Different Gatherings...

Morning Worship (Feeding) Upward

Upward

The Sunday morning service is the main feeding time. As such, biblical exposition is primary. It is popular to view this service primarily as an evangelistic time. As a result, many churches are calibrating these services to the musical and cultural preferences of their target audiences. According to , though, the purpose of the main weekly gathering of the church is not evangelism, but edification. It seems wise, then, to calibrate these services not to the preferences of unbelievers, but to the scriptural parameters given to us for the mutual edification of believers.

This is also the main weekly worship gathering of the church. Since worship is a response to revelation, this is where the meatiest expositional meal is served. As the main corporate feeding time for the gathered congregation, biblical exposition is the centerpiece not only of this service, but of the entire public ministry of the Word. Yet since all Scripture is about Christ (, ), that exposition should always lead to an unearthing of the evangel. This means that the sermon should normally be an evangelistic exposition—it should expose both believers and unbelievers to the content of the Gospel and its implications for each as the natural result of making the point of the passage the point of the message. Such preaching will help motivate members to bring their unbelieving friends because they know the Gospel will be clearly presented and unbelievers will be openly exhorted to repent and believe. This evangelistic exposition will be best complemented by thoughtfully chosen Scripture readings, carefully worded prayers, and meaningful songs that all underline the theme of the passage.

In short, this is where we read, preach, pray, sing, and see the Word of God together every week.

Sunday Care Groups (Discipleship/Application) Outward

Outward

A Live and Active Church Culture

Jesus told the Twelve that the world would know that they were His disciples by their love for one another (). The same goes for the church. Selfless, humble, Christlike love is to be the signature of those who claim to be members of the local church. Showing distinctively Christian love for one another, then, is a critical evangelistic tool for the spread of the Gospel and the growth of the church. What this means for the pastor and church leader, however, is that we need to be deliberately cultivating a culture of Christian love and concern in order that the local church would be known as a genuine, distinctively Christian community in the surrounding neighborhood.

The church is to be full of live, active cultures—relationships that are mutually encouraging and help people grow spiritually. Churches should be full of spiritually dynamic friendships in which older Christians are helping to teach and guide younger Christians in the Word, where peers get together regularly for accountability and prayer, and where Christians are reading nourishing Christian books together and talking about how they can use them to grow spiritually. This live, active culture of love has at least five different aspects.

Covenantal. The first aspect of any local church community is that it is covenantal. That is, it is a community of believers who have become part of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood and, as a result, have covenanted together to help each other run the Christian race with integrity, godliness, and grace. It is a community of mutual commitment to doing each other good spiritually—bearing each other’s burdens, sharing joys, giving to support to the ministry, exercising affectionate watchfulness over one another, and at times rebuking the unrepentant or submitting to correction ourselves as needed.

Careful. The church’s culture of mutual love should also be marked by a carefulness—a deliberateness—that shows our concern for obeying God’s Word in every aspect of our corporate life together. We want to show intentionality at every step—not simply that we have good intentions, but that everything we do is deliberately planned to serve the functional centrality of the Gospel.

Corporate. In cultivating a culture of mutual love, we want to make sure we encourage people to place a high priority on the corporate life of the congregation, not simply on their own individual walks with the Lord. The nature of the Christian life is corporate, because the body of Christ is a corporate entity. While our individual walks are crucial, we are impoverished in our personal pursuit of God if we do not avail ourselves of the help that is available through mutually edifying relationships in our covenant church family (; ).

We can encourage members to prioritize the corporate life of the church by teaching them about the biblical place of the church in the life of the believer, praying for them, encouraging them to attend services more than simply once a week, expecting their attendance at members’ meetings, encouraging them to make known their desires to serve as deacons of your church’s different ministries, encouraging them to pray through the membership directory a page at a time, and challenging them to serve in an area for which they may not necessarily feel ideally equipped. Cultivating the priority of the local congregation in the lives of individual members will help curb our selfish individualism and create an atmosphere of humble servanthood.

But again, they must be taught from the Bible that the corporate life of the congregation should be central to the life of the individual believer (; ; ; ; ). We can’t live the Christian life alone. We are saved individually from our sins, yet we are not saved into a vacuum. We’re saved into a mutually edifying community of believers who are building each other up and spurring each other on to love and good deeds.

Cross-cultural. The local church is for everyone. That’s why it is difficult to defend the practice of targeting a church to a particular demographic based on any factor such as age graded ministry etc. Targeted churches can have the unintended effect of obscuring the transcultural, unifying power of the Gospel. When the Gospel enables us to live in love, even though we may have nothing else in common save Christ, it is a testimony to its power to transform a group of sinful, self-centered people into a loving community united by a common relationship with Jesus Christ.

Cross-generational. The local church is a family. It’s a place where children and adults of all ages can and should be relating to one another for mutual encouragement and edification. Older Christian men often have much to teach younger men about life and leadership, and there are countless ways that younger men can serve and help the elderly. Older Christian women often have much to teach younger women about serving in the home and church, and younger women can often serve older women in countless ways, whether it be social, spiritual, or physical.

Think of the power of cross-generational fellowship as an evangelistic witness. Visitors will wonder why so many young people are at an older member’s funeral, or how that widow has so many young people coming to her house to lend her a hand. The point is that, in the context of a niche-marketed society, the church can stand out as a unique beacon in the community for being a web of warm cross-generational relationships that are grounded in the Gospel.

Personal Discipling Relationships

One of the most biblical and valuable uses of your time as a follower of Jesus will be to cultivate personal discipling relationships, in which you are regularly meeting with a few people one-on-one to do them good spiritually. One idea is to invite people after the Sunday service to call you in order to set up a lunch appointment. Those who express interest by calling and having lunch will often be open to getting together again. As you get to know them, you might suggest a book for the two of you to read together and discuss on a weekly, every-other-week, or as-often-as-you-can basis. This often opens up other areas of the person’s life for conversation, encouragement, correction, accountability, and prayer. Whether or not you tell these people that you are “discipling” them is immaterial. The goal is to get to know them, and to love them in a distinctively Christian way by doing them good spiritually. Initiate personal care and concern for others.

This practice of personal discipling is helpful on a number of fronts. It is obviously a good thing for the person being discipled, because he is getting biblical encouragement and advice from someone who may be a little farther along, both in terms of life stages and in terms of his walk with God. So in this way, discipling can function as another channel through which the Word can flow into the hearts of the members and be worked out in the context of a personal fellowship.

It’s good for the one who disciples as well, because it encourages you to think about discipling not as something that only super-Christians do, but as something that is part and parcel of your own discipleship to Christ. This is in large part why you hear your pastor publicly encourage members to get together for a meal during the week with an older or younger member and have spiritual conversations over books on Christian theology and living. Members need to know that spiritual maturity is not simply about their quiet times, but about their love for other believers, and their concrete expressions of that love. A healthy by-product of "every joint…every part” () discipling other "joints and parts” (members) is that it promotes a growing culture of distinctively Christian community, in which people are loving one another not simply as the world loves, but as followers of Christ who are together seeking to understand and live out the implications of His Word for their lives. These kinds of relationships are helpful to both spiritual and numerical growth.

As a pastor, a healthy by-product of my personal discipling of other members is that it helps break down defensive resistance to my pastoral leadership. Change will always meet resistance. But as I open up my life to others, and as they begin to see that I am genuinely concerned for their spiritual welfare (), they will be more likely to see me as a caring friend, spiritual mentor, and godly leader; and less likely to misunderstand my gradual initiatives for biblical change as personal power grabs, self-centered ego trips, or overly critical negativism. Developing these kinds of relationships establishes your personal knowledge of me, which is helpful in nurturing personal trust of my character and motives, and in growing an appropriate level of confidence in my leadership among the congregation. It gradually breaks down the “we vs. him” barrier that sadly but often subtly stands between a wounded congregation and a new pastor, and is helpful in paving the way for biblical growth and change.

Building a Corporate Witness

The ultimate goal of building this kind of community—one built on distinctively Christian love that flows from the distinctively Christian Gospel—is to display God’s glory throughout our surrounding neighborhoods, our cities, and ultimately the world. We’re right back at . “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” Our Christlike love for one another is intended by God to be the church’s most powerful tool for evangelism!

This is the reason that depending on a program for evangelistic effectiveness is a little like outsourcing the main responsibility of the church. Evangelism programs are not necessarily or categorically bad. Some are quite good. But I fear we sometimes depend on them so much that we forget that the church itself is God’s evangelism program. The mutually loving relationships in the church are designed by God to be attractive to an unbelieving culture. The covenantal, careful, corporate, cross-cultural, and cross-generational love that is to characterize the church and glorify God is at the same time intended to evangelize the world.

Summary...Internalizing and applying these biblical truths will make all the difference in how we go about building a local church body.

Instead of wrongly affirming the priority of the individual over that of the corporate whole, we will teach people that growing in love for one another and in concern for the corporate good of the church is pivotal to the growth and health of the body.

Instead of relying on programs, we’ll disciple people.

Instead of relying on paid staff to do all the ministry, we’ll teach people by both word and deed to initiate personal conversations and relationships with other members of the church in order to do them good spiritually.

Instead of looking for the next man-made ministry model to make our church a success, we’ll entrust ourselves to the transforming power of the Gospel to change our hearts and build a community of Christians characterized by selfless love and genuine concern for others.

Being intentional makes a difference.

Wednesday (Equipping/Prayer) Inward

Equipping

We desire our mid-week service to be a time of equipping. Many see this as a time for age-graded fellowship or teaching that is related to a particular stage of life. As popular as this model is, we think the mid-week hour can offer something much more unique and helpful than age-graded fellowship.

We pick a N.T. letter and take it slow- a verse or two per week, usually investing a few years in the same book. This may seem tedious, but it gives the whole congregation the opportunity to wrestle through important doctrines together, to figure out as a church how God’s word applies to us as individuals and as a church body, and to evaluate ourselves together as to whether or not we’re really obeying this part of Scripture as a church.

Praying

Prayer shows our dependence on God. After about a half out of study, we work out some “Prayer Points” from the text we’re studying and begin to pray them into the lives and hearts of the congregation.

Prayer honors God as the source of all blessing, and it reminds us that converting individuals and growing churches are His works, not ours (; ). Jesus reassures us that if we abide in Him, and His words abide in us, we can ask anything according to His will and know that He will give it to us (, ). What a promise! I fear it is so familiar to many of us that we are in danger of hearing it as trite. Yet we must hear it as that which rouses us from our sleepy prayerlessness and drives us joyfully to our knees.

What then should we pray for as we begin to work for the health and holiness of the church?

(1) What more appropriate prayers could a pastor pray for the church he serves than the prayers of Paul for the churches he planted (; ; ; ; )? Especially for those who ‘don’t know what to pray.’ Allow these prayers to be a starting point for praying Scripture more broadly and consistently. This is another way we can unleash the transforming power of the Gospel on the lives of church members.

(2) Pray that your preaching of the Gospel would be faithful, accurate, and clear.

(3) Pray for the increasing maturity of the congregation, that your local church would grow in corporate love, holiness, and sound doctrine, such that the testimony of the church in the community would be distinctively pure and attractive to unbelievers.

(4) Pray for sinners to be converted and the church to be built up through your preaching of the Gospel.

(5) Pray for opportunities for yourself and other church members to do personal evangelism.

One of the most practical things you can do for your own personal prayer life, is to assemble a church membership directory (with pictures, if possible) so that everyone in the church can be praying through it a page a day. We also want to remember the members in the area who are unable to attend; members out of the area; and for elders, deacons.

I desire to model for the congregation faithfulness in praying through the directory in my own devotional times, and publicly wnat to encourage you to make praying through the directory a daily habit. Your prayers for people don’t have to be long—just biblical. Perhaps choose one or two phrases from Scripture to pray for them, and then pray a meaningful sentence or two from what you know is going on in their lives at present. Get to know the sheep in this flock well so that you can pray for them more particularly. And for those you don’t yet know well, simply pray for them what you see in your daily Bible reading. Modeling this kind of prayer for others, and encouraging the others to join you, can be a powerful influence for growth in the church. It encourages selflessness in people’s individual prayer lives, and one of the most important benefits is that it helps to cultivate a corporate culture of prayer that will gradually come to characterize your church as people are faithful to pray.

Patience

The best way to lose your place of influence as a pastor is to be in a hurry (which I’ve come to find out), forcing radical (even if biblical) change before people are ready to follow you and own it. It would be wise for many of me as a pastor to lower my expectations and extend my time horizons. Accomplishing healthy change in churches for the glory of God and the clarity of the Gospel does not happen in the first year after the new pastor arrives. God is working for eternity, and He has been working from eternity. He’s not in a hurry, and I shouldn’t be either. So it is wise for me to show care for the congregation and concern for the unity of the church by not running so far ahead of them that people start falling behind. I want to run at a pace that the congregation can keep.

As we walk some things may need changing quickly. But as much as possible, I want to do these things quietly and with an encouraging smile, not loudly and with a disapproving frown. I am supposed to “reprove, rebuke, exhort.” But we are to do it “with great patience and instruction” (). I want to make sure the changes I want to implement are biblical; then I want to patiently teach people about them from God’s Word before I expect you to embrace the changes I’m encouraging. This patient instruction is the biblical way to sow broad agreement with a biblical agenda among the flock of God. Once this broad agreement is sown, change is less likely to be divisive, and unity less prone to fracture. As I work for change, work also to extend genuine, Christian goodwill toward people. “The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth” (). Make haste slowly … and kindly.

The key to displaying and actually having this kind of patience is to have a right perspective on time, eternity, and success.

(1) Time. Most of us think only about five or ten years down the road (if that). But patience in the pastorate requires thinking in terms of twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty years of ministry. This puts all our difficulties into perspective. In an interview with, John MacArthur, who looked back over forty years of pastoral faithfulness in the same church, Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. His fifth year of ministry saw tumult and division among the leadership. But he persevered over the long haul and now says he’s seeing what happens when a pastor stays thirty-five years longer than he should have from a human perspective: exponential fruitfulness, and a culture of godly graciousness and joy.

Am I in it with your congregation for the long haul—twenty, thirty, forty years—or am I figuring on “moving up the ladder” by taking a bigger church in five or ten years? Am I building a congregation, or a career? I want to stay with you. I want to keep teaching. Keep modeling. Keep leading. Keep loving.

If you’re a young, aspiring pastor who has yet to receive from a church an external call to preach, choose wisely. No one can predict the future or see all possible outcomes. But it may be less than wise to accept a call from a church or location that you couldn’t imagine staying with longer than a few years. Go where you can envision contentedly putting down roots for the rest of your life, and commit.

(2) Eternity. As pastors, one day we will all be held accountable by God for the way we led and fed His lambs (; ). All our ways are before Him. He will know if Iused the congregation simply to build a career. He will know if I left them prematurely for our own convenience and benefit. He will know if I drove His sheep too hard. I desire to shepherd the flock in a way that you won’t be ashamed of on the Day of Accounting. “Do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve. For he who does wrong will receive the consequences of the wrong which he has done, and that without partiality” ().

(3) Success. If I define success in terms of size, my desire for numerical growth will probably outrun my patience, and perhaps even my fidelity to biblical methods. Either my ministry among the people will be cut short (i.e., you’ll be fired), or I will resort to methods that draw a crowd without preaching the true Gospel. I will trip over the hurdle of my own ambition. But if I define success in terms of faithfulness, then I am in a position to persevere, because I am released from the demand of immediately observable results, freeing me for faithfulness to the Gospel’s message and methods, leaving numbers to the Lord. God is happiest to entrust His flock to those shepherds who do things His way.

Confidence in the Christian ministry does not come from personal competence, charisma, or experience; nor does it come from having the right programs in place, or jumping on the bandwagon of the latest ministry fad. It doesn’t even come from having the “right” graduate degree. Much like Joshua, our confidence is to be in the presence, power, and promises of God (). More specifically, confidence for becoming and being a healthier church comes from depending on the power of the Spirit to make us adequate through the equipping ministry of Christ’s Word.

“Such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” ().

And how does the Spirit make us adequate? What instrument does He use? It’s not a program. It’s Christ’s Word. “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, [why?] so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (; cf. ; ; ).

The one thing necessary is the power of Christ’s Word. That’s why preaching and prayer will always be paramount—no matter what fad tops the charts. Let’s stake our ministry on the power of the Gospel ().