By unSeminary: Welcome to this week’s episode of the unSeminary podcast. I’m happy to have Dave and Jon Ferguson with us from Community Christian Church. Community has nine locations in Illinois as well as online services and works in three correctional facilities.

Almost all Christians want to share the love of Jesus with their friends and neighbors. But it often feels awkward when we try, or it feels like we failed at a bad sales pitch and results in frustration. Listen in as Jon and Dave share how they’ve equipped the people at Community Christian so they know what it looks like, in very practical ways, to help others find their way back to God.

Blessing vs Converting. // Many believers have been compelled by what they’ve experienced with God, but just haven’t figured out what it looks like to share their faith in a natural way. Often they end up feeling like they are trying to coerce or convince somebody. Community Christian Church believed there had to be a better way when it came to sharing the gospel. They came across a doctoral dissertation called “Blessers vs Converters” where two groups went to Thailand. One group went for the purpose of trying to convert people to Christianity and the other group went to focus on blessing the people there. Over a two year period, the blessers created a lot of social good and saw 100 people come to faith. Meanwhile the converters saw only 2 people come to faith. This led Community Christian to come up with the Bless Practices.Proclamation and demonstration. // The Bless Practices are not something to add to your life, but rather a way to live your life similar to how Jesus lived his. He blessed people and introduced grace to them. Community Christian realized that just because people in the church know your mission statement, it doesn’t mean they are living it out. They may want to, but they need practical tools to do so. This is where the Bless Practices come in.B.L.E.S.S. // Dave and Jon use the word B.L.E.S.S. as an acronym that offers guidance in how to reach out to others. B – Begin with prayer. Pray for the people in your neighborhood and your coworkers and let God direct you who to reach out to. L – Listen. 62% of non-christians and lapsed christians said they would talk about faith with people who didn’t pass judgement. E – Eat. Find ways to integrate other people into meals, coffee breaks and so on and use these things to build friendships. S – Serve. Jesus came not to be served, but to serve to others. Listen and learn how you can best serve that person to bless them. S – Story. When people were ready to listen to Jesus, He would tell a story. We also can tell stories about how God has worked in our lives.Let us bless, let God convert. // It’s important to remember that our job is to bless while it’s God’s job to convert. We often don’t listen long enough because we think it’s our job to convert, but listening is a great way to love someone. Embrace a posture of humility. Although we know the truth and the truth sets us free, we don’t know everything. We don’t know other’s stories and need to listen well as they share.Be a blessing. // Dave and Jon Ferguson have written a book titled B.L.E.S.S.: Five Everyday Ways to Love Your Neighbor and Change the World. The book is meant to offer a more organic and authentic way to share faith and goes into more depth on these five simple and straightforward practices and how you can live them out.

You can learn more about Dave and Jon and their book at www.bless-book.org . If your church would like to do a teaching series using B.L.E.S.S., send an email to Dave to get access to free resources that will help you in equipping your church to share their faith more naturally.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Carey Nieuwhof

Leadership has felt pretty uncertain and divisive this past year. How do you make decisions when the future isn’t predictable and your team has different opinions?Download the FREE Pivot Ready Cheat Sheet to get help making progress and gaining clarity through rapid change and disruption. It will give you a framework that effective and resilient leaders use to make decisions and take action.

Source: Everyday Ways to Help Your People Change the World with Dave & Jon Ferguson

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by Warren Bird: Who mentored you or believed in you before you believed in yourself? That person is your Hero Maker!

If you pick a recent day from your calendar, and review the ways you spent your time that day, how much were you the hero and how much did you make heroes of others? It’s easy to let the spotlight come to ourselves, but it’s so much more strategic to make heroes of other people that God is using on the front lines of ministry. Everybody wants to be a hero, but few understand the power of being a hero maker.

In Hero Maker: Five Essential Practices for Leaders to Multiply Leaders, you will learn how to bring real change to your church and community by developing the practical skills to help others reach their leadership potential.

Drawing on five powerful practices found in the ministry of Jesus, Hero Maker presents the key steps of apprenticeship that will build up other leaders and provides strategies for how you can activate gifts, help others take ownership, and develop a simple scorecard for measuring your kingdom-building progress.

Besides rich insights from the Gospels, Hero Maker is packed with real-life ministry stories ranging from paid staff to volunteer leaders and from established churches to new church plants. A practical tool accompanies each of the five practices, with several illustrations for how to use it.

Whether you lead ten people or ten thousand, Hero Maker will not only help you maximize your leadership, but in doing so you will also help shift today’s church culture to a model of reproduction and multiplication. The book, which has already made #1 ranking on three Amazon bestseller lists (see below), makes a compelling case that God’s power and purpose are best revealed when we train and release others, who in turn do likewise.

Become that rare breed of leader who brings change into our world by sacrificially investing in others who become the heroes. By becoming a hero maker, you will join a movement of influencers that are impacting hundreds, thousands and perhaps millions of people around the world.

Dave Ferguson is lead author, and I got to be his co-author. Besides being a board member at Leadership Network, Dave is lead pastor of Community Christian Church with 11 locations across Chicago, visionary behind a church planting network of 1,200+ churches, and president of the Exponential church multiplication conference.

Both of us feel this is our most significant book to date. For free materials to use with the book, see HeroMakerBook.com.

The post Are You More a “Hero” or “Hero Maker,” According to Your Calendar? appeared first on Leadership Network.

Source: Are You More a “Hero” or “Hero Maker,” According to Your Calendar?

The post Are You More a “Hero” or “Hero Maker,” According to Your Calendar? appeared first on Passion for Planting.