help equip you all to face the arrows that the Devil want to shoot at you.

If we are going to be a church dedicated to helping people take the next step, then these skills will be critical to helping us do that.

The final week, week 4, will be Holy Worship.

Here I will be preaching through the book of psalms.

Psalms is a wonderfully devotional book that gives us a language to pray to God with, and it covers the vast majority of life’s disappointments in the context of worship songs.

We want to prioritise prayer, and prayer songs, inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, seems like a good way to do that.

So that how we want to stay devoted to the apostle’s teaching this year.

We will monitor how we go as we go, because obviously, particularly the hand stuff will be new, so please give us your feedback as we go.

To the Fellowship

The fellowship in the new testament was a way of talking about gathering together to be Christians together.

Notice the text doesn’t say - we devoted ourselves to a fellowship, but rather the fellowship.

This particular fellowship is supporting one another, building one another up in faith and in the word, and discussing the things of Jesus together.

Bringing that forward to today, we have to realise that fellowship is more than simply sharing coffee after the service.

It is something deeply fundamentally different to talkiong about what you did during the week, while at church.

It is the ministry of speaking God’s word TO each other.

Because we are committed to being a new testament church, a church that is committed to THE fellowship, we have been doing this through the discussion questions in each worship service.

And as your feedback indicates, this has resulted in spiritual growth in your own lives.

81.5% of you say that the discussion question have value to your own spiritual growth.

And in fact many of the comments said that you want more time in the services to discuss the questions more fully.

Something I was very encouraged by.

But even more than personal value, as we have devoted ourselves to THE fellowship of speaking God’s word to each other, our community strengthened.

Significantly.

Most of you feel that the discussion questions are very valuable or extremely valuable in building up the church community.

Not surprising if we see that speaking God’s word TO one another, is part of what it means to devote ourselves to THe fellowship.

However, we do have to recognise and respect that the discussion questions are not for everyone.

Not everyone feels this positively, and we do have the 12% who feel that these questions are of no value.

Church council had a long discussion about this, and in the end we decided not to make a decision at this stage.

We had differing opinions as to how we can best manage these competing views, and so we have decided to take a month, and to pray about it.

We want ask you to also pray about this, because we want to be a church that is dedicated to the fellowship, but in a way that recognizes how God has wired each person.

So will you pray with us?

The other part of devoting ourselves to THE fellowship today is participation in growth groups.

Now, again, we need to think about just how far we have come as a church.

As our culture here has shifted to outside, as we have continually turned our eyes toward those around us, as we have started asking ourselves the questions in our every day life “How can I help them take their next step toward Jesus”, we as a community have changed.

A couple of years ago, we essentially had two functioning growth groups.

Two groups whose express purpose was to help the people in teh group grow spiritually and take their next step.

Today, 80% of our active congregation members are either in a growth group, or want to be a part of one.

Just so you know, that is considered by church health people to be the gold standard of participation.

No church will have 100% attendance, but this is 80% of the church, who take the word with them through the week, and who can encourage one another with the word, outside of the church service on a Sunday.

Notice, that all but one person who was in a growth group described their growth group as valuable to them.

This is massive.

So I want to take a moment here, just to first of all that God for the massive shift he has accomplished in our congregation in this regard.

To him be all the glory.

And I wanted to also recognise the growth group leaders, who incidentally are all part of our pastoral care team as well, for the care and input they give each week.

Praise God.

So that is The fellowship.

So we have seen how we hope to be committed to the apostles teaching this year, and how we are committed to the fellowship this year.

And that also is the feedback we wanted to share with you from the surveys, because those things have a direct impact on how we do church on Sundays and during the week.

But now, I want to tackle the other things together as we now share the plans for this year.

They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer… then jumping to v47, and Every day the Lord added to their number, those who were being saved.

Those who were being saved

The Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Do you see it there?

This is a process.