Below is an excerpt that I liked from a recent article by Ed Stetzer on becoming an outward focused church. I write some commentary below each of Stetzer's 7 steps.
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Many churches are built around themselves. One simple way to find out--draw a line down the middle of a board or piece of paper and have people within the church honestly assess what functions and ministries of the church are being done for the church versus reaching out to the community. Most likely, the need to lead the church to engage outside of her four walls will be obvious. Then, seek to mobilize the congregation to move outwardly any way that all of you can think of to do it.
Since it is easy to lose momentum and drift back into old patterns, here are a few ideas to help keep the outward focus fresh:
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- Plan some simple events to minister to people that involves a group of people from the church. Then have someone share brief testimonies of the outreach experience.
Testimonies are tremendously important in getting people to catch the outreach vision. Both at Liberty and at High Pointe, we have tapped into this power of testimonies by doing live interviews and making some high quality videos. Doing outreach as a group is also important, as it provides a community witness and also helps keep people encouraged in mission.
- Develop a simple outreach plan for the church and then highlight one different part each week in the worship services.
An important step in this is changing your bulletin to highlight mission (evangelism, community service). We share stories and includes stats of numbers of people served each week in our bulletin. I also work outreach into virtually every sermon in some kind of way. There is power in preaching in motivating people to reach out!
- Pray for God to change your heart and the heart of the church during public prayer times and pray Luke 10:2.
This is a great idea and one that we do not do enough.
- Provide training for people to better share their faith, like "Share Jesus Without Fear" or "More to Life Training."
We have done some of this, but need to do more. People are scared to share. They need to be shown how, in a natural way, to take away the fear.
- Make a big deal about baptisms by explaining what they represent and invite baptismal candidates to share their testimonies before the whole congregation.
Baptism is a big part of our theology, so this is something that we naturally do. However, we again make videos about these decisions to highlight them.
- Meet monthly with key leaders to update, recast a vision for outreach, and pray for God to move in the lives of the church family to act on the vision.
We do a lot of this, but we need to be more systematic in this.
- Develop a list of people who do not know Jesus and pray for them regularly with key leaders and before the congregation.
This is something that I have sought to do with our small groups and with our ministers and staff. It is frustrating, however, because I think that if I did not do it, no one else would. It is amazing how few people have lost people on their minds and cannot come up with anyone even to pray for. One of the things we did at Liberty was to ask each person to put down two unchurched people to pray for and serve that year. Then we took these names up (it was in a Sunday night service) and prayed for them that night during the service. Several came to faith that we prayed for that evening.
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What do you think of Stetzer's suggestions?
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