Service: A Series Part Three

Service is...Incarnational, Evangelical, Relational and Nutritional

Relational. In the early centuries of the Church, Christ’s followers, filled with compassion and kindness, served the people around them. It is estimated that the early Church grew at a rate of 40% per decade during this time. They didn’t have direct mail, large special events, banners, or the internet to get their message across. All they had were themselves. 

They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added those who were saved — (Acts 2:46-47 from The Message). 

God entrusted His message to the Church then, and that responsibility is still ours today. While events can help us gather the masses, they can’t take the place of Christians rubbing shoulders with non-Christians.

The church that develops long-term, trusting relationships with the community is the one that has an opportunity to influence its culture. The most effective way to do that seems to be in the context of serving. In meeting the needs of others and serving alongside them, we cannot help but create relationships. Relationships are key to building bridges into the community.

So how do we go about this? Here are some following paths to journey:

1. Rub shoulders. Get off the campus of the church (non-Christians don’t go to church). Get into the community and discover where the people are, what they are doing, and how they are hurting.
2. Recognize that relationships take time. Serving the community once a year will not build a relationship or reputation of being a caring church. Service must be constant and daily. In time, the relationship and reputation develops.
3.  Partner with other churches and organizations that genuinely care about the community’s health and welfare. Ministering with assistance from the DC Baptist Convention can help strengthen your efforts through cooperation and compilation of resources and expertise. 
4.  Develop partnerships and ministries with no strings attached. One rule of thumb is that churches should come ONLY to serve and bless, not to control.

Serving others puts us into relationships with those we serve and those with whom we are serving. Are you ready to serve?

Service: A Series Part Two

Service is... Incarnational, Evangelical, Relational and Nutritional.

Evangelical. Sometimes we ask ourselves: “But what if we serve and nothing happens? What if we do all this and they don’t respond? What if we spend all this money for a community event and no one comes to know the Lord or becomes a member of our church?” A pastor confessed to me that one of the hardest things about his church’s ministry to the community is to work all day cleaning up a man’s yard without being thanked.

Some people will say they’ve never experienced such love before, some will indeed receive Christ, and some will even become vibrant leaders in the church, but a lot of people will simply have no response to your service. That’s OK, it’s all happened before.

Jesus knelt with a cloth and pitcher of water. Having loved his own… he now showed them the full extent of his love. He washed his disciples’ feet, his last recorded act of service before the Cross. What did one have to do to deserve a foot washing? Have faith? If so, Jesus should have skipped Thomas. Demonstrate loyalty? Well, then he should have passed by Peter. Behave honestly? Then he should have skipped Judas, the one who would betray him. No, he would wash the feet of all — the act was about Jesus, not them. Service is truly service only when it is done without the expectation of repayment.

Knowing that only one of the ten lepers whom he would heal would return to give thanks did not prevent Jesus from healing the other nine. Healing was what the Father called him to do, whether people thanked him or not. 

The Apostle Paul reminds us, Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people.

Good deeds help those in need. Good deeds can engender the goodwill of the city. Good deeds can get people to think and be willing to hear more. Good deeds can elicit amazement and cause people to say “Wow!” Good deeds can draw people into your church and into relationships with Christians. Good deeds can be the bridge or the road, but they are not the saving message that crosses that bridge or travels that road. Good deeds are the complement but never the substitute for good news. So continue to do good deeds and be prepared with the good message regardless how often you may have to share it!

SERVICE: A Series--Part One

Service is... Incarnational, Evangelical, Relational and Nutritional.

Each holiday season, phone lines among nonprofits are filled with people wanting to do good. Interest in others always peaks during the holidays. It's a way to soothe, an otherwise guilty conscious, our guilt of extravagant living. For the disciplined Christian, service to others is a daily opportunity. For the next several postings I will share with you the call that many of us and our churches have forgotten--the power of being externally focused.

Service is incarnational. Service is the point where the needs and dreams of the city, the mandates and desires of God, and the calling and capacity of the Church all come together. The community may not care much about salvation, but it does have needs. In meeting those needs, meaningful relationships develop and out of relationships come opportunities to share the love and gospel of Christ. The early Church grew because her people loved and served. I believe servants can go anywhere and make a difference. Service gives us access not only to places of need but also places of influence.

Increasingly our Convention staff find we are being invited to serve in places where we never could have imagined, giving us the opportunity of bridging love, grace and redemption. It is God's kindness through our service that leads people to a response and better understanding of Him, not the threat of His judgment. Barriers to the gospel are removed when people are served and blessed by our expressions of hospitality. It has been said that there is only one way to God and that is through Jesus; however, there are a thousand ways to Jesus.

As we enter into the life of the city through service, we have the opportunity to engage people from whom we normally have been isolated. We see relationships form and people taking steps toward God and His Church. Good deeds form a great bridge over which the good news can travel.

Beginning this quarter among D.C. Baptists, the Journey of 180 will kick-off the convention's challenge of discerning, dialoguing and dreaming about the future work of our Baptist congregations. a major part of this journey will be discovering the places that God is at work in the world around us and how we can join in His mission. I have a suspicion that we will hear many creative ideas, energizing streams of thought and prophetic messages. While I look forward to this time of reflection and visioning, I hope that we will also be able to turn our words into action. Will you join me?

Building Momentum: Conclusion

There are many things that cause us to lose our momentum. Discouragement, failure, lack of focus, no ambition and unwillingness to take risks are some of the factors that can cause resistance to our forward movement (momentum). The best way to counter the loss of momentum is to understand the momentum principles in their most basic form. Principles that I have taken and over-simplified for our understanding and application.

(1) Realize momentum takes time and patience. Jesus said God's Kingdom grows in influence like yeast does in bread dough. Bread rises slowly, but it does rise! Reversing negative momentum or getting positive momentum going from a dead stop, takes time and patience. Just keep moving forward.

(2) Just do something--almost anything. Doing nothing won't change anything; in fact, it usually makes things worse. In Jesus' story of the three men given talents, the criticism of the man with one talent was that he did nothing. We can begin by just doing a little something, being obedient to God in little ways. After all, most of life is made up of small things.

(3) Build on success. Focus on recent forward progress. Many of the psalms in our Bible were written by people in trouble. They often used psalms to review the ways God had helped them in the past. This gave them the confidence to move forward and seize the future, and their psalms usually end on that confident note.

(4) Remember the power of momentum. It's easier to be positive toward your spouse or friend when you've recently had a positive experience together. In the book of Acts we find that the church was given the increase, not because of their worship style, small group discipleship meetings or evangelism tactics, but because they went about ministering daily to the needs of people. The sooner you follow one positive step with another, the easier it becomes to create continued positive experiences. Continued positive experiences increases the chances of sustained forward movement.


As we embark on the Journey of 180, there will be many voices seeking to give direction to a preferred destination. Our task is not to listen to any one voice but to corporately discern the destination that God has for us as a convention. As the forward movement gains speed, let us not be delayed, deterred or derailed by the fleeting attractions along the way.

It takes a great deal of energy to get a train moving 70 miles per hour down the track, but once it gets going it's nearly unstoppable. That's the power of momentum. Understanding these simple basic principles and putting them to use can help each one of us move forward in life and as a body of believers.

Momentum

When I was small, my grandparents lived within the town limits. The railroad ran behind their house. I remember loving to cross the tracks to play in the dense woods. Sometimes trains would stop, sometimes pass slowly, and other times speed through. As an adult, the fascination no longer exists. Matter of fact, trains now bother me because typically I am the one that gets stuck at the crossing for a stopped or slow moving train to pass before I can proceed.

 While there aren’t many tracks to cross in the DC area, if you will, I’ll give you the visual: You’re waiting at the crossing for the train to pass. It will be a while, that much you know, because the train is stopped. You hear the train creak and see the wheels begin to turn ever so slowly. It seems to take forever for the train to gain any speed. That’s the problem with a train: it takes so long to get going. The locomotives seem to barely be able to handle the load. But once the train gets moving down the tracks at 70 miles per hour, those same engines have no trouble maintaining the speed. It’s the principle of inertia at work: Things at rest tend to want to stay at rest and things in motion tend to want to stay in motion.
 The inertia that a moving object builds is called momentum. It takes lots of energy to build momentum but far less energy to maintain it. This is more than a principle of physics—we can apply this principle to our personal lives and to the life of our church as well.

 Church leadership expert John Maxwell has a book titled The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. One law is that of momentum. Maxwell argues that to lead, one must create and sustain momentum among those in the church. Churches experiencing a lack of momentum, where there is little spiritual or numerical growth, are often referred to as plateauing. But this doesn’t last long—negative momentum (going backward) soon follows.

 Momentum was in one of the stories Jesus told: A wealthy man who went away for an extended period of time called together three associates and gave them money to invest while he was gone. One was given five talents, another two, and the third was given one talent to oversee. You know the rest of the story, so here’s the lesson: We’re to invest wisely what Jesus gives us in opportunities, finances, abilities, gifts, relationships and time. Jesus indicates that when we try to do something with what we’ve been given, we’re going to end up with more. Once we have experienced the fruit of our investment, we willingly continue to invest. That’s the principle with momentum.

 The one who works and takes risks to multiply what he or she has been given by God has even more, and the one who doesn’t do anything to gain more will lose what he/she has. Sometimes the greatest risk is in doing nothing. Will you commit with me as we begin 2012 to invest at least one thing in your life for the work and ministry of the Kingdom?

HOPE: Moses, Myself and My Church

Moses:

It is one of the great moments in the Old Testament history. Perhaps it is the key moment: a moment of spontaneous combustion as the bush ignited into flames. “Moses” it said, “Moses” it resounded. At the sound of his own name he was caught, as we also would have been. We listen, whether we want to or not, because the Voice that calls us by name in such a theophany, is a voice that knows us and has something to say.  For all we know, everything may depend on our listening and answering.

Moses, the stranger and exile, stood there with the muck of the sheep on his shoes, guilty of a man’s murder and he listened and answered. The end result of God’s conversation with Moses was the word GO. God gave him purpose and a direction, not necessarily a road map…but a sense of Hope. Through His encounter with God, his faith was so bolstered that he developed a hope that he could be a part of something that would make a meaningful difference in the world.

Myself:

There are times for all of us when life seems without purpose or meaning. Who am I? What is my life really meant to accomplish? Am I experiencing the life I was created to experience? Every day just seems like a do-over, is there more?

Even in church we read our purpose/mission statement (if we have one) and wonder what it really means. What can we do? Where can we turn? We come to church week after week, year after year, but can we say how, if at all, our lives have been changed as the result?  Is the life with Christ just a list of do’s and don’ts that seemingly keeps me stressed out?

To be honest, I suspect we would say we haven’t been changed much by today’s Church, which mirrors more and more the culture of the world and less of the Kingdom. Yet, we keep on going. Beneath all the reasons we have for doing so, exists a deep foundational root. If I could give only one word to characterize the element of the root, the word I would give is Hope. Hope that eventually we will experience a change that frees us to experience life abundantly, personally and corporately.

It is through our hope that He will call us by our name and give us courage to pursue the radical life of discipleship He would have us live and become; and in our community of faith, He will come to heal, to save and to teach us how to provide the Hope He has given us to others.

My Church:

My church, the church on the other side of town and the church on the other side of the world; all churches everywhere at some point or another feel they are stuck. In my denominational role, I have had the unfortunate task of assisting congregations close their doors for the last time. They got stuck while sitting in the pew, passing time and prayer for someone to come and release them from their mired-up condition. The divine intervention never came. They died being stuck to the things of old that break easily.

In most congregations throughout our nation things went well in the past, especially in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but the things that brought those past successes do not work today. Now we can sit and pray, thinking the whole time we will die without divine intervention. So we sit and pray and hope. Our hope is not in divine intervention but in the life in which Christ has called us.

As individuals, He has called us to accept His grace, redemption and new life. Pastor J.D. Greear writes concerning the need for us to recover the power that made Christianity revolutionary: the Christian pilgrim must be radical enough to lay aside the “rules, do’s, don’ts and expectations that have historically been ingrained in us” and radically reconnect with the Gospel of Christ.

Our hope should be grounded in the daily prayer: In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes you love me less. Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy. As you have been to me, I will be to others. As I pray, I’ll measure Your compassion by the cross and Your power by the resurrection.

As the Church, God has called us to make a meaningful difference in the world. Unfortunately, the overwhelming focus of our budgets, activities, programming and ministries are tied to the church campus. A reconnection with the passion of the Gospel will challenge the Church to focus less on the church campus and more upon the world community. The hope of the future Church will be dependent upon a new kind of Christian. The answer lies not in the one who sits in the pew and prays for divine intervention but in the one who enters the door afresh, whose connection is not with a campus but with a Christ who calls out, Go!

Can you imagine a spiritual journey that is not confined by the expectations of religion and society but freed by the principles and edicts found in the four Gospels? Can you imagine attending a church that feels more like community of faith whose passion is driven less by the needs of the campus and more by the needs of the global community? It can happen, are you willing?