Starting Point Lesson 1 - Leader Notes and Slides

Welcome (5 Minutes)

Go around and Share Names

Question #1 Why are you interested in Being part of Clear Lake Baptist Church?

Question Card

(5min.)

Hand out Question Card- Have them put their name on the card and answer the Questions.

If You were to stand before God and He asked you

“Why should I let you into heaven?”

What would your answer be?

(collect the cards at the end of this session)

Booklets

Walk through the Overview

& Table of Contents

Our Church History

Walk through the Church history page

Our Pastor

Introduce Pastor Jason

Our Association

Walk through our Association (GARBC) & (IARBC)

(5 Min) Introduce the class

So the question we want to answer in this class is..

why does church membership matter and is it for me?

Say: For us to answer this question in the next 6 weeks, we are going to look in depth at the three things all church members should do

When You learn more about your relationship with God, it should cause you to grow in your Knowledge of Him, and as your knowledge increases it should motivate you to put it into practice and serve.

Learn, Grow and Serve.

(slide of Cycle

a healthy Church member is someone who is Learning Growing and serving

We learn which causes us to grow which results in us serving. Which results in us learning more what it looks like to be like Christ…which causes us to grow which leads to more serving …

Without any one part you cannot be a healthy church member

Do you you see the cycle?

So this is our purpose as members

to learn and grow and serve.

Questions?

What is a Healthy Church Member?

(10 min)

introduce the Book Study “What is a healthy Church Member?”

This is a book that helps us have a biblical perspective of what a healthy church member looks like,

Read from the FORWARD and INTRODUCTION (pg. 11-17)

excerpts from the FOREWORD (pg11-)

“Good morning, Beloved.” I can still hear it.

That’s also the word that the apostle John used again and again in his letters to some of the earliest churches. In God’s providence, John’s letters, together with the rest of the New Testament, tell us a lot about what it means to be Christians together. They tell us what it means to be a church member, which is what this little book is about, too.

Thabiti, the author of this book, knows from experience that living the Christian life is not something that we’re supposed to do alone.

Being a Christian is a personal matter, not a private one. When you are born again, you are born into a family. And that family is not only the great extended family of Christians throughout the world, but also the particular nuclear family of a local congregation.

INTRODUCTION (pg 13)

Jenny surprised me when she started crying during our membership interview. The first twenty minutes of the interview were fairly routine. She recounted her childhood growing up in a Christian home, her high school years filled with fear, and a period of living as a prodigal during college. Then she recalled with some joy her conversion experience in a hometown local church.

So I did not expect her to sob at the question, “How was that church for you spiritually? Did you grow there?”

After pausing for a moment, she explained, “I expected that after my conversion someone would have helped me to grow as a Christian.” She continued with a distinct trace of confusion and anger: “But it was as if people put me in a corner somewhere, as if they expected me to figure things out on my own. It was a terrible and lonely time.”

How many Jennys have you met in your lifetime? Perhaps you are a Jenny. Perhaps you have spent considerable time in a local church, or several churches. And perhaps your Christian life is not too dissimilar from Jenny’s. You came to the faith bright eyed and bushy tailed, bouncing with energy and zeal to do great things for the Lord. But soon you found yourself wondering, “What exactly am I supposed to be doing as a member of this local church?”

If so, this book is written for you. And if not, this book is written for you, too.

Whether your Christian life began yesterday or thirty years ago, the Lord’s intent is that you play an active and vital part in his body, the local church. He intends for you to experience the local church as a home more profoundly wonderful and meaningful than any other place on earth. He intends for his churches to be healthy places and for the members of those churches to be healthy as well.

This little book is written in the hope that you might discover or rediscover what it means to be a healthy member of a local church, and what it means to contribute to the overall health of the church.

In 2007, Crossway Books published Mark Dever’s What Is a Healthy Church? That book offered one definition of what a healthy church looks like biblically and historically and, along with his prior work Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, has shaped the thinking of many pastors and church leaders in the years since it was first published.

This book takes its cue from What Is a Healthy Church? though it attempts to answer a slightly different question: “What does a healthy church member look like in the light of Scripture?” While Nine Marks of a Healthy Church primarily addressed pastors in the task of church reform, this book seeks to address the people that pastors lead and to encourage those people to play their part in helping the local church to increasingly reflect the glory of God.

How can you, an individual member of a local church, contribute to the positive health of your church?

A lady named Mrs. Burns cornered me after the church service one Sunday morning. She was a little hot and bothered about some of the things that were changing in the church as well as some of the things that were remaining the same. I tried to greet others as they were leaving while at the same time nodding politely to Mrs. Burns as she complained of her dissatisfaction.

When she paused in her litany, my first thought was to ask her, “So what exactly would you have me to do about these things?” But in a rare moment of insight I thought better of asking that question. Instead I asked her, “So what are you going to do about the state of the church? How will you become a better member and contribute to the health of God’s family in this place?”

Those questions belong to every Christian, not just the ones who complain like Mrs. Burns. The health of the local church depends on the willingness of its members to inspect their hearts, correct their thinking, and apply their hands to the work of the ministry.

The chapters that follow present one proposal for becoming a healthier member of your local church. The chapters assume that you’re already a member of a local congregation and that perhaps you just need a little nudge or the opportunity to think through a few key issues.

Chapter 1 encourages “expositional listening” to the Word of God. Healthy church members are those who listen in a particular way to the Word of God as it is preached and studied—they let God set the agenda by seeking always to hear the true meaning of the text so that they can apply it to their lives.

In chapter 2, church members are encouraged to dedicate themselves to learning the overarching themes of the Bible. In other words, they are asked to become “biblical theologians” in an effort to protect themselves and the church from false and unsound teaching.

Chapter 3 invites church members to be saturated in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gospel that saves us (Rom. 1:16), and it is the gospel that will sustain and motivate us in our daily Christian lives.

There is no way to listen expositionally to the Scripture, to master its overarching narrative and themes, and to live a gospel-saturated life without also desiring and endeavoring to become a biblical evangelist. Chapters 4 and 5 offer some suggestions for thinking about conversion and evangelism in a biblically healthy way.

Chapter 6 is a call to make a serious and active commitment to membership in the local church.

Then chapter 7 provides one reason why committed church membership is important: the local church is where Christians experience the shaping and correcting discipline of the Lord.

Chapter 8 examines spiritual growth from a biblical perspective,

while chapter 9 includes some recommendations for effectively supporting the leadership of your local church.

Chapter 10 is a call to consider prayer an essential aspect of becoming and being a healthy church member. A brief discussion of the biblical basis of prayer is offered along with some suggested things for healthy church members to include in their prayer lives.

Each chapter also includes some recommended readings for further study. These are not the only things that make for a healthy church member; other things are important as well. But I hope these stir us all to love and good deeds for the glory of Christ and the beauty of his bride.

Ask: So why do you think church membership is important?

Ask: does anyone have any other questions for me as we begin our study together?

Home Work

Read What is a Healthy Church Member Marks 1 & 2.

Closing Prayer

Prayer