Some key ideas that we've discussed already, again a little review. Number one, unlimited growth.
When it comes to church growth, our goal is to receive as many as the Lord will
add. Three, three hundred, three thousand, thirty thousand
or to multiply congregations indefinitely.
We're in the business of growth.
We want to be prepared to experience growth whether that is growth of our local
congregation or growth through ministry development.
Growth is not just numbers. Growth is how you grow a ministry.
How effective it is, how many people. Let's just take a food ministry because I know you've done that
in the past. It's a food ministry, has three or four families that come every week
growing that ministry is whoa, maybe 50 families come to you. You add different to
counseling situations. One of the things we do every family that comes for
food, OK, we give them food, but inside every
one of those bags of food there is Christianity for beginners.
So we crossfeed the two. OK?
So that type of ministry, that type of ministry growth. Number
two church organization and growth. Organization
precedes growth in any enterprise we said. New Testament
organizational pattern will permit not automatically produce. It permits growth.
OK? God's the one who adds. Now there are a lot of strategies for church
organization but only one pattern. I have to keep repeating that and having a New Testament
pattern will prepare us for unlimited growth that God will give and He will give it. He's promised it.
Number three, the New Testament pattern for organization requires us to identify,
implement and integrate the ministries of the church described in the New Testament.
So in my last lesson we kind of went through the five areas of ministry and what
they were. What are these ministries? What are we supposed to be doing? We said
in evangelism what are we supposed to be doing? We're supposed to be communicating the
information of the Gospel to those who do not have it. To those who don't
believe, to those who have never heard it. How you do that? That's your business.
You send out flyers four times a year fine, ads in the paper, articles,
radio program, DVDs, Internet, doorknocking, Gospel meetings.
You pick one. Just pick one and do it. OK?
Alright so you have to identify, implement and integrate. So let's talk
about identification. In Acts 2 which I read to you, one to
47, it describes only five ministries. Every ministry activity of the
church can be put into one of these five. So in order of biblical
appearance, as I mentioned, and you're going to learn these by heart: evangelism, education,
fellowship, worship, and service. So unless a church is fully aware of the
existence and nature of these ministries, it can't do the
program. If you're not aware that fellowship is just as important as evangelism
and education, is just as important as worship, unless you're not aware of
these five basic ministries, you can't put the plan into operation.
Now once we understand the nature and purpose of each
ministry, the work of ministers is to implement each ministry, in other
words, your full time guys, what are they supposed to be doing?
Well they're supposed to be implementing those five ministries. That's what
they're supposed to be doing. The degree of success the church has in each
area is dependent on its size and knowledge and maturity and the skill of its
leaders and how well they know these five areas of ministry,
what they're about and how to accomplish them.
But the task for each congregation should be clear to everybody,. In other words how do we
evangelize in our community? What training and resources do we have?
Or who will teach the church and how and where will we do this teaching? And
where will we meet for fellowship and worship and who will organize these things for the edification of the
brethren? And what are the needs of the church and community and how are we going to meet these?
If you're having a meeting, those are the questions that should be asked and
answered. Building a congregation is like building a
house, each part needs to be installed in its proper order. Building
a church begins with evangelism and then framed with teaching,
fellowship, and worship and service are added to complete the structure and prepare it to repeat the
cycle. That's what growth is. So if we don't have a plan of
implementation or if we leave parts out, the church is incomplete
and stunted in its growth. Remember the goal is unlimited growth. The approach is
New Testament organization and ministry. So you have to identify the
ministries. You have to implement them, in other words get those plates up and get them spinning. And
then thirdly, Integration. How do these ministries
work together? How do the elders and ministers and deacons and staff and
saints, how did they work together in a cohesive system that
exercises these ministries effectively and biblically?
And so the ministry management system that I'm going to propose is one way to integrate
all of these five ministries in such a way as to provide effective leadership,
effective ministry on an organizational base for unlimited growth. You
see without a plan to manage ministry, it's difficult to analyze our strengths and
weaknesses. It's difficult to assign tasks and responsibility.
It leads to the levelling of growth. What we end up doing is we end up doing the
least. Not the most. We end up doing the easiest,
not the hardest. We end up doing what we know instead of learning what we
don't know. That's what we end up doing.
And that's that's why churches plateau, we're cruising. We're just cruising
along. And a lot of times it's not because of bad faith, it's because we don't
know how to get that thing into drive. We just don't know the mechanics of how to do it.
So now we're going to enter into the "How do we do it?" OK. How
do you begin at your church? Well I would say carefully.
So first of all how do you do it? Well you identify the ministries.
Everybody's got a copy of that flowchart if you'll flip over there.
A review of the five ministries: what they are, what their goals should be, how they ought to function.
There we go. You, the ministers and elders and deacons and support
staff need to know this, need to be in agreement.
You need to teach the church. Look at this, see this up here? That's what you should have. You've got one of those, it's blank.
That's a flow chart. There are the five ministries.
And so we ought to know and agree. For example, what is biblical evangelism
and what are we doing in evangelism? The preaching of the gospel to the lost with
the objective of their belief and obedience. Is there anything we're doing in this church that can be
put in that box, evangelism? If you don't know what the ministry, whatever it is, is about how can you minister?
If you don't know what the objective of the teaching is, what are you going to teach? So
the first step is to identify the five ministry areas and be very
clear as to the biblical nature and purpose and who's in charge.
So let me show you this. Here's the flow flowchart at
Choctaw. OK? Here's the flowchart
at Choctaw. Notice in the flow chart at Choctaw, let me get my copy here.
We've got five areas of ministry.
Notice under evangelism we've broken it down into three areas of
evangelism. Local outreach. So in evangelism
elder Steve H and elder Harold W are the
elders responsible for that area of ministry along with a
brother Dayton K, who is also one of our elders at Choctaw. So we've
broken it into three areas. Local outreach, local
means Choctaw and the surrounding community. What are we doing? Well
visitor follow up. Who's responsible for that? The elders and the
ministers. Personal bible studies, somebody says I want to have a personal [study], who's
responsible for organizing and assigning those? Marty K is responsible for
that. New converts. New converts need to be taught. We need to kind of
integrate them. Who's responsible for that? Joe was
baptized Friday, who's going to bring Joe the packet that gives all the
information about the church? That gets his name into the computer? Assigns him a
mailbox. And all the rest of it. Finds out his
gift assessment? What are you good at? What do you like? Who's going to do that? Well here in our church and
the person who's responsible for making those assignments, that's Marty. There is no job
that doesn't have a name next to it. No
job that does not have a name next to it. So we have local, we have
domestic outreach. Our domestic outreach is our Internet ministry.
So bibletalk.tv. Well Mike Mazzalongo and Hal Gatewood are the
two; Hal works full time for bibletalk.tv and I'm a full time minister
responsible for it, so we're responsible for that. We also have a fully
equipped TV studio at Choctaw and Hal and I,
and actually this is not up to date,
there's a name missing and that's Bob Chilton. His name is there too because he works in the studio.
We have international evangelism that's outside the United States.
Who is responsible for that? Dayton K is responsible. We support
missionaries in Haiti, Kenya, mission requests that come in, mission
trips, special collections, World Bible School. There's a name next to everything there.
Alright. I'm not going to go through every name here, so fear not. OK?, but I just want to do a
couple of them just to show you. Let's look at education for example.
So notice I said in education. Who is the elder like something
happens in education and someone says, "Well, we need to talk to the elders." No, no. The elders
don't have an entire...we have 7, we don't have seven elders getting together to talk about
one thing that's happening in education. We have an elder over education. If there's an
issue or a problem we go see that elder. In this case it's Bob C.
So what does he oversee exactly? Well, all the classes, well, all the adult and teen
classes I work with that, I create the curriculum for those
classes. Epic, it's like LTC.
LTC. It's like LTC but it's local. It's in Oklahoma City. OK?
Who's in charge of that? Bonnie B and Celestia B, these two women, they're responsible for
that. Preschool, Niecie H and Jenny A. Time Travelers, teachers, even the workroom.
Something happens in the workroom, somebody broke something in the workroom, who do we talk to? Well we know who to
talk to in the workroom. It's Evelyn E or Juice S. They're responsible for that.
And so on and so on, all the way down the line. I want to show you
something in service ministry, OK? So we have
evangelism, education, fellowship, worship's at the
end, then we have service ministry and service ministry is
divided into three areas. It's divided into administration.
OK. And so under administration we have the office staff, Marty's the office manager, we have a
secretary, bookkeeper, custodian, church directory, and so on and so the web site,
every single ministry has a name next to it and has a
budget and every single ministry has a budget number.
So in evangelism for example, visitor follow...or I'll do
mine, Bibletalk. That's EV, that's the area of
evangelism and 130. That's the
studio. 131, that's copying material
EV 130 - 06, that's
computer equipment. 07 is software, 08 is plastic cases,
09. So when we need to buy something, we don't have seven elders making a
decision that we got to buy a new computer. We have a budget. We simply make a
purchase order, we write down what ministry it's for, exactly what area it's
for. We put the number in. We know what our budget [is]. Bang! It goes to the office. We have
an elder who is in charge of finance. He reviews it. OK.
Are they spending their budget yet? It's all good, check. He signs it and away we go.
That's implementation. That's systematized. OK?
Because we don't want to bog down the system with administrative details, we
want to minister to people not to paper.
OK so that's our flowchart and this flowchart is has to be updated
every month, because every month there's a new ministry, there's a new thing. Somebody has been added,
somebody has been taken away. So the beauty of computers of course, as you know, you can go in and make
changes. Boom. And the secretary spits one of these out, the computer
does it and everybody gets a copy. We know what the new flowchart is. We know who's in charge of everything
and we can add as many ministries to any area as we want.
So somebody comes up with a bright idea about teaching, "Oh, I got a great idea!" I'll mention it. So we
had a great idea, you know what where we're going to do? Some research. I have a great idea. You know what we're going to do? We're going to have a
health fair. A children's health care. Oh yeah?
Why? Well because in our congregation we have many professionals: so we have some medical doctors, we have
an optometrist, we have nurses, we have all kinds of people there. So in our fellowship hall we're going to
set up booths and the doctors and the eye doctor and the dentists and the social workers
there they're going to offer screenings, health screenings, give away toothbrushes, all kinds of stuff
for children in our community and in our parking lot, because we have a lot of people, we'll put them to
use. We're going to have a fire truck with the deputy fire chief. We're going to have an ambulance with a paramedic.
We're gonna have a cop car with one of the guys who's a police officer and we're going to have a
helicopter because one of our members is a nurse, she works for Air Kid
One which is the OU Children's Hospital neonatal and she travels
with the helicopter so she asked permission and they're going to fly the helicopter to our church and
land it in the parking lot.
Do you think we're going to have trouble drawing children that day?
Do you think so?
Oh wait a minute, I forgot to tell you, after they do the booths
and visit the things and get the little badges and hats, oh I forgot to tell you,
the very last booth, VBS sign up.
VBS sign up for the following week.
What do you think? You think it'll work?
Where does that go in my ministry chart?
Evangelism. It could go there. But for all practical purposes
it's under education. Why?
Because the tip of the spear is what?That booth at the end, what is it going to
be? VBS. This is a VBS project.
So the elders said, you know, somebody had, we never did this before. So somebody said I had a
great idea and brought it to the elders and they said, "yeah, we think it's great. How much money do you need?"
$2,000 bucks. OK. Next year because we brought it several months ago, OK. Next year we'll put
$2000 in the budget for that. We said we needed a youth and family ministry
because we've got so many young families moving and so on and so forth. Growth.
We need a youth and family minister, so the elders turned around and said to the congregation, "OK we're going to raise the
budget level on Sunday. The weekly budget total is going to raise for
2014, but here's the deal we're going to make with you church.
If you meet budget every single week for the first three and a half months of 2014,
we will hire a youth and family minister. It's up to you.
If you want to give to it, go ahead and if you do it, we promise we'll hire a youth and
family minister and if we don't make budget for the first three and a half months of the year
then we won't hire because you're telling us
'We don't want that. We don't want to pay for that.'" What do you think happened?
Yeah we're $2000 ahead of budget
at the three and a half. And in two weeks, we have our
first and probably greatest candidate coming to interview for that job.
People give to ministry.
If the church is ministering and the congregation sees that ministering is happened they will rise to the
occasion. They will give to it. OK. Let me show you your flowchart.
This is Ponca City's flow chart.
And you have a copy of it. You can flip it over if you want to look at it here.
Notice in evangelism" local outreach, Hispanic mission, Friday night
class, gospel meeting. Once a year. Twice. once. Once a year gospel meeting.
At least once a year. That's it. Local outreach. What's the Friday night class?
What is it? Bible study here for the community. OK.
Domestic outreach: jail ministry. I get that. International Outreach: the Cuban Ministry that
Bud was explaining to me that you have been very involved in. The Jamaican mission. OK.
Do you think that your local outreach is adequate?
No, because it..now is it biblical? Oh of course it is.
Hispanic mission, in other words, you have Hispanic brethren meeting here. Is that the idea?
You're working. OK. Same thing Friday night class, open to the community. OK.
And then at least once a year gospel meeting. Well this place is not
very big. If you want growth you have to
you have to punch up local evangelism. OK?
In other words, the 10000 people that live around you, you've got to find a way to get the information to them.
That's your job. Get the information to them. Let the Word do its work,
but it won't do its work if you don't get the information to them. Education is pretty
straightforward. One of the things about the churches of Christ is most of them have a pretty good education ministry.
Fellowship. New member packets. Visitation. Young Marrieds. Worship. Service Administration. Benevolence
and maintenance. So this is your flowchart.
I'm going to have something else to say about that in a few minutes.
But I just want to show you what yours is and you're going to see how to work with this. I'm going to give you
something to do to work with your your flowchart. Alright.
So once you know in theory what ministry is about you need to diagnose your own
congregation to see what ministries are being done. So we need to
create a flow chart in order to plug each existing ministry into the right category
once you've done that. Now once the
ministries themselves are plugged in, you need to assign the elders deacons.
Now one of the things that I forgot to ask that I didn't get was there's not a name
next to each one of this and I'm asking you is there a name next to one of
these things? OK so if you're creating a flowchart, there has to be a
name next to each ministry area. Very important. Why? Because you
need to know who's accountable for that particular area.
OK? This will show you at a glance what you are doing and who is
doing what in every area and it'll also show you how many people are actually
involved in ministry in your congregation.
Then you need to educate the congregation to use and to refer to this system so that you're
all talking the same language when you talk about ministry. Ultimately the role of
ministers in a growing church will be to train assigned people to ministry and
manage the system itself so that the body can grow.
So, my assignment and I guess we'll talk to the
elders and Bud and so on and so forth, the assignment is, the first step is
create your flowchart so at a glance you can see this is what we are doing
and these are the people who are in charge of what we are doing.
So that you can better manage it. Alright.
Integration. Once we grasp the nature and objective of each ministry
area and we create a ministry model where all present and future ministries
can be plugged into, if somebody has a great idea,
if you have the flow chart and the list, you know exactly where that great idea is going to
be put under what ministry; who's going to be in charge, who's going to be working it, and you
also know which budget it'll be under. That's a tremendous
help for follow through because in church work I've noticed people have great ideas, but there's
no follow through and there's no follow through because they don't know the mechanics of how to take an
idea in the abstract and make it concrete and workable.
And what I'm talking about when I talk about the flowchart is that gives you a tool to
work with to take abstract ideas and put them down on paper so that you know
where it fits, who's going to do it, which elders are going to be responsible, is there money in
that budget? How it affects and how it can integrate with other ministries in that area.
That's a very simple piece of equipment. In other words, you've identified the
ministries that you have. You've organized them into the five areas. You have the
leadership and the ministry coordinators in place. OK. How do you kick start the
process? How do you kick start the
process? Well first of all encourage and empower each ministry area to come up
with their own plans and projects for their area of
ministry. Now I have a thing here that I'm looking for.
Oh yeah. Here it is. You've got this idea worksheet here.
Everybody got this? If you flip over you'll find it. OK.
Now we're not going to do this today.
I leave this as an assignment that if you do a follow up
to this seminar. I leave you this assignment to do as a follow up. OK.
What time, how are we doing on time? OK. So I want you to to
break up into 5 groups, maybe the elders can help, you know assign people.
And you break up into five groups and what you do in your
group, you come up with three new ideas for evangelism. So
let's say this table here is the evangelism group. Alright.
This group will come up with three, the best three ideas, they have for
evangelism. They could be for local evangelism, domestic, or international,
whatever it is, but it'll be evangelism. And since you already know the goal of evangelism
is to transfer the information of the Gospel to the people who don't know it, at least you
know what it is you're supposed to be doing, right? Then you have another group
responsible for education. So assign let's say this table here is going to be doing education.
Well you have your meeting and you come up with the best three ideas you can
for education. And since you know what the goal of education is,
right?, to communicate the teachings of Christ and help people integrate that into their lives,
well then you know what kind of ideas you have to come up with. Anyways, I'm not going to repeat the whole thing, but fellowship, worship, maintenance.
I want you to come up with three ideas in each of these areas. Alright, now.
What do you do next? What you do next is
once you've got the three areas, you get together at a general meeting
and you pick the best idea from each area.
The best idea. So this group here is
evangelism. They shared their three ideas with the whole group and let the group decide, you
know what? Number one idea, that's pretty good, but number two, that's doable. We could do that. Alright
let's. So number two idea. We're going to do that and education do the same thing.
And then what do you do? You implement the best idea from every area of
ministry and you add it to the flow chart that you already have
for your work. See what I'm saying? Remember what I told
you the equation was? Ministry equals growth.
So now with your flowchart, you know what your ministries are, you know what you
have. And you also know the goal of each of these ministries.
And now you have a new idea for each area
of ministry, and you put those into play.
And then watch what happens.
If those begin to gather some momentum, you begin to have result,
maybe idea number two needs to be implemented and so on and so
forth. OK?
Alright. So how do you manage the process? We finish up with this here.
Well, first of all as I say, encourage and empower those with the
ideas. Elders need to encourage the congregation to come up with
ideas, empower them to put them into play. You
have to have two types of meetings. One is the ministry meeting. An
elder and or a deacon and coordinators meet to plan and
organize activities in their area of ministry.
So you need to break yourselves up into five ministry areas. And that's
pretty easy. How many here teach Sunday school or classes?
Any hands up? One, two, three, four. OK, there's your committee.
How many here are responsible for organizing the potlucks, the dinners, the cooking, the all that kind
of stuff? Anybody? OK. No. Alright. There's your committee.
Fellowship group. And so on and so forth. Who's responsible? Who mows the lawn,
takes care of the exterior, does the custodial work? Anybody?
Nobody? Nobody does that? There's a couple of guys back there. One, two, three, four, five.
There's your service, it's administration,
that's office stuff. Benevolence,
that's counseling, food giveaways, all that kind of stuff. And then there's
maintenance, well maintenance is maintenance right? The grounds, the building. So there's
the maintenance crew. Usually the ministers and a couple of the elders
are in the area of benevolence because they they do counseling and so on and so
forth. And then administration. Again the preacher usually is the office
manager too so on and so forth. So you break yourselves up into groups.
And when you have ministry meetings, you talk, have your flowchart, have it in front of you and say to
yourselves, "Well how's this going? and "Do we have enough money to do that?' and "Will we do this and will we
do that?" "And oh yes by the way...
We need to now integrate this new idea that we decided", whatever that is,
"into this area." "How are we going to do that? How much will it cost?"
We need to come up with some costs so that we can run it by the elders and see if we can put that in the budget and so on and so forth.
So that's ministry meetings. And then we have to have elders meetings. Oh dear. Elders meetings.
Well, you already have elders meeting but elders meetings have to have two parts
I have found in my experience. One part is the ministry
agenda. OK? The ministry agenda is "How are we doing
in evangelism, education, fellowship? Are there problems, are there budget issues are there
equipment we have to purchase? Are there people we have to hire?" You know, ministry things
that need to be talked about. The admin people have given us
2015's budget, their recommendations. Let's take a look at that and see if we can approve
that, whatever, ministry stuff. OK? And then they take a break and then
they do shepherding stuff.
No color of paint.
No "do we put in grass in the back?" We don't discuss any of that.
Shepherding meetings are only about the sheep.
And one of the biggest problems in congregations is that the ministry meetings
suck up 90 percent of the elder's time and they only have 10
percent left for the sheep. I mean I'm
not saying this for this. I mean that's across the board. And so
elders have to designate the time; we're in a ministry meaning, we're going to give it 45
minutes and then, boom! Whatever we haven't done we'll just do next time. Take a break, have a
prayer, OK, shepherding meeting. The way we do it and as a lot of
other congregations do it, we have shepherding lists and they're just broken down in
alphabetical order. We have seven shepherds. The congregation is broken into seven
groups and just alphabetically, just to make it simple.
And each shepherd, each elder, is responsible for that group, meaning if someone
has to go to the hospital or if the sister Abel, "A" , if sister
Abel who is in Brother Chilton['s group] because he's the top of the alphabet there
among the elders, if sister Abel is in Brother Chilton's group and she's brought to the
hospital and so on and so forth, guess who's going to go to the hospital and make the time to go see
Sister Abel. First Responder. Well first responder is going to be brother
Chilton. Why? Because she's in his shepherding group.
And Sister Abel also knows that brother Chilton is her elder.
So if she has an issue, a complaint, that, this or that, she's not going to form a posse.
She's not going to bend the ear of every deacon in the place. She's going to look at the
chart and say oh brother Chilton is my elder, I'm in his shepherding group. I'm going to call brother
and say brother Chilton, it's just too cold in the auditorium on Sunday morning and we need to get a
better heating system and whatever.
Because we don't want the sheep to fall through the cracks.
We don't want the sheep to have crisis
and not have the shepherds be at their side. And
we don't want to burn out our shepherds.
Because if you're a shepherd and you think you're responsible for 95 to 110
families, it's too much, but if you have
15 families, OK. 15 is still a lot, but 15 families is
manageable. Does that mean that one elder can't visit somebody in the Z group? Of course not.
But as far as first response is concerned, OK,
if Brother Weaver, another one of our elders, wants to know about sister Abel,
who do you think he's going to call?
Hey Bob. Yeah. How's sister Abel? I've got to make announcements on Sunday, what can I report
about? Well, I went to see her at the hospital. I think she's stable, she is getting out in two days. Great. OK, thanks for letting
me know. That's how it works.
Two types of meetings.
This type of approach can accommodate growth because we have a
new family that comes in that's only one family added just to one elder. Not all of them get it.
And unless the next 60 people that you know become members of our congregation all start with the
letter "A", then we'd have to redistribute.
OK.
OK so last thing. What is it going to take?
What will it take?
What will it take to make it work? Commitment. You all need to be
committed to making it work. It's got to become our system, not just Mike's
system or that we had the meeting system. You need to make up your minds that
you're willing to change and commit yourselves to making it work. If you have a cohesive
commitment from the leadership,
the church will follow. If the leadership said, "This the way we're going to do things from here on in,"
the church...I'll go one further, I'll go one further. Not the church
will follow, the church wants to follow.
The church wants leadership.
They want their leaders to lead. They want to see them leading. They want
to support them in their leadership. People who cause trouble usually in the
minority, the majority of the people in the church love and respect their elders and they
want them to grow and they want them to lead and they want to say amen to the things
that their elders are saying.
So if you have again a cohesive commitment from the leadership, the church will want
to follow. Secondly continuity. All of your plans, all of your
ministries, all of your communications need to key off of the ministry model.
The budget needs to be broken down along the five areas of ministry.
The Web site, our Web site, broken down the five areas of ministry. The bulletin,
the five areas of ministry every...This is the basis.
We have a budget and I showed you briefly, I think it's back here somewhere.
There is the fellowship budget. For the fellowship budget, see FS-330-00
special events, so FS-330-05, women's
conference. They've assigned $250 for that. The church picnic
$350. Homecoming, that was our 70th anniversary $2000 and so on and so forth.
Every single thing. Every single ministry in the
church, every single piece of paper, budget or otherwise
follows this model so everyone knows exactly where they are
and what is going on.
And then of course the last, let me just get to the other two, the last thing it
needs of course is our Lord himself. Let's remember that the power comes from
Christ and the glory goes to Christ.
The system, it's just a tool. That's all it is. It's just a
tool. Hopefully it's a biblical tool that will enable you to serve the church to the glory of Christ.
In the end I believe that a congregation that uses Bible tools such as a church
organization and a system for ministry,
if you use that to reach a Bible goal, unlimited growth, that
church is a true New Testament church in the spirit of biblical restorationism.
Remember the Lord was adding to the number day by day those
who were being saved and those who were being saved were following
a New Testament church. So what do we want to be?
What kind of New Testament church?
Faithful. We want to be a faithful New Testament church. And if
we succeed in being a faithful New Testament church what will happen to us? The Lord
will add. And what's the mechanics? The
mechanics are the New Testament ministry system. Five areas of
ministry. Get those plates in the air and getting spinning.