News from The Kingdom

Being the CHURCH rather than meeting Focused church-goers!

The central Church activities that are most emphasized and consume the most time and resources to make happen and tend to become the “thing” church participants focus on as to what church is about and a paradigm for many church participants.

For a lot of churches, that focus is the weekend worship service(s). That focus, for some, is a matter of theology. Certain activities and meetings, particularly the weekend worship, is viewed as essential to our connection with God. For others, if not essential, specific meetings and activities are at least a long and strong tradition and heritage.

Few church leaders that I have talked to would say Sunday worship, small groups, or other meetings are the essence of what church is about. However, because these events are where most of our time, resources, and emphasis go, it is natural for these activities to be the focal point of church life.

Our vision of church life, our Christian community, goes beyond meetings to “things” involving our whole life and relationships, and we want to think intentionally about how to shift people’s paradigms beyond viewing the “meetings” as the central activity of church. Not that we do away with meetings, as Pr. Yuri says, but we allow meetings to be a support structure for the lifestyle, rather than the other way around.

Thinking serious about changing the focus of our church from meetings to relationships and lifestyle, we want to consider some paradigms shift and put them into action.

1. Conversations – How many times do we say, “It’s time to go to church.”? Whether going to church means going to weekend worship or it means going to small group, We want to get people to quit “going to church” and instead get them to “be the church.” Some will say it is just semantics, but our vocabulary speaks to what we value. If you want your value to be lifestyle focused, then help people see that they do not have to go somewhere to be the church. Instead, they ARE the church wherever they happen to be.

2. Recruiting volunteers – We want people to volunteer for all activities as CHURCH, be it to serve on a committee, to be a greeter before our worship service, to signup to invite their neighbor over for dinner, or to celebrate Shabbat and to do devotions with their family. What we want to ask people to do as Church, is what is important, and we want our people to value it.

3. Scheduling – We don’t want our week calendars so full of events and activities that our people have no time to “be the church” in their neighborhoods and workplaces; we don’t want them to only have enough energy to do those activities and events that are initiated by the church, and not self-initiated as the Spirit may lead.

4. Resources – We want a considerable percent of the church budget to support activities that happen off the church campus. For example, subsidizing babysitting, giving small groups a modest budget to pursue community service, or creatiang family devotional journals for families to work on at home on Shabbat days.
5. Vision – Our vision emphasize a community full of Christ-followers much more than a church building full of people. Our aim is for people to lead, which helps them get excited about where we are headed.

6. Training – We are aiming on training hands-on and lifestyle-oriented with relational coaching and accountability as important components. We want to use public testimonies and relational modeling as a way to keep momentum going.

7. Handling suggestions and complaints – A lot of energy is expended from church leadership dealing with conflict and complaints about church events and programs. How many people complain about how their personal worship during devotions is going, or how their witness to their co-worker is going? We want to help people re-orient from consumers to producers. Help them to focus their discontent on their own lifestyle – being the Church – rather than on how the church is serving them.

8. Front door – Redefining the front door of the church we want to help people see the front door as their individual relationships with the unchurched, rather than a worship service or event.

9. Leadership – Being the Key leadership of the ministry, we don´t want only teach about the life we want people to lead, but also help people modeling and living the life God wants them to live.

10. Attendance – We tend to “expect what we inspect.” Focusing on attendance says that showing up at the meeting is what is important, and it very well may be. What we really want is to inspect or count the lifestyle practices that are important to the Church values. We want to tally of the number of hours of prayer at home that happened weekly, count the number of relational encounters people had where Jesus entered the conversation and many other actions of what makes one a real CHURCH.

There are many more things that are important when making a paradigm shift in the direction of lifestyle focus and I am sure that we will find out. I would love to hear what our people and people out there have found to be important as well. Perhaps they would be willing to share specific ideas that they have thought of. Whoever have different thought, please, share them with us!

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.