God’s Call to …

All of those involved in ministry (should be all Christians) know the importance of being called by God. We often speak of being called to a church or being called as a pastor, deacon, teacher, etc. We know from experience that an assurance of our calling is sometimes the only thing that keeps us going.

Reading Ed Stetzer’s book Breaking the Missional Code helped me gain a new insight on our calling from God. Always the source of our calling must be God. It is he who calls us. Through the Holy Spirit we are gifted for ministry. Through the lordship of Jesus Christ we are directed to our ministry. Through God the Father we are empowered for our ministry (See 1 Cor. 12:4-6).

But under the lordship of Christ, what do we understand as the object of our calling? Are we called to a church, or to a position of ministry (pastor, deacon, etc.) or as Stetzer suggests, are we called to a people? Our sense of calling will greatly affect how we seek to fulfill our calling.

If our primary sense of calling is to a particular church then to be successful we can be tempted to be competitive rather than cooperative and can be tempted to seek out programs and methods rather than seeking out an intimate relationship with the Father. If our primary sense of calling is to a position then to be successful we can be tempted to depend upon skills and techniques rather than upon God’s enabling.

Our primary call is to an intimate relationship with the Father. It is out of the intimacy of that relationship that he will begin to reveal his plan for our ministry. Yes, we serve in a ministry role through a local church. But, do we serve the institution, the members or are we called to serve the community?

Scripture tells us that God loves the world. He sent his Son to seek and to save those outside a relationship with him (the lost). Jesus wept over the lost of Jerusalem. Have we spent enough time with him to gain his heart for our lost community? Do we have a weeping spirit for the lost of our community?

Missionaries know that to reach a tribe they must have a call from God to reach them. Then they must develop a love for the people to whom God has called them. That love for the people to whom God is calling us will help overcome the temptation for easy and cheap success through programs and methods borrowed from others.

Only when we know whom God is calling us to reach will we be able to begin figuring out how to reach them. Maybe we need to begin to pray, “Lord, who is it you have called me to reach?” When we know the answer to that prayer, the ministry journey is just beginning for real.

What do you think?

Becoming Missionaries

I am concerned that our baptism rates keep dropping while our population keeps going up. We are becoming less and less effective at reaching the lost people in our communities. One of the problems seems to be that our culture is changing rapidly and the church is becoming irrelevant to most of the people in our communities. Our culture no longer sees the value in the Christian faith that it once saw.

How do we cross the growing cultural gap while remaining faithful to our Biblical faith? I believe we must now view our communities as being non-Christian. We must also see ourselves as missionaries being sent into a non-Christian culture. This change in thinking can help us adjust our approach to our communities.

What would we expect a missionary to do when leaving their cultural context and going to a strange and lost culture? If we can learn what missionaries do to reach different cultural settings then maybe we could adapt their methods to our church’s outreach to our communities.

I would expect a missionary to identify with the people where he was going. That means learning their language, their values, their social structures, their taboos, their life-styles and then adopting these everywhere they do not conflict with the gospel.

Next I would expect the missionary to begin developing relationships with individuals within the culture. He could begin with meeting needs of individuals and helping them solve problems in their society. Working shoulder to shoulder with the people to help others and make their community better will break down many barriers.

As God gives opportunity the missionary should share his faith and lead others to faith in Christ. These first converts should then be taught that their responsibility is to reach their family and friends. Those who are “native” to the culture are best able to reach other “natives”. What we are looking for is an indigenous church planting movement within a lost culture.

Let’s face it; most of us are no longer native to our community’s lost culture. We are part of the Christian sub-culture. We no longer have the language, values or life-styles of our lost neighbors. We must learn to be missionaries to our own communities if we expect to be effective in reaching them for Christ.

We must begin to plan how to get ourselves outside our churches rather than planning how to get the lost inside our churches. We must find more ways to serve God in the world where the lost are rather than in the church where the saved are. As much as we can we must learn to love and serve the lost in our communities so they can learn to love and serve our God rather than the gods of this world. Let’s become missionaries! What do you think?

A NEW PARADIGM FOR ASSOCIATIONAL MINISTRY

Adapted from Mike Day’s address to the

Baptist Identity Conference II

Union University

February 2007

 

Church Driven – Associational ministry starts with the church as the legitimate expression of God’s mission in the world. It affirms that the Great Commission was given to the church.

Priority Based – The association bases its ministry on the priorities of the local church.

Leadership Development: most of us learned our leadership skills in a less complex church and cultural environment and need to add to our skills base for today’s leadership challenges.

Membership Deployment: The work of the ministry is the responsibility of the whole body and we must find ways to involve a larger percentage of the body in the work of the church, inside and especially outside the church walls.

Life and Community Transformation: Unless the gospel changes the way we live the world will have little reason to believe our testimony that God can change their life and destiny. Being a transformed people we must seek to transform the world in which we live.

Spiritual Reproduction: The ultimate end of all we do is to produce more Christians and more churches.

Institution Free – The association supports and encourages institutional ministries but does not own and maintain them. It encourages churches to be in the ministry business or helps develop parachurch organizations to operate institutional ministries.

Resourced Focused – The association helps provide the churches the resources they need to accomplish the mission to which God has called them. It has no programs to maintain; no ministry of its own to develop but uses its resources to assist the churches to fulfill the commission God has given them.

Strategically Managed – The association provides a non-directive, catalytic and facilitative model of leadership for the local church. Non-directive in that the association will help the church decide for itself the direction of its ministry under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Catalytic in that the association will help the church in developing its response to the great commission without inserting itself into that church’s ongoing ministry. Facilitative in that the association will help the church discover its resources for fulfilling its mission without the church becoming dependent upon the association for those resources.