serve Archives - Passion for Planting

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

Sean Cronin — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

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 Read y 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

The post Everyday Ways to Help Your People Change the World with Dave & Jon Ferguson appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Outside the Box Multisite Church Launch

Sean Cronin — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 10:00:06 +0000

Home > Blog > Outside the Box Multisite Church Launch

Outside the Box Multisite Church Launch

By Bryan Rose

If becoming a multisite church, or adding another campus, is on your vision-radar right now, chances are you are primarily thinking in terms of Sunday morning worship. Most multisite church expressions initially begin with a weekly service. And, in most cases, the worship service is a natural and necessary way to most effectively reproduce your culture across campuses.

But what if multisite was less about your worship venue and more about your missional engagement? Best practices of the past do not automatically create highest effectiveness in the future.

As a strategic outsider focused on vision alignment, here are two outside of the box approaches to launching a multisite campus that I am seeing churches consider before beginning a worship service.

Serve First

Starting with missional engagement allows immediate impact in the target area. The Serve First model tilts the investment scale toward leading people over assembling equipment. Immediate return with this campus launch model is meaningful activity in the community and the creation of opportunities for the core team to live the mission right away.

Groups First

Another church is beginning to meet regularly and grow as disciples in smaller gatherings. Instead of waiting for worship services, group members invite neighbors and friends into fellowship and life-change in the neighborhood. Allowing the notion of “campus” to be decentralized into homes, versus concentrated in a building, a felt 7-day presence is immediate.

Both of these approaches to multisite campus development naturally bring the necessity of developing leaders to live on mission, as opposed to recruiting volunteers to accomplish a task. Corporate gathering for worship and teaching can still occur, but with the freedom to do so in non-standard times and other-than-weekly rhythms.

As multisite churches numerically move beyond the 5000 milestone of 2012 and exponentially toward the next horizon, innovative approaches to reaching people and replicating DNA beyond the Sunday morning service will continue to develop.

How are you thinking about multisite outside the box?

Source: Outside the Box Multisite Church Launch

The post Outside the Box Multisite Church Launch appeared first on Passion for Planting.

How to Create a Culture of Service in Your Church

Patrick Bradley — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 09:00:19 +0000

By Daniel Im: William Wallace, Melinda Gates, Hitler, Elvis Presley, Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, Bono, and Jeff Bezos.

What’s your off-the-cuff reaction when you hear those names? Do you think of similarities or differences? If you could group them together with one word, which one would you use? Would the word “leader” come to mind?

Now you may or may not agree on how effective each one of those individuals were (or are) as leaders, but it’s clear that when they acted, people followed. They led and history is different because of it.

While William Wallace led with passion to secure Scottish freedom from the English, Melinda Gates has led with compassion to give away more money than most people can even begin to fathom. While Hitler led the Germans with an authoritarian grip, Elvis Presley led with his charisma and rolling tunes.

Haven’t you ever noticed that as quickly as you can name leaders, you are able to name different attributes that make each of them uniquely effective? This is because there is no silver bullet to leadership. There is no common set of characteristics that—when put together—produce the end result of a leader.

In fact, just consider the weight of these words from Donald Clifton, the father of Strengths-Based Psychology, the grandfather of Positive Psychology, and the creator of the StrengthsFinder assessment. He was asked, just a few months before his death in 2003, what his greatest discovery was from three decades of leadership research. Here was his response…

Source: How to Create a Culture of Service in Your Church

The post How to Create a Culture of Service in Your Church appeared first on Passion for Planting.