FusionLife

As I finish up my thoughts about how the church (as a whole) and specifically in my ministries have not given the importance due to training and equipping church members to do the work God has prepared for us and them to do in advance (Eph 2:10 & 4:11-12) there is something we can do about it.

First off there is now quick fix for this, it’s going to take time and energy looking at your ministry (whole church, youth, children’s, first impressions, small groups, etc.) and seeing what needs to be done and then planning it out.

Giving training and equipping the importance that it is due requires…

-Making the big ask. For the most part people are not going to line up at your office door waiting to sign up to be a volunteer in you ministry. They are actually dying on the inside waiting for you to ask, they’ve been told they were created for a purpose yet we never give them ways to fulfill that purpose in or outside the church.

-Ask what are their passions and gifts. A great place to start when placing them in ways to serve.

-Give them a list of places to serve.

-Give them Spiritual Gifts analysis and the Strength Finders test, or your personal favorite. This helps to make sure people are serving in a way that suits their giftedness. Too many times we place warm bodies in whole that might end up being square peg in a round whole.

-Spend time putting together what the position entails, expectations, and training material into a manual of some sort. You can’t pull this stuff from other churches or organizations, you have to spend time putting this together yourself for your specific ministry environment and church culture.

Above all you have to make it your ministry not just a part!

The Whole Series
Part 1 - Equipping?
Part 2 - The Misaligned Focus of Church Leaders
Part 3 - Training and Equipping Lapses
Part 4 - What We Can Do About It

I’ve been thinking a lot about the equipping leaders we are to be for the people God calls us to lead, Eph 4: 11-12. What I’ve found in my ministry’s is that I don’t understand enough about equipping and so the people (volunteers, elders, other leaders, parents and student leaders) are not being equipped to do the work we are called to do among the church body, in the community and throughout the world.

We have looked at the over arching issue in part 1 and in part 2 we talked about the misaligned focus of leaders and today I want to look at training and equipping lapses.

Last week Starbucks closed all of it’s American stores for 3 hours to retrain it’s employees how to make the perfect espresso. People complained, gripped, quipped that 3 hours of training was going to do anything. But they are wrong. When we get serious about training and making sure what we are trying to accomplish is happening we all win (the owners, employees and customers).

It can work the same way in the church if we (those named in Eph. 4:11) get serious about it. Part of getting serious is helping people in the church realize what the job of the minister is and is not. To much falls by default to the paid staff that the real ministry (things like process of thinking through training and equipping and then creating plans and systems to actually train and equip our people is put on hold) gets shelved so that the urgent is taken care of.

These lapses are forged by (1) this lack of understanding of what leaders in the church are called to do and the different roles that each play, (2) a lack of understanding that no one possesses all the gifts in vs. 11, (3) we do not take it (training and equipping) serious. We can work on the first 2 by getting back to the bible and seeing what it says about them, but I want to focus the remaining writing on number 3.

What would it look like if we took training and equipping serious? Open up the white cloud dream space that you use when you day dream and imagine with me a church that began to take it serious.

I see the leader(s) beginning by looking at what ministry roles they have in their church (worhsip leaders and musicians, nursery and children’s ministry volunteers, greeters and first impression volunteers, small group leaders, community service volunteers, etc.). Then taking the time to list out the gifts and talents for each (musical ability, stage presence, ability to lead others in praise and celebration of the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit, I’m sure there are more), then making a list of trainable aspects (practice time to continue to get better at playing and learn new techniques, time to learn the new songs, etc.).

Now that we know what the job entails we can look at systems to put into place that train and equip this worship ministry volunteer. What kind of systems can we put into place, you might ask? What about things like application or interview, spiritual gifts tests, a basic handbook of expectations and procedures of how the worship ministry works, weekly practices as a team, daily practice time individually, you can bring in professional musicians to do training, take them to conferences, workshops or visit other churches that you connect with to watch how they do it. List these ideas out, try them with a batch of volunteers, and treat everything as an experiment and tweak what isn’t working and run with what it is.

Lapses in training and equipping doesn’t have to happen. We the leaders can and have to do something about it, it’s what we are called to do. You can take these ideas and apply them to any volunteer position and think through what it going to help them be the best they can be and glory can be brought to God through what they do, that is what training and equipping is all about.

Two examples of this comes to mind Community Christian Church and Reston Community Church. CCC regularly puts out training guides that they are producing and RCC went through a period where they worked through job descriptions and expectations for all the paid and volunteer positions. Make sure to check them out.

So last time we talked about equipping we talked about Ephesians 4: 11-13 and what many see as the churches lack of time, energy and resources put into actually equipping Christians for the work God has prepared for the them to do Eph. 2:10.

Ephesians 4: 11-13 It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

So, some are given the gift to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. These gifts and offices range from God given authority to lead the church or a sent leader on a specific task (apostles of Jesus and apostle of the church), to those inspired by the Holy Spirit to speak and preach, those gifted specifically to reach the lost (evangelists), followed by those who specifically shepard the flock (pastors) and finally those male leaders who teach the whole church or small groups of Christians. These men lead and equip the church (the people) to do the works of service needed in their community which leads to maturity and completeness in Jesus Christ.

The problem is we sit around and wonder why we have such spiritual infants running rampant in our churches and the same servants burn out from doing all the work both of which occur because we have a misaligned focus. A lot of the time, we as church leaders have forgot our biblical role to equip the church body to do ministry. More discipleship is not the answer, more fellowship is not the answer, but aligning our churches with more service oriented ministry opportunities is.

When and only when we focus on equipping our churches to do the ministry/ serving (whether in or outside of the church building) and tie their passions (formed when God created them) with the works (which God created for them in advance) will we see maturity and biblical understanding grow in our church, which is what the Apostle Paul is trying to tell us in Ephesians 2:10.

Next time we’ll talk about equipping and training lapses.

For some reason I have never paid a whole a lot of attention to Ephesians 4: 11-12. It was never covered in any depth in college or any ministry I’ve been in but I have no excuses for why it has just been glanced over.

“It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”

Over the last few weeks these verses have been coming back to me more than likely because of a Children’s Ministry Volunteer Meeting but it seems deeper than that. So started to look for equipping and training material. No real avail a first. But then it I finally did and man did I find a treasure trove.

From Cadre Ministries I found:
Dialogue #1- Training Makes All the Difference
Dialogue #2–The Training Genius of Jesus

And from Community Christian Church’s Small Groups I found:
A Coach’s Guide Book

Over the next few days I’ll break down what I see as unaligned focuses of church leaders, training and equipping lapses and what we can do about it.

So Buckle Up and Stay Tuned.

Ever picked up a flyer, magazine, advertisement anything that just didn’t look good? What was your first impression? What thoughts run through your mind as you process what you see? This is what first time visitors think of when they visit our services. First impressions are made with in the first 5 to 15 minutes they are on the property; that includes parking the car, walking up the side walk entering the foyer and being greeted and given a bulletin.

We’ve been working on some of our first impressions that we can handle in house during the week. We’re finishing up a logo, redesigning the bulletin and how things appear in it. Eventually we are looking at having one or two color shells printed up to spice it up a little bit. Having discussions on graphics and clip art, font, font size and color, uniformness. These are leading up to a style guide for the whole church so that things look uniform and pleasing to the eye.

Somethings we have to work on is… -parking lot (appearance, parking lot attenders) -greeters (knowing what to do when new people come in and specific training on get their name, helping them to the Children’s Ministry area if need be, asking if they can be of any help and showing them to the auditorium) -website (this one is mine, I’m waiting on the logo and color scheme then I’ll start to flesh it out) -worship lyrics and announcements on the screens

What are some ways your small church is working on First Impressions?

Were in the middle of some office upgrades network, network printers, actual office phones (with hold, intercom, transfer and extensions) but it is taking way to long. We are literally talking about taking church office out of the Bronze Age into about the 19th century, maybe the 20th. Its an interesting ride watching how everyone is reacting to some of the changes we are making trying to stream line and make the office more efficient and ministry less painful. I think the network cable will be run today so and the network up and running.

We have a lady in the church offer to be out Admin Assistant for the office so we’ve also been converting some dead foyer space into her office. It is taking some time getting used to some being there to do things for you and we are still working out what all she is going to do for us. If you have a Admin Assistant drop me a comment or email about what all they do for your office. We want to firm up her responsibilities since she is wanting to hit the ground running.

Alot going on at the office this week and last. Hopefully this will lead to some normalcy and time to actual do our own jobs.

Don’t forget to drop me a line about your Admin Assistant.

I wish I had taken a picture of how dark black my hands were today after I finished doing the breaks on my mom’s PT Cruiser. What a pain. The front two were a breeze and the second drum break went a little faster the first one which took probably 2 hours by its self. I’m not really a mechanic but like most willing people we get asked to do jobs whether we are gifted or talented enough to really do it. The 5 or 6 hours, in the blazing Florida sun, invested in helping my mom was worth it, but tonight it got me thinking about giftedness.

How many times do we have a whole to fill is some ministry in the church and the first person to even barely mention serving gets stuck in that position. Without thought put into what the position actually calls for, whether or not the person is a fit for the position or not both of those without any thought or energy into helping that person (and all our volunteers) know how God designed them and gift them to serve His kingdom. Maybe this is why volunteer burn out can be a huge problem in most churches? Maybe this is why we can’t find enough volunteers? Maybe they know we aren’t going to help them fit so they don’t even bother.

What if we spent time specially with new people getting an idea of what they liked and didn’t like to do in life and service? What if we worked them into a class that helped them see how God gifted them to serve Him and them got them in direct contact with ministry team leaders that lined up with what they like to do and how they are gifted?* Maybe we would better serve them as they serve the Kingdom?

Just some thoughts.

*adapted from lessons learned from Savannah Christian Church from discussions with their staff and their leadership conference The Next Level.

Discipleship Video

This is going to be another busy weekend for us as we have brought in our top candidate for our open Senior Minister position. We had a great time tonight with the search team (they did a great job and really plowed through the resumes with guidance from the Holy Spirit pretty fast) and our candidate and his wife tonight. It was a nice laid back gathering. For the team they got to put a whole person with the bits a pieces that we have learned from him along the way and for them they got to meet some of the hard workers and leaders in the church. The rest of the weekend is jammed pack with lunches and dinners, meetings and interview, plus him speaking at three service. Then more meetings, lunches and dinners with a lot of key people and the Realtor. Hopefully God will continue to guide us in this direction and we will vote on him a week from this Sunday. I can’t wait. I know God is pulling the pieces of His puzzle together for this part of the Kingdom and I have a feeling its going to be a new direction where God is going to open up doors for impacting our community.

We have been searching for a new senior minister at our church for about 3 months now. This weekend, 4 people from our search team travel to go check out our top candidate. You could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit as we traveled and the easy with which everything happened. We had a great time meeting our candidate and his family and viewing the culture and and environment he helped shape. We learned a ton about him from a great meeting with the Elders at his church and other staff members. They are sad to see him leave but understand his following God as He is leading their family to a new opportunity to serve Him. We are bringing down the family in a week and a half for an interview and for the congregation to hear him speak and meet him.

On a side note I wished we would have had more time to walk around Chicago and not just see the little part we saw on the way to the airport (Midway). Lots of beautiful buildings with history and stories to tell, not like most of Florida.

Anyways pray for our church and this family as we hope will be a great time and a new chapter in this churches history book. One that will look externally to the lost in our community and do it through creating a culturally relevant environment, through a simple process that make disciples and turns those disciples back into the community to serve and love the people in the greater DeLand area.