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As church leaders we are all trying to find ways to make our presentation of the gospel more effective. While there are many different ways to structure a worship service, the tips I give in this article are specifically geared towards churches who are trying to use their Sunday service to reach lost people. If your target audience on a Sunday is sinners there may be a few tweaks you can make to make your service better. Most of the suggestions might be contrary to what you think a worship service should be if you were raised in a church where the Sunday service was open to sinners but primarily structured for Christians.
1. Shorten your service
Chances are your services are too long. You probably don’t feel like they are because you have stories about services you grew up in that went 3 or 4 hours, but your guest hasn’t been to church in 15 years, and he’s giving it a try because his friend leveraged all of his relational collateral to get him there. Who said that church services had to be long anyway? Where did we come up with that unwritten rule? A few weeks ago we had a lady visit our church, and after the service was over she came up to me, shook my hand, and asked me
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Needless to say, there is a lot about church planting I didn't know when my wife Jennifer and I started preparations to plant Discover Life Church. We both grew up in a Pastor's home and had successfully led youth ministries together for 8 years, but there was so much about this new endeavor that we weren't prepared for. I don't believe it was because we didn't pray enough and it certainly wasn't for a lack of input from others. There are just some things in life that you have to learn as you go through them. I am finding that God often times doesn't let us see the whole picture. If we knew when we started what we know now, we might never have obeyed His calling or trusted His leading. Here are five things I know now, three years into this amazing journey...
#1. I DIDN'T KNOW IT WOULD BE SO HARD... to build an effective team of people.
About three months after our launch, I called a mentor of mine to shoot the breeze one day and he asked me a troubling question, "Have you lost your leadership yet?" I responded in confidence, "No we have been the lucky ones!" Little did I know that over the next six months, God would clean house of my first wave of leaders and
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“When was the last time we laughed like that as a family?” I asked myself as we were on our way to a small family get away during spring break. The church calendar had been non-stop from Thanksgiving to Easter Sunday; the kid’s sports program had us running every night of the week from basketball to volleyball to gymnastics. It seemed as if there were not enough hours in the day or enough days in the week. We were always exhausted. Family dinners were infrequent because of the differences in our schedules. We rarely saw each other. We were like ships passing in the night.
One night after an exhausting day my wife and I were lying in bed and we realized that the hectic pace of our calendar was taking its toll not only on us, but it was clearly taking its toll on our children. Living in a pastor’s home is a challenge and oftentimes pastor’s kids bear the weight of the responsibility just as much as their parents.
I am sure if you are in ministry and you are reading this you have felt the same way I did. The difficult pace of ministry can have a negative effect on several areas of your life. It affects your health, your marriage, and it affects your family. So that night we
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If your greatest ministry takes place from a stage on Sundays you’ve missed the point! Sure, you have a platform to proclaim the Gospel to a group of people, but shouldn’t your ministry extend beyond that?
I once walked into the dressing room of a Grammy award winning worship leader/singer who was exhorting his band with these words,
Let’s not just be about the stage tonight. Many people are found worthy of the stage, but let us be found worthy of the altar. Before you are a performer or worship leader, you must be a worshiper.
Think about that for a moment. He was telling a group of people whose literal job it was to lead people in worship to first find themselves in private worship to The Father…then help others find their way to Him too.
Even beyond that though, I hope my ministry is best defined by what I do outside of Sunday morning. I want to impact my wife, my children, my neighbors, my co-workers, and strangers with the Gospel and It’s telling through the way I live. Pastor Judah Smith quotes his dad who said, “Don’t let your preaching get better than your living.”
So, Pastor:
- What does your life outside of Sunday say to the world around you about the
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How many things do you do that are different? Think about it for a second: the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the way you parent, the way you lead your ministry, what do you do that's different. Normal is safe, creating something different is hard and painful. I once heard Bill Hybels talk about being made fun of and called a sinner for 15 years and then copied by those same people for the next 15 years.
People (all of us) don't like different. Until something becomes normal we don't like it. This isn't about defending The Fray, or hearing an opinion about the national anthem, this is just a warning, and a wake up call that when you get ready to take a risk or take a chance, get ready for criticism. When you want to parent differently you will get criticism from parents who did it the way they were told. If you want to try something new at work get ready to take some cheap shots from people who don't want you to shake up their routine. If you want to do church differently get ready to be called a sinner from religous people who do it the way they were raised. Non-Creators are always taking shots at creaters. Obviously we all have our opinions and we have every
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