Lets have a quick look at fellowship. Fellowship has a place in pretty well every aspect of the church. It should be a part of Sunday morning, small groups, and any other secondary service or gathering the church might have. We must remember that relationship is absolutely key to work in the Kingdom. While Jesus had His crowds where he taught and performed miracles, He also had his small group - his disciples. Through what we read in the gospels, it’s clear that Jesus loved his disciples. They were his closest friends and the ones He invested most of his teaching energy.
The point is that Jesus understand’s the importance of relationship. He would far rather you sit and talk to the homeless man whom you have just fed, than to see you just drop a loonie is his hat.
We need to make ourselves available for these kinds of personal encounters. I for one am terrible at it. I’m fine in front of a big group. I’m fine with my close friends who already know me. I’m nt good with the peopel I don’t know. This is just a part of how I am. So I have to make a real effort to make myself available to new peopel during times of fellowship. As a leader, it’s very important that I am accessable because otherwise things start to look eliteist. It’s not helpful for people to see the church leadership as some up high, unreachable group of individuals that don’t really care to know the rest of the people.
So at every opportunity we really should be fellowshipping. This will grow a caring community of people. This will make a church body feel loving and home-like. It is a worthy goal of any church to be trying to make people truly feel at home when they come to their meetings. Home is not a putluck lunch where no one talks to you. Home is not a service where someone says that they hope you feel welcome but no one actually welcomes you before or after the service.
As we fellowship and grow relationships, we will get to know one another. We’ll get good at knowing each others needs and setting out to meet them without having to aks for what we need quite as often. We’ll just start functioning more and more as a loving and caring community.
We need to intentional about out fellowship and our relationship building in all our meetings. No meeting should be so pressed for time that there is no time for visiting before and/or after the gathering.
One of the best “uses” for Sunday morning services is teaching and fellowship. As I have dicussed there are many aspects of 1 Corinthians 14 that I don’t think work well in larger settings. There is something about group dynamics that just kind of make certain types of ministries less effective. Even those churches that do try and have personal prayer ministries and that kind of thing on a Sunday, usually set things up so that the people seeking ministry basically move to place where they are pretty much in a small group ( a prayer chapel or even a gathering at the front of the church). The difference would be that it would be a small group where people might not know each other all that well. I’ve even seen it where an alter call is made at the end of a service and those who have chosen not to respond simply leave the service and head home leaving behind a small group.
There are some things that work very well in large groups though. One of them is clearly teaching. Someone with a gift of teaching on his or her life is often very effective when teaching in a large group. I have been thoroughly engaged with speakers when I’ve been one of thousands sitting in the crowd.
Sundays provide a great opportunity for all the small groups within a body to come together and be taught together. Why is this important to do? Well, I think a shared vision and direction is critically important in a church body. I think that teachers are more than just someone who teaches. They are a form of leader because what they say has can lead someone to make decision about their lives. In this comes a great responsibility.
In this discussion comes some tough questions for teachers to ask themselves. Where are you leading people? Are people making life decisions based on the lessons you provide them with? I think teaching can be encouraging, or it can be challenging, or it can be both. Another question… Am I challenging the people I’m speaking to? Am I encouraging them?
Something I often struggle with, having been a Christian for as many years as I have, is the fact that I hear many of the same sermons over and over again. Take for example the story of the prodigal son. I have heard this story more times that I can count. I’ve heard teachers teachon the cultural significance of a son in those days asking for their inheritance early. I’m probably wrong, but I’m fairly convinced that there is nothing new to learn from that story. To be reminded of it from time to time can be helpful - this is true. But I’m at the stage where I can recall all of what that story is about by having a teacher simply say “Remember the prodical son?” This is enough for me to get the point. I don’t need to have it decoded for me once again. In fact with that particular story, I just about shut right down when I hear it because I’m just so tired of hearing the same thing about it over and over again.
Not to be hard on teachers but I think there is some responsibility here too. Surely it is valuable to teach on this story and any elementary Christian topic when new Christians are around, but what of value are you offering to the regulars that have heard it all? This is a tough balance to have in your teaching because a church with un-challenged and bored regulars will ultimately be a church that is generally uninspired. This will be a church that is crippled in Kingdom work because so few people in it are inspried to grow in their own personal callings. At the same time, a church that teaches WAY over the heads of any new folks that might come along is going to ineffective in some ways as well.
The bottom line is that there needs to be lots of opportunities for teaching. If it has been determined that there are usually lots of seekers present on a Sunday, then perhaps teaching that is guaged on a more elementary level is important. In this case though, it is very important that there is more advanced teaching being offered at different times. I’ll go so far as to say that it would be the responsibility of a church’s leadership to actually plan this thing out. If we are making our Sunday services seeker friendly, then we NEED to have some non seeker friendly gatherings where we have our teachers teach some of the more gritty stuff so that our regulars don’t go away week after week feeling unchallenged, bored and even discouraged. It is not the regular’s job to get themselves challenged, interested and encouraged. They are already coming to services. They are doing their job of being there. The leadership now need to take over and provide what is necessary for growth.
This being said, if a person regularly attends a church that simply refuses to provide teaching that engages them, then I think that person needs to move on and find a new place to meet. Though teacher bare a responsibility in providing useful teaching, there comes a point where we need to look out for ourselves as well.
I think its fair to say that every church will be different in this regard. The church leadership needs to get intentional about planning these things out so that there is a time and place for people at different faith levels to recieve the teaching they need in order to grow. Everyone needs to be tought regularly. I personally don’t think that it’s enough to get a relevant teaching only once a month. We need to be enganged on a weekly basis if at all possible. I think this almost always means that more than one weekly gathering is necessary.
Now what of small groups? Well this is one area that I feel teaching isn’t that effective. I think a bible study approach to learning is more effective. Some small groups might be fortunate to have a teacher in their midst. In this case, maybe having a teaching during their gatherings would be effective. However, when there are no teachers in a small group - a bible study format might work better in order to get some learning accomplished. By “bible study” I’m thinking of a format where the group will read the bible or some other text together and then discuss the passage together. The sharing amonst them will inevitably provide opportunities to learn from one another.
Lets look at outreach now. It is true that one of our main purposes on earth as Christians is to fulfill The Great Commission and to worship God in all aspects of our lives. In fact, by the very act of fulfilling the great commission we are engaging in an act that honours and worships God. No matter how you cut it, outreach is huge.
Outreach can be done in many ways. There are some forms of outreach that are more effective than others. I personally find that a manipulative form of outreach is not helpful in the long run. If people are scared into a commitment to God, they may spend many years trying to come to terms with a loving God of whom they are afraid. This basically puts a persons ability/willingness to try and draw close to God on hold for sometimes a persons whole life.
I’m going to be focussing a little more on the evangelistic purposes of outreach in this series - or outreach that grows the church. This is not to say that outreach that is simply service to the non-chruch community is not important and valid. That kind of work is of great value.
In North America we often like to try and convince people of the reality of God instead of hoping and encouraging people to seek an encounter with Him. In fact there is some evidence to suggest that a logical belief in God might not have the same saving effect as a full belief of the heart. Take a look at Romans 10:9-10:
9That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
This suggests there are but two conditions of salvation. 1) The confession of the mouth that “Jesus is Lord” 2) The belief in your heart that God raised him from the dead. These are not an either/or thing either. It says “and”. They both are required.
A logical argument for God can not in itself cause a person to meet these two requirements. We might be able to pull out number 1, but number 2 is a heart thing and the fact of the matter is that we can really only influence our hearts, but not outright change them without some kind of encounter. Change is something that comes over time and is usually attached to some kind of emotional event, or in this case a spiritual event. Often spiritual events are in fact emotional.
Jesus taught a lot by example and by using proverbs which are in essence examples themselves. He did not try and convince people of the exsistance of God by a series of sound and logical arguments. He merely was himself and simply showed people who he was. This is one of the most effective ways of outreach. Our example in the world has a great impact on people.
I was once a salesmen at a music store. I set out to be a realiable and responsible salesman, so I decided that I would give my customers special treatment so as to win their trust and their future business. It was a successful strategy. At one point I had one of the other salesmen come up to me and say that he had been watching me serve my customers and had realized that there was an honest way of doing business that not that much harder than always taking short cuts. Basically he told me that I had inspired him to do his job better and to try and serve his customer with as much integrity and courtesy as possible.
In this case I didn’t have to teach how to do this. I simple did my thing according to some pricipals I decided to follow. It was seen by someone and without even really trying, I made a convert. I think the Christian life works in much the same way. People watch other people. You are being watched from time to time. Be honourable and responsible. Be Christ-like and make people wonder what it is you have that they don’t have. Eventually, this will start them seaching and eventually they will find the truth in Jesus Christ especially if they know that you are in fact a follower of Jesus.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is that outreach is not always best done in large groups at a Billy Graham crusade. Most of it should be happening on a one-on-one basis. Much of it doesn’t even need to be all that overt. It can be simply an example we are setting amongst people who we know don’t know Jesus. Once again, I feel that Sunday is not supposed to be our main outlet for outreach. It’s not the pastors job to reach all the people in the neighborhood, it’s our job to do that. Outreach should be a daily endeavour.
I think the danger of putting all our outreach eggs in the Sunday morning basket is that we start to hope that the church we are in will do that outreaching for us. We might muster up the courage to invite a friend, but in the end we don’t want to actually have to let the cat out of the bag about our own beliefs. Logically, you and your story are going to have FAR more meaning to one of your friends or acquaintances than that of your pastor.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think there is a place for outreach ministry on Sunday mornings. The problem comes when that ministry become a crutch to us and we treat it as out main outreach tool in our own lives. This goes hand in hand with using church as our main source of prayer time and worship time. We need to be engaged in all these things far more frequently than once a week.
What about small groups? Well in some ways I think people are more willing to engage with God and encounter him if they were invited to a more intimate small group setting. However, these times with our small groups need to be structed based on 1 Corinthians 14 in my opinion. So if the Spirit were working in full steam and new comer arrived, what effect would that have? I think the point is that we need to be careful. Spiritual gifts can be scary to people who don’t understand them. We need to make a point of educating people on the gifts. If a new person is invited to a small group that regularly sees manifestations of the Holy Spirit, I think it would be important for someone to explain to that person what sometimes happens and the Biblical support for those things to be happening. I suppose the same would go for Sunday mornings where manifestations are likely to take place.
In writing this series, I’m starting to notice a pattern. I think we as a church (or possibly its just me) rely too heavily on our churches to do the work of the Kingdom for us. So we end up mandating much of the tough stuff to the church we go to so we don’t have to do it. Among other problems with this thinking, this also helps to perpetuate the problem of the Sunday service being used for too many purposes - in that it is trying to have something in it for everyone.
Revised (edited for grammar and content) March 21, 2006
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