During my summer breaks, I attend a little church that puts on really bad services. Not long ago, this church of about 30 — down from about 75 at its zenith — had a guest speaker come in. He got all pumped up and said, “This church is going to be under the new blessing of God. Not only are we going to take our neighborhood; not only are we going to take our city; not only are we going to take our state; not only are we going to take our country, we are going to take our world!” I was sitting in the back row looking at people half asleep thinking, “We can’t even put on a decent service. We’re no threat to the world! We can’t choose four songs and get them right. We can’t do a Scripture reading creatively. We can’t put a single video together. We are not taking the world. Are we kidding ourselves?”
It is worth your church’s effort to build a team of people that meets minimally 90 minutes a week to simply pray, brainstorm, go through flip charts, and ask, “How can we make next Sunday’s service fantastic? Can we read the Scripture a different way? Can we sing songs a little bit differently? How can we raise the engagement level? What prop can the pastor use to make something a little more interesting? How can we make it more memorable?” Lest we forget, services matter! Music matters, drama matters, creativity matters, preaching matters, and making the preaching relevant and creative really matters.
RAISE RESOURCES
Your church will never reach its full Kingdom potential until you get good at raising resources. When I was just starting ministry, the great theologian, R.C. Sproul asked me, “Bill, how much ministry can you do with a hundred dollars?” When I said I didn’t know, he replied, "About a hundred dollars’ worth.” He proceeded to tell me that it takes money to generate ministry and if you want to generate just a little bit of ministry then just raise a little bit of money. But if you would like to generate even more ministry you are going to have to generate more resources, and you’d better stop being apologetic about it and realize that it takes money to launch visions. It takes money to feed the hungry and to resource the poor. It takes money to build a children’s ministry. It takes money to have a thriving student ministry in your church. It takes money to do these great things that we would all like to see our churches do. Pastors and church leaders have to get over their hang-up about this and teach about what the Bible says about raising resources and cast vision that makes people want to give.
SELF LEADERSHIP
I’ve talked a lot about this in the past few years, and I continue to believe very strongly that if you are going to build a prevailing church that is going to go from strength to strength over the long haul and give God glory, you’re going to have to take the long haul approach. That means your leaders have to take care of themselves and each other. This is the only way to ensure you will sustain the ministry joyfully over a long period of time.
Self leadership is the leader’s ability to navigate the highs and lows of ministry. It’s the ability to overcome personal discouragement, to maintain sober-mindedness in crisis, to keep ego at bay at all times, and to stay focused on the life mission. It’s the discipline to continually ask the questions: Is my calling sure? Is my vision clear? Is my passion burning hot? Don’t allow yourself to go into peril because you didn’t take the time to regroup, recalibrate, take appropriate time off, retreat spiritually, and refresh your soul.
My prayer is that we’ll all take some of the ideas above seriously and that we’d continue to challenge ourselves to pour all we’ve got into the Bride of Christ. Let’s learn to cast compelling visions, to build great teams, to put on great services, to raise resources, to do self leadership that can drive us to the kind of vision that has heaven cheering us on from one end to the other.
