June 26, 2006

Welcome to our church growth, mission, and evangelism blog. I hope you all had a great weekend and you are rested up for another week of God building a church:

Develop espirit de corps. Church members will be great affected by the way their ministers treat each other. Uphold the biblical qualifications for elders. An elder must be gifted to lead. He must manage his family well. Be able to teach. Be able to discern false doctrine. He should have biblical knowledge and wisdom and well as character.

 

An elder is to be an overseer-someone who can teach, shepherd, manage, and pray. Select your elders wisely. Elders can be selected from deacons who are in charge of service ministries-greeters, parking lot attenders, ushers, servers, facility volunteers, kitchen help, etc. Experience in these servant ministries helps develop the necessary qualities for eldership.

 

Encourage elders to get to know each other. Your elders need to get to know and love one another. It happens much more naturally if they are spending time together on a casual basis: golf, dinner, or a retreat. Find tangible ways for the elders to support the staff. Being with the elders should be uplifting for the staff members.

 

Develop your own leadership style. Live an authentic life style. People are constantly watching how you live. Your life and the lives of the leaders of your congregation preach much louder than anything you say from the pulpit. People want to know if who you are is consistent with what you say.

 

Take time off for spiritual development and rest. Revitalize yourself physically and mentally. Find someone you can trust and invite them to keep you accountable. Find a mentor who can ask-how’s your marriage, are you growing spiritually, is the ministry going well, is there anything that you need to confess? Love your closest neighbors-your family.

 

Stretch yourself. People reach the pinnacle of success and then become bored because the challenge is over. If you are stagnating spiritually, perhaps God is preparing your heart for a new challenge. If you can’t find a leader, be a leader.

 

Excellence-since Jesus gave his all for us, doesn’t he merit our best in return? Services where people are giving less than their best, don’t give honor to Jesus Christ. And it’s certainly not a good way to evangelize. Imagine how much easier evangelism would be if your church services were done with so much excellence that they inspired people to the extent that they couldn’t help but tell their friends about the experience.

 

Excellence takes hard work. Great sermons can take 15-20 hours to prepare. You must do the ongoing maintenance to keep your excellence. You can loose the edge really fast! You can start a program of excellence, but it takes daily diligence to maintain that standard of excellence. Excellence is about doing everything you can to win people to Jesus Christ. Be prepared for criticism and disappointment.

 

Set the standard for excellence early. Often your first effort becomes the standard for later expectations. When you decide to do something new, make the first time the best it can be done. If you have a new idea, be sure it is something that you can do with excellence, or don’t do it. You can’t do everything that needs to be done!

 

Some ideas have died and need to be buried! Sometimes if you give an idea a decent burial, someone more capable may resurrect it later and do well. The church needs to have people with the right gifts doing things so that they can be done with excellence. People without the talent need to be tactfully told so.

 

When you aim for perfection, you’re often disturbed when you fail to meet your goal. You need to develop a good sense of humor and be able to laugh at your occasional failures.

That's all for today. Congratulations to our sponsor, www.thegreatcommissionchurch.org , for serving 25,000 web pages since New Year's day. Please take time to visit their web page. Our podcast will be coming up again tomorrow, be sure to join us. Send your thoughts to me at: [e-mail] .

Until tomorrow, thanks, and God bless.

Pastor Bob Emery