There are some things that every church—to be a church—must do well.
—Howard Hendricks
Some time ago I visited a church that has an unusual strength in fellowship. I was so profoundly impressed I asked the pastor, “How in the world do you attract this many friendly couples to one church?”
He said, “It’s very simple. You can’t get in and out of this church without somebody inviting you to lunch.” Even though it’s massive, it’s the friendliest church on planet Earth, with a fellowship virus that has spread to everyone. Objectively, I wouldn’t say it was the greatest preaching center in the area, but it’s developed this one strength to an inspiring level.
At the beginning of any new ministry year a church must evaluate its last performance. I would use three questions:
1. What are we doing well? What are our strengths? If you don’t capitalize on your strengths, you tend to minister on a basis of weaknesses.
2. What are we doing that needs to be improved? You may be doing many things reasonably well, but how much can you improve them? We are embarrassed by our weaknesses and we excuse them rather than find ways to overcome them.
3. What are we not doing that we should be doing? Many churches tend to do what any other human organization can do, instead of what the church alone can do. In planning a new church year, church leaders must be aware of the unique contribution the church makes to the community—the spiritual contribution.
Yet a church can go overboard in emphasizing its strengths and neglect the many other necessary ministries that make up a church. There are some things that every church—to be a church—must do well. Chapter 2 of Acts gives the heart of a New Testament church. In this context four essential disciplines stand out: instruction, worship, service, and fellowship. Now, the context of the paragraph at the end of Acts 2 is evangelism. It begins with people being added to the church daily, and it ends the same way. If the church ever loses its evangelistic thrust in the process of teaching, worshiping, servicing, and fellowshiping, these disciplines will degenerate into ends, rather than means to an end.
Here are some thoughts on these four disciplines of the church, which every board should evaluate as it plans for the future.
Instruction
The pastor-teacher’s role is defined in Ephesians 4:11. His primary task is to be an equipper of the saints for their work of ministry. He’s committed to a ministry of multiplication, not addition. He’s not doing the work of ten men, he’s equipping ten men to do the work.
Many of our board members aren’t involved in spiritual ministry; they’re involved in activities that others in the congregation can do. If a Christian leader is going to make a spiritual impact, he must surround himself with a group of people into whose lives he’s pouring his own—which, by the way, is a tremendous blessing to him. That’s when he starts growing, when he becomes personally responsible for somebody else’s spiritual growth.
We have the idea that instruction has to take place within four walls. That might be one of the greatest barriers to learning. For example, I can teach for hours in a classroom, walk down to the snack shop, sit down with a student, and get involved in a conversation that will change his life. That doesn’t mean I should abandon classroom teaching, but some of my most effective teaching has been done in my office, over at the snack shop, and out of my home. You can impress people at a distance; you can only impact them up close. The general principle is: The closer the personal relationship, the greater the potential for impact.
True discipleship is a commitment, a lifestyle. It has to be as high a priority to the pastor as preaching, but not to the exclusion of preaching. I often think of the Savior’s words: “This you ought to have done and not to have left the other undone.” Don’t stop preaching and do start discipling.
One question I ask a pastor—I love to do it, particularly when I’m leaving—is, “When I come back, I am going to ask you to show me the core of people into whose lives you are building. Who will be here when you are gone?” The answer comes through effective preaching and discipling.
For instance, the Lord Jesus sent his disciples out after he had carefully instructed them about how to minister. When they came back they were higher than a kite. The text says they rehearsed everything that had happened. And he was excited with them. On another occasion they went out on their own, and they struck out. Jesus bailed them out, performed the miracle they had blown, and the text says, “The disciples took him aside and privately asked, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘This kind comes out by prayer only.'” Prayer? What in the world does prayer have to do with it? They had cast out demons before and they had done it successfully. Now they were learning they had been spending too much time using their gift and not enough time developing the spiritual resources needed to maximize their gift.
Instruction can begin right in the retreat room. I’d start a Bible study that revolves around passages such as Acts 2, Ephesians 4, and Matthew 28, and get people involved in a discovery process.
I’ll never forget one time when I was studying a passage of Scripture with a group of men, and one of them said, “Hey, hold it! I’ve got the picture! Jesus Christ never became blind to his objective. He was always on target!” I said, “Okay, why don’t we come up with our objective?” The next time we met they all came with their lists. We lined them up and I said, “Okay, you prioritize them.” For the first time, some of them began to focus the gospel on their daily lives. One man very quietly said, “It’s hard for me to believe this, but something that’s number two on my priority list is number twenty-two in my life.” The impact upon his life of that confession was twice as great because he had discovered it, not because I said, “Look, Tom, it would be a good idea for you to get a list of objectives and prioritize them.” Some of the best sessions I have ever had with a church board have come through this kind of discovery.
In our retreats and board meetings, we need to spend more time praying, studying, and sharing.
I was meeting with a church board one night when it really got heavy. Finally the pastor broke down; I mean he broke down and wept like a baby. In between sobs he said, “Men, I just can’t carry this load.” Then one member said, “What in the world are we holding you responsible for? This isn’t your burden, this is ours.” That launched a discussion that went until midnight about our ministry responsibilities as lay leaders.
Worship
I had an elder who would have failed an audition for a choir, but during the hymns he would stand down in front of me with a hymnbook open, mouthing the words. One day I asked him, “Mr. McFadden, what are you doing?” He said, “I’m worshiping.” I asked, “You mean you’re repeating the words?” He replied, “That’s right. Remember, Pastor, you have not worshiped until you’ve told God your personal response, and these hymns are my response.”
Worship is a personal response to a divine revelation. You haven’t worshiped until you’ve responded.
Developing a higher level of worship among the people must start with the board. The board sets the pattern; they are the behavioral model given in Titus and Timothy. Unfortunately, we don’t worship very often in our board meetings. When I was being trained, professors would say, “Look, men, one of the problems you’ll face in your ministry is board meetings, spelled b-o-r-e-d. It’s a grim scene, but that’s part of the price you have to pay.”
This doesn’t need to be true. Board meetings can be a time of worship and celebration. I worked with a board where the members knew each other, loved each other, and confided in each other. As we faced difficult and complex issues, it was not uncommon for someone to say, “Pastor, I don’t think we have enough wisdom for this problem right now. Why don’t we pray?” We would bow our heads and pray around the room. More times than not, we would find the insights and wisdom we were seeking. Worship must start with the elders.
In addition, Sunday morning worship can be jeopardized by inadequate planning. One way this happens is by allowing worship to be set in concrete. I happen to have the crazy idea that preaching should precede rather than follow the worship service. Preaching should be followed by sharing, application, prayer, and other worship responses, and that requires careful planning and training.
We should prepare our people for change. Individually, we are predestined to be changed, conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. Corporately, the church should be the most revolutionary agency on earth. Too often, though, people come unglued because the service didn’t start with the Gloria Patri, or the Lord’s Prayer was in the wrong place. Board members, who are the opinion shapers, must set the worship pace and say to the people: “This is what we are going to do and this is why we are going to do it.”
The use of response in corporate worship can enhance authentic worship. Worship becomes more meaningful when we realize that all of us face the same tempter and the same struggles, and that we can look to the same Lord and each other for help and support.
Service
Service must be seen in a broad context. It’s easy to see it only in terms of our local church—what are we doing at Fourth and Main on Sunday morning in Sunday school. I see service as what goes on in the office or factory Monday through Friday. The average layperson has the idea that his or her vocation is a penalty. That’s what he or she does five days a week in order to “serve the Lord” on Sunday. Actually, what takes place on Sunday should equip someone for the service to be performed all week.
We also need to recognize that within the church many of our people are overworked and undertrained. I find more and more people who do not enjoy church work, they endure it. When the focus is ministry activity to the exclusion of the individual’s spiritual life, then burnout is inevitable. A typical example is the person who pulls back and says, “I don’t want to get involved.” This is one reason why a lot of people like to go to a big church and get lost in the crowd. I think we’re asking people to minister when we’ve never sufficiently ministered to them. You can’t minister out of a spiritual vacuum.
My goal for a local church would be to help every member serve Christ in at least one way, outside as well as inside the church. The average layperson isn’t serving in that way because he’s not trained to do it; but once he’s properly trained, it’s amazing how he will begin to enjoy it and become comfortable with it. When a person serves within the borders of his spiritual gifts he will enjoy the work of the Lord.
How you enlist a person usually determines how he or she will serve. A moratorium should be declared on at least three ways of enlisting people. One is the public announcement read on Sunday morning: “Beloved, next Tuesday we are going visiting. Please show up. Last week nobody showed up. Won’t you please come this week?” Usually, no one will come the following week except the two people you should never send visiting!
Another one is the last-minute conscription; it’s the situation where the Sunday school superintendent slips in during the adult class opening exercises, taps the person on the end of the row, and sentences him to the junior department for life. The moral of which is, “Don’t sit on the end of the row.”
The third scene is a desperate C.E. director who approaches a sincere, good-hearted person and says, “We’ve been all over the building looking for someone to take the high school class and we can’t find anybody who wants to take it. We’ve lost six people in the last seven months, and now we’re coming to you. Will you take it?” If this good-hearted Christian says, “Well, I don’t have much time,” the C.E. director usually responds, “That’s all right. It won’t take very much time.”
A better way to recruit is to get people involved right away—when they join the church. People need to know we’re not operating the Church of the Sacred Rest.
I saw a church go from about 34 percent participation, which is very high, to 93 percent. They committed themselves to the idea that everyone in the church was going to have a responsibility. No exceptions. They matched person with job and began to develop a realistic training program, which was hands-on. They learned to teach, for example, by teaching. I like the idea of apprenticeship.
I also love the idea of long-term commitment. I would like to meet more people who have been teaching sixth-grade boys for ten years, love it, and are still working on becoming the best sixth-grade teacher in the world. Single-year appointments destroy continuity. Since there is no continuity of ministry, there is little development toward the mastery of a skill. Single-year appointments also assume people will burn out in a year. It’s almost a Pygmalion effect. If you assume it, it will happen. On the other hand, if you develop workers with the idea of long-term commitments, you’ll train some real experts.
The greatest nursery teacher I know is a person who has been teaching for thirty-eight years. If there is anything to be known about teaching nursery children, she knows it. Even more exciting, she’s trained another twenty-five or thirty people in her skills. I’ve heard her say, “I’m no good with adults; they bother me, they threaten me.” But she loves little kids, and they love her.
To evaluate the way your church works with its laity, I recommend asking two questions:
1. How are current members functioning?
2. What potential resources do new people represent?
You work on it correctively by recruiting people who are already members but not serving. You work on it preventively by recruiting new people who are just coming into the church.
For people who already have become spectators, many churches have used a questionnaire very effectively—a means by which people can indicate the service areas that interest them. There is one warning I give to churches using surveys: Follow through! I recommend a committee examine the data, match the jobs with available people, and—this is the key—go to the prospect personally and say, “The committee has spent a lot of time thinking and praying about this matter, and we feel that God would have us approach you about the possibility of working in such-and-such a position” (that is, if you have as a committee thought and prayed about the position and the appointee before approaching him/her).
We enlisted a neurosurgeon to serve in our college department in this manner. Three of us made an appointment and went to see him. When he saw us he said, “Good grief, what is this?”
“Well,” we said, “we have a challenge for you.” Before we could continue, he called his nurse and told her not to disturb him for any reason. We described the task as clearly as we could, and then very straightforwardly told him, “Doc, it will take everything you have and then some, but we think you’re our man.” That night he couldn’t sleep. His wife asked, “What’s the matter?” He replied, “I have to make an important decision.” “What, are we going to leave Dallas?” “No.” “Are you going to sell the practice?” “No, I’m struggling with the fact that three Spirit-led men came to my office and said, ‘We feel that God would have us approach you about the possibility of taking the college class.’ How can I view that lightly?”
And most of all, laypeople need simple encouragement to continue their service. I was walking through town with a well-known pastor when we met one of his members. Calling her by name he said, “I was going over the Sunday school reports and I saw the names of the kids you led to Christ this year. I want you to know that you are engaged in a significant ministry.”
That’s how to build up lay leaders.
Fellowship
The tendency of leadership is to stifle fellowship—which means, “to share in common”—by gravitating toward vertical rather than horizontal relationships; professor and student, teacher and disciple, pastor and parishioner. We need more horizontal relationships that are developed around commitment to the same goals. Regardless of our station in life, all of us are in the process of learning and maturing.
Also, the average layperson doesn’t think that his vocation has spiritual importance. Most physicians, salespersons, and business managers think their “secular” tasks are unrelated to the body of Christ. Our faith commitment to each other should be the great equalizer. Because we are members of the same family, it’s very important to me, the pastor, for Jim, an elder in our congregation, to do good work at the local television station. I am going to pray for him and support him in his work.
One day I was at Dick Halverson’s church and he said, “Howie, how would you like to make a call with me?” We went out to a junior high school where one of Dick’s members was the principal. He was expecting us and had some sandwiches brought up from the cafeteria. After lunch, we studied the Word and spent some time praying together. Just before we left Dick said, “Let’s take a walk.” So the three of us walked all the way around the block. After we had returned to the front door, Dick said, “Okay, let’s pray and claim this place as your center of ministry.”
Dick was as concerned about this man’s ministry as he was about his own. He sought to help equip him to function as a Christian leader in society. That’s how you develop fellowship.
The dynamics of fellowship in the New Testament, though, had a lot to do with the times. They operated in a context of persecution. Interestingly, in our times, the greatest Christian fellowship you see around the world is in persecuted areas.
I was in India some time ago, where we conducted a pastors’ conference outside one of the communist-controlled states where it is against the law to preach the gospel. Three pastors who had just been released from prison for preaching came to the meeting. I said, “What’s it like in your state?” They said, “Just like the Book of Acts. The more they persecute us, the more we flourish. We’re conducting four or five services every Sunday to accommodate the people.”
They told me about one church where the leaders met with the pastor and said, “Pastor, we have a problem; there are some people coming to church more than they should. From now on let’s tell the people, ‘If you come this Sunday, you must stay home next Sunday.'”
I’ve watched this phenomenon over and over again. My son attended Harvard, and the thing that really hit me was watching how his ministry and that of his friends took off the moment they were nailed to the wall for what they were doing.
I keep asking my friends, “How can we launch a persecution in Dallas?”
The persecution against Jesus Christ always started when he became involved with people and changed their lives. Satan is for any program that doesn’t change people. But once you start overhauling the lives of people, watch out.
Which brings me back to the four disciplines. If I’m right that God has called us to make the church a center for instruction, worship, service, and fellowship, all in the context of evangelism, you can expect powerful things to happen. You will impact the community. You won’t have to stir up trouble; it will come to you. When the Holy Spirit begins to convict, convince, and rebuke, hang on, for resistance is on the way. And not just outside resistance, but internal resistance as well. You’ll know when you’re on target because that’s when opposition always comes.
When you are doing what Jesus Christ has called you to do, you can count on two things: You will possess spiritual power because you have the presence of Christ, and you’ll experience opposition because the devil does not concentrate on secondary targets. He never majors on the minors.
Even in our planning, it’s critical to remember what Paul said in Ephesians: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.”
Copyright © 1997
