Below is an outline of what we covered in Part 3 of yesterday’s webinar The Strengths of a Small Church. In the comments section, share how your own church equips its members to serve, as well as any questions you have for our presenters, Brandon O’Brien and Chuck Warnock. Also, take a look at Part 1, Authenticity, and Part 2, Lean and Nimble.
Part 3: Equipping
Brandon:
If you decide to start streamlining your programming schedule, how will you make sure that the people in your church are involved actively in discipleship and sharing the gospel in the community? That’s a fair question.
When does most church programming take place? Evenings. Weekends. In people’s “extra time,” after they complete their work, family responsibilities, and hobbies. Let’s say you have a congregation of 100 adults and all of them serve in church related ministries with five hours of their leisure time per week. That’s enough time for Sunday morning activities, a midweek program, and something like a committee meeting. At that rate, your congregation can log 500 volunteer hours in a given week. That’s an enormous level of participation.
But it’s safe to assume that most of those 100 adults have jobs, and many of them have children. If they all work full-time, they will spend a combined 4,000 hours on the job every week. And it is likely that they will spend another 500 hours or more serving on the PTA, coaching tee ball, playing golf, or volunteering with a local community organization. That’s 4,500 hours of what people would consider dedicated time.
One Christian commentator, Tom Sine, estimates that a couple generations back, families spent roughly 30 percent of a single income on rent or mortgage; that same expense today costs on average 50 percent of two incomes. He also says that the average American is working 10 hours more per week than he or she was 15 or 20 years ago. What this means for the church, in Sine’s estimation, is that “young people will have less time for family, church, prayer, Scripture reading, witness, and service.” In other words, if people are working longer hours and spending more of their income on basic necessities, they are less and less likely to have disposable time or money to give the church.
One way creative churches are finding to address this challenge is, instead of loading the church calendar with programs and expecting people to minister in their extra time, they are finding ways to equip their congregants to do ministry in their dedicated time.
1. Altadena Baptist Church (California): “ministry midwives”
a. The majority of the ministry initiatives come from lay people
b. The Martin Luther King Day celebration
c. L.A. marathon
2. Trinity Lutheran Church (near Seattle): “high accountability/low control”
a. The pastors consider themselves responsible for the message the church carries into the community.
b. But they consider the congregation responsible for actually doing the work.
c. Pastor Eileen Hanson’s job is to meet with people and help them see how their hobbies, interests, and work situations can be effectively viewed as ministry opportunities.
Chuck:
I really like the two examples Brandon shared of Altadena Baptist as “ministry midwives” and Trinity Lutheran with their “high accountability, low control” model. Usually, we do “low accountability, high control” ministry and the results are not always good.
As Brandon pointed out, people are really busy now. So equipping for ministry has to be both effective and efficient. And it has to be based on real-life need, not just “let’s all go to church for one more study in how to do this.”
I grew up in the age of Baptist “study courses.” You could actually take an entire series of courses, get a certificate for each one, and a diploma when you completed the series–and you never had to actually do anything with your new knowledge! Church members don’t buy that approach now, and they shouldn’t.
Equipping church members is an on-going task. Equipping can take place through the pastor’s sermons, too. That’s the one time a week you have everyone together, and have everyone’s attention, so there’s nothing wrong with encouraging members to find their gifts and passions, and learn how to employ them.
But equipping can also take place informally. I ran into a pastor-friend the other day at Starbucks. We chatted for a minute in line, and then I asked him to join me a table. He said,”I’d love to, but I’m mentoring a guy and he just walked in.”
Of course, equipping can also take place in the typical classroom-style, small-group arrangement where you train in the how-tos of ministry.
One of the best things we have done is to maximize how our people already care for our congregation and community. Remember the appreciative inquiry process I talked about. Well, out of that came a desire to make sure that all our members, and many of our neighbors, got cared for in the midst of life crises. We already had an informal network of people who took food, wrote cards, and made contact with those who were sick, grieving, or shut-in. But we needed an intentional process to do those things, and to make sure that everyone was cared for.
Our deacons established five deacon team ministries: hospital visitation, bereavement care, homebound care, prayer ministry, and meals.
We promoted the teams at a Deacon Team Ministry Fair one week during our Sunday school hour. The coordinator for each team manned a table with simple information about what their team would do and talked with each interested volunteer. That morning, 65 members of our congregation (which runs less than 100 on Sunday) signed up to participate in one or more team ministries. And three years later, those teams are still functioning well. We provided brief training for the hospital visitation team, and the others have self-organized. Our Meals Team is probably the most active. Each week we carry meals to over 20 people in our community, including non-church members. Each of the teams ministers to our whole community, not just our members, and we have actually had people join our church because we ministered to them in one of life’s crises.
In addition, each month we have a senior bus day trip to a local point of interest. The “ARK cruises,” as they are called, are planned, coordinated, and conducted totally by our own volunteers. I go on some trips, but not all. The same is true for our monthly Senior Adult Fellowship, which is a monthly program and lunch, again coordinated by a different group of volunteers from the bus trips.
Both programs reach seniors not from our church, and give them a time for fellowship and an inexpensive outing. For some, those events are the only social outings they have. All of this is run by our volunteers, who occasionally ask me to pray, bring a devotional, or just join in the fun. Church leaders and I support both of these ministries with some funding, and help with room setup, equipment needs, bus maintenance, and promotion.
In his book Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church, Reggie McNeal says, “The missional expression of church will require new metrics to measure its vitality. The current scorecard for the North American church is tied to the definitions of church as a place and church as a vendor of religious goods and services.”
In other words, to paraphrase Ryan Bolger of Fuller Seminary, rather than counting butts in the seats, we should be counting people engaged in mission. To that I would add that we should also count those whose lives are impacted by what we do. Although we run less than 100 on Sunday, we touch the lives of over 300 people through our various community ministries, which also include a Community Music School we co-founded with a local university.
The equipping church, especially the smaller equipping church, should focus on measuring its impact, not its intake, each week. Of course, you’ve got to pay the bills and keep an eye on the health of the church itself, but nothing will energize a church, small or large, as much as when its members are excited and involved in ministries they helped create, that make a difference in people’s lives.
