BRINGING BELIEVABILITY IN A RURAL CHURCH CONTEXT

Jason Calvin Parker

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BRINGING BELIEVABILITY IN A RURAL CHURCH CONTEXT

Introduction

Good morning everyone my name is Jason Parker and I am the Lead Pastor at Woods Harbour Wesleyan Church which is a church located in the rural community of Woods Harbour. The community has just a few hundred people. We are about 20 minutes from Barrington and about 40 minutes from Yarmouth. Our church is 85 years old.

I should tell you just a little about myself.

I grew up in a small fishing community much like the one I am in now. The community is Canso Nova Scotia, the exact opposite end of the province. My family were all fishermen and God called me to fish for people.

Jesus radically got a hold of my life late in my teen years. I was addicted to drugs and drank all the time and lived a life totally separate from God. Jesus radically changed my life as a 19 year old and Jesus freed my from my addictions and called me into ministry almost immediately.

I was discipled at a place called Harvest House and lots of opportunity to do all kinds of ministry there. After that I youth pastored, led worship and did kids ministry. God called me to prepare for long term ministry at Kingswood. I worked at Kingswood after graduating for almost 4 years. Part way through my time at Kingswood I started experiencing a real restlessness and couldn’t put my finger on it. Honestly, I believe the grace of God to do the task I was doing was lifting off of me because God was calling me to pastoral ministry.

I never expected to pastor an established rural church.... EVER.

I saw myself doing the work of an evangelist, becoming a professor or church planting but definitely not pastoring a rural, established congregation. So I didn’t take any classes on how to run a church or how to lead a board meeting or any of that. So if you are here today and you just feel this constant I don’t know what I am doing welcome to the club. But I hope that some things I share today might inspire you and encourage you.

I think this is an important point to say that I am young, inexperienced with less than 2 years of leading a church under my belt. I have so much to learn. But I do feel like the Lord has blessed us so far at Woods Harbour and I do feel like there are some specific things that are contributing to the growth we are experiencing that might be helpful so today I would like to share about

BRINGING BELIEVABILITY IN A RURAL CHURCH CONTEXT

The Call Story

My wife and I were called to this church almost two years ago to split one full time position in half. I will spare you the details but I will just say I did not want to come to any kind of rural context. My wife and I specifically wanted to be an urban context and through God’s supernatural grace we were called specifically to this church and to these rural communities. Looking back it is without question my wife and I were called to these communities.

The Story

People have asked me a lot about what specifically we are doing and often times I wouldn’t really know what to say right off that bat. And so today I would like to take some time to point to what I think the Lord has done to cause us to experience the growth that we have.

When I arrived at Woods Harbour Wesleyan in July 2017 I immediately observed some things.

1. The church had lost hope

2. Lost passion

3. Lacked a clear concise vision.

Honestly the first season of me being at Woods Harbour i felt so compelled to share the optimism God has for that particular context. So I preached messages from the pulpit on what God could do and I literally felt the Spirit of God lift the despair and breathe hope and optimism.

Ephesians 3:20 NIV

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,

I preached on this passage and started expressing to the church the potential it has because of the resurrection power of Jesus at work.

Preach the potential

One of the primary functions of preaching is to combat oppressive things that hold back a local congregation from moving forward with God’s mission. I also started preaching through the book of Ephesians to help the church be reminded of who they are in Christ and what Christ has done for them to help them raise their optimism.

My theology of the church is that the

Christopher Wright along with other people who are part of the missional church movement argue that the Church exist for the mission of God. This is so foundational to my philosophy of ministry.

If God has called you to a specific context then he has a game-plan. Your job as a leader is to discern what the game-plan is, be captivated by that and share that with those God has given you to influence.

Dwight Robertson said that “The Church is God’s Plan A to reach the World and there is no Plan B.”

If the capital C church exists for God’s mission than our local churches exist for God’s mission in our own unique context. A huge part of the discerning process is discovering what is God’s unique mission for your church for your unique context.

You need to labour in prayer until the Spirit of God reveals to you what the unique mission your local church has. And not only do you need to pray about it you need to gather with key influencers and other people in your congregation and begin to ask the Spirit what your unique mission is.

One of the problems with looking at what other people are doing and making a carbon copy and trying to force their mold on your unique context is God wants to use your unique church, with your unique people, with their unique gifts to reach your unique communities.

While it is so key to learn as much as we can from other models I think the most important key as it relates to the mission of God for your unique context is to find out from the Father Why your church exists as it relates to the mission of God?

Once you have found that out you have found your WHY?

FIND YOUR MISSIONAL WHY

2. FIND YOUR MISSIONAL WHY

Fallen Condition Focus

High Points

3. Passion and vision is birthed in prayer corporately

The most valuable and precious thing I inherited from the previous Pastor was a Monday to Friday morning prayer meeting at 7am with a small group of committed saints who were committed to and believed in prayer. Every morning, including this morning we gather oh usually between 3-8 of us to pray and seek the heart of the Father and more specifically pray for lost people.

The two prerequisites to successful Christian living are vision and passion, both of which are born in and maintained by prayer. Leonard Ravenhill Why Revival Tarries

This is the number one reason we have experienced the growth and amazing things we have. I could tell you over and over again all the specific incredible answers to prayer we have been blessed with.

As a leader you need both passion and vision to be the fuel to effectively lead your church or ministry and prayer births and maintains passion and vision.

When we first arrived at the church the church needed to not just be told to believe God and understand their potential they needed to see God do some really neat things. So we began to pray specifically. We began to pray that people would make public commitments to Christ. We had to be diligent and it didn’t happen right away but before too long people started responding to the gospel.

Baptisms - In out first year of ministry we conducted 10 baptisms that we specifically prayed for. I mean, we prayed for baptisms and the Lord provided. We are doing 2 this Sunday coming. We baptized more people in our 2017-2018 year than we have in at least the past 15 years.

Salvations - We also prayed for salvations and in our first 10 months we saw 5 people make first time commitments to Jesus in the 2017/2018 year.

- Maureen

Paige

Membership - We prayed for new members and the Lord has helped us add 6 new members in the past few months

We prayed for people to help with our worship team and it just so happened there was a Chinese guy in our church who can really play piano.

Paige

We launched our Celebrate recovery ministry and our taking our leaders through the training now

Giving Story - 10,000 cheque

The New Parsonage Win

Why am I telling you all that?

2 reasons, I want to give God praise for how he answers prayer and secondly I want to illustrate something. When you pray God actually answers. Prayer really works.

Vision and passion come through prayer.

After we pray we have to then do something and put our faith in action.

Faith comes from vision and passion that has been birthed in prayer.

3. Build Authentic Trust

The other thing that I think really has helped us with growth was the Lord helping me to build trust as quickly as possible. In order to do this you really have to love your people.

I was a young naive leader dealing with conflict when a very wise Dr. Mark Gorveatte slipped me the book the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it but the essence of the book explains the importance of having a foundation of trust as you work in teams. Our brought our entire board through the five dysfunctions. And as you discover quickly, church ministry is all about team work in the body of Christ.

One thing I knew I had to do as a young rookie pastor was garner the trust of those in the church and specifically the key influencers.

4. Identify the Influencers

Dr. B says that 1 out of every 15 people are leaders or influencers. So when I arrived at the church the annual attendance the past year was 76 so I figured at the time there were around 5 key influencers. While I want to connect with all different people, early on I wanted to spend a lot of time with those key influencers.

I have found that the best way to build trust with key influencers is to pray with them.

When you pray with key influencers they get to know your heart and you get to know theirs and the walls come down. So with at 3 of these key leaders I pray with regularly. Some of them see ministry very differently than I do and have a lot of different perspectives than I do but because we have established trust they allow me to lead them and our church.

One of those key leaders had been hurt and their ministry was not validated. This leader has a passion for visitation ministry which would be an area ministry that really challenges me. So we laid hands on this guy and empowered to represent our church as the director of pastoral care and visitation and Richard Macadams is knocking it out of the park. I can’t tell you how valuable his ministry is to me. He frees me up to give my focus and attention.

This may go against your approach to ministry but one of the things I learned in a seminary class is if you can get a person or team to take the lion share of the visitation ministry it frees the leader to give attention to moving the church forward with God’s mission.

One of the challenges in an old, rural church was dealing with the expectation that the pastor should do visits.

While I am very open to visiting people I have made it clear that Richard, with a primary gifting as Shepherd, is the director of that ministry.

5. The pastor doing all the ministry is unbiblical - PREACH IT over and over again.

J.D Greer - Gaining by Losing

I have also preached over and over and over again that having all the ministry rise and fall on the pastor is an unbiblical practice of ministry.

A huge part of my philosophy of ministry is that the primary role of leadership is not to “do” the ministry but to raise up leaders and equip others for ministry.

Ephesians 4:11–12 NIV

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up

Our Sunday morning service was ok but it was lacking engagement and leadership. One of my first projects was making our Sunday morning serv

Maybe this is wrong but I want to be able to lead in such a way that people who show up to church would not necessarily know who the pastor is because the church congregation is leading things so well.

One of the things a mentor of mine said to me, Pastor Wensell Macleod, is that if you are always the voice up front people will become dull to your voice and you will lose the room.

- Building Leadership Teams to govern ministry

- Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In the first few months of us being there my only worship leader and his piano playing wife left our community for work so I was left with the responsibility to lead worship and preach.

So I quickly recognized the need to raise up a team of hosts to give leadership to our Sunday morning. I identify 4 different personalities to give leadership to hosting our Sunday morning experience and I can’t tell you what an amazing job they have done and how much they have blown my expectations out of the water.

- Identifying Influencers

We are all learning and figuring stuff out as we go but I can’t even believe the leadership they give. And what’s amazing about it all is that I think if you ask these four they feel way more part and engaged with the mission of our church because they are involved in the ministry.

If you want buy-in to the unique mission of your church find a ministry to plug people into

AJ Thomas told me that “if someone can do the job about 80 percent as well as you empower them to do it and it is highly likely that before too long they will do it way better than you.

We are still working but our first priority was making our Sunday morning as top notch as possible.

6. Assess and address dysfunctional ministries

The other thing that has helped us I think is assessing dysfunction and having the courage to address the dysfunction.

Kid’s Min - As a board we decided that we needed to do a better job at our children’s ministry. We decided we needed to pray and God gave us a vision of doing Sunday school launch at the local school and God began to bring some new leaders to that ministry. That ministry has been re-invigorated with passion, energy and some new leaders.

Prayer Meeting - We have a Tuesday night prayer meeting and I will tell you a little story. We have about 20 people that come to this and everyone except for me that attended this meeting were over 65 years. One night I said to them, 15 years or so from now there is a good chance I’m the only person at this ministry so what are we going to do about it. We began to pray about it.

Then a few weeks ago as I was talking about dysfunction a person asked if our church was dysfunctional and I said well this ministry was. We are putting some fresh new energy into the ministry and now instead of that ministry being pastor led the people coming to the event now lead it and it has brought a whole different level of energy. We also added a “course” feel to the evening which gets buy in from those who don’t normally attend.

These are just a few examples of empowering and equipping.

The bottom line about this is that I think it is a more biblical model of leadership for the Pastor to equip and empower leaders and teams to lead ministry than it is for him or her to lead it.

- Building Leadership Teams to govern ministry

- Identifying the contextual why

- Assessing and correcting dysfunction

I should say though that everything has not been ice-cream and lollipops. When you try to move at a quick pace there will be people to resist change and you need to help nav

Prayer Meeting

Emily’s Quote - is our church dysfunctional

7. Build momentum & Celebrate Wins

Dr. B talks about every Sunday find something to celebrate. You need to get your people cheering about the things God is doing.

Hugh Marden

We have been so full lately we have had to put more chairs out and we are running out of the chairs we have bought.

Who are all these people - Young couples and children

Every Sunday I try to communicate a win

Your people need to see authentic baptisms and authentic conversions. It is amazing what it does to a church congregation when they begin to see with their own eyes the Spirit of God transform someone’s life.

8. Leaders are Learners

As soon as I started pastoring I quickly realized I desperately needed help so I immediately signed up for the Mentoring Round Table because I needed coaching as it relates to leadership.

Staying plugged into studies and reading is so key in being able to lead effectively.

There is a fantastic book called the Leadership challenge and it really summarizes well a lot of what I talked about today.

- Learning, Reading & Mentorship

The Leadership Challenge

- Learning, Reading & Mentorship

Model the Way -

- Learning, Reading & Mentorship

Inspire a Shared Vision - Unique Mission

Challenge the Process - Assess Dysfunction & Healthy Conflict/Buy In

Enable others to Act - Equip & Empower

Encourage the Heart - Sincere Love

Sum Up

Preach the potential

2. FIND YOUR MISSIONAL WHY

3. Build Authentic Trust

4. Identify the Influencers

5. The Pastor doing all the ministry is unbiblical

6. Assess and address dysfunction

7. Build Momentum and Celebrate Wins

8. Leaders are Learners

Q & A

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