How To Lead a Program Ministry without losing your mind – Part 2

Posted on by Rich

From part 1 of this series, there were three activities that are needed to get out of scramble mode:

  • Planning
  • Communicating
  • Team Building

This post will be primarily focused on planning. The idea of planning is to ensure that all of the necessary work to ensure the ministry “event” goes well is done. If you get that the event is something that happens weekly then there are things that have to be done every week. That is the easy part, but it can still fall over. What I am advocating is having a written plan that you and your team use for every event that your program ministry does.  When you are used to “scramble mode”, I know taking the time to write the plan sounds like a luxury (I don’t have time). Additionally, if you have never created an event plan, it can seem like an overwhelming idea. Just follow along for a while.  It really isn’t that bad.

Luke 14:28-30 NET

28 For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t sit down first and compute the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish the tower, all who see it will begin to make fun of him. 30 They will say, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish!’

Planning is the discipline that requires us to decide before we start, whether we have the ability and necessary resources to finish what we start.  While this passage from Luke is part of Jesus’ illustration about counting the cost of discipleship, there is an assumption that wisdom involves planning.  Hmmm – those, who don’t plan are regarded as…?

Perhaps most motivating reason for having a written plan to follow is so you can improve ministry results.  If you have your “every week” plan written down and every team member understands the whole plan and knows what tasks they have to do, then when we do it the same way every week, we can observe ways to improve the plan. If the plan is different, random, or invisible then it you can’t improve it.

Continue reading “How To Lead a Program Ministry without losing your mind – Part 2” →

Leading a Program Ministry Without Losing Your Mind – Part 1

Posted on by Rich
Stop The Insanity!

Does it seem like preparation for a weekly ministry program always runs down to the wire? Is it hard to delegate prep work to volunteers so it ends up back on your plate on day of your program? Do you somehow believe that ministry is improved through chaos? Do you believe that God somehow rewards you for pulling it together in the eleventh hour?

I ran across this verse a few months ago, and it has become one of my new favorites. It talks about wisdom as applied to how we do work.

Ecclesiastes 10:10 NET

10 If an iron axhead is blunt and a workman does not sharpen its edge, he must exert a great deal of effort;
so wisdom has the advantage of giving success.

In Solomon’s day, the axe was a universal tool, used for many tasks that involved cutting and building. If I wanted to apply this verse to how we work in ministry, the axe would be the ministry team. So this series is mostly about things that we can do to “sharpen” our ministry to enable our team’s effectiveness.

Continue reading “Leading a Program Ministry Without Losing Your Mind – Part 1” →

Literal Interpretation of Scripture – Part II

Posted on by Rich

A few years ago I wrote a post about this topic that I am still happy with.  Recently a friend challenged me to think about some deeper theological issues, and I wrote him a response, but there is an element of that is an extension of my former post that I want to publish here. There is an earlier post that I will share, because I think this also gets to some challenges with our identification with a church and doctrines that we need to deal with.  But both of these posts deal with our duty to understand the scriptures, and to correctly interpret and apply them, first in our own lives, and then in our interactions with others.

What I am writing about deals with a very specific challenge to human understanding of the attributes of God, and how those attributes of God transform into the doctrines of the Church.  God is sovereign, loving, just, merciful, holy, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, immutable, self-existent, self-sufficient, faithful, good, wise, and transcendent.

Continue reading “Literal Interpretation of Scripture – Part II” →

Church Community Matters

Posted on by Rich

I have recently started to inhabit a new church community. I want to talk a little about the differences between big and small churches, especially how community forms. Our new church is a plant from a very large, very successful megachurch that I will refer to as the “mothership”. We get new worship music from the worship band at the mothership. Most of our “methods” and “systems” come from the mothership. And frankly, we are a small to medium sized church. We have a sanctuary that seats about 300 people, and we have two services that are regularly about 2/3 full.

My wife and I have noticed that sometimes this church feels a little impersonal. It has a big church style small group ministry. We haven’t joined a small group yet. we have committed to doing so, and are waiting for the selected group to finish a special curriculum which should happen in a few weeks. We also haven’t started serving in any ministries yet. Continue reading “Church Community Matters” →

The Church as a Family

Posted on by Rich

Pastor preached a great sermon this week out of 1 Timothy 5 about how when we need to confront other believers about an issue of faith, (especially when they are near the cliff of a heresy) that we should treat them like a family member. He also talked about how we actually treat our own biological and cultural family members, and how if we don’t “provide” for them we are worse than an unbeliever.

This caused me to think about what it means to treat my family as God has instructed, and also whether our modern North American Evangelical church culture is really anything like a family. I was deeply convicted by the message, and this is the outworking of my thinking about the topic. Continue reading “The Church as a Family” →

Literal Interpretation of Scripture

Posted on by Rich

Once upon a Bible translation

About 12 years ago I was doing some web work for the church I was attending, and as a part of that I was posting sermon notes on the website every week. Pastor would send me his notes, and I would take the scripture references and look them up and paste the verse into the text, so readers wouldn’t need to do that. The problem at the time was that the pastor used NASB as his normal version, and I couldn’t find a free electronic copy of that translation. So while I was casting around for free electronic bibles I found the New English Translation – the first free and open source bible translation. Continue reading “Literal Interpretation of Scripture” →

Programs are Programs

Posted on by Rich

Programs are just programs. They’re a way to organize people and help them go where God has already called them to go and [do] what God has already called them to do.

I love this statement from Allison Vesterfelt’s post on the StoryLine blog.

I think when we look at our church (the one we are regularly attending) in North America, we tend to see its ministry in terms of the programs that it runs.  We have a view on ministry that says ministry = programs and programs = ministry.  That is, with more words, if some kind of ministry is important, we create a program to do it, and by default any ministry that doesn’t have a program wrapped around it isn’t that important. Continue reading “Programs are Programs” →

Busy Work

Posted on by Rich

Some times we just assume things. Like whether something “on our list” really needs to be done. Some times tasks turn in to habits – and we have to ask ourselves whether the original reason we started doing “it” is still viable. It really is a question of value. How much value do I get from doing the task, and how much does it cost me to do it?

Here are some ideas to help you think about busywork in life, career and ministry… Continue reading “Busy Work” →