From the Resurgence: This is a fantastically helpful list of questions for assistants to ask their pastors to help define roles clearly, clarify expectations, and know how best to serve them.
Mark Driscoll developed this list along with AJ Hamilton, one of his former assistants, back in 2005 — and apparently wrote a 65 page paper along with it (way to go!).
This is a guest post by Dan Cruver, director of Together for Adoption.
Want to learn more about missional living and our call as Christians to care for orphans in their distress?
Last year over 1,000 gathered together in Austin, TX to consider The Gospel, the Church, and the Global Orphan Crisis. Join us this October 21-22 at Redemption Church (Gilbert Campus) in Phoenix for Together for Adoption (T4A) Conference 2011 as we explore the theme Missional Living, the Gospel and Orphan Care.
As written in Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living Through the Rediscovery of Abba Father, “To live missionally means to live each waking moment in light of the gospel so that it increasingly affects every part of our lives for the glory of God’s grace in our fallen world” (p 17). James 1:27 tells us that the practice of true religion necessarily involves caring for orphans in their distress. Therefore, to live missionally means that the Gospel is increasingly moving and empowering us to care for those who live on the razor-sharp edge of our world’s brokenness. Whether we are conscious of it or not, the Gospel is at the center of missional living and the evangelical orphan care movement.
General session speakers include: Darrin Patrick, Tullian Tchividjian, Tim Chester, Bryan Loritts, Juan Sanchez, and Jeff Vanderstelt
Worship Leaders: Shaun Groves, Aaron Ivey, and Jimmy McNeal
General Session Hosts: Shaun Groves and Johnny Carr (National Director of Church Partnerships at Bethany Christian Services)
Save $30 by registering this week for Together for Adoption’s October 21-22 orphan care/adoption conference (read full-details here). You may now register for just $75 today, July 26th, through Saturday, July 30th. This limited-time discount is over $30 less than our current early bird special. Take advantage of this super early bird price and help us spread the word about it this week. This sale ends on Saturday, July 30th at 11:59pm. Register here for this super early bird rate.
Note: If you are coming with a group from your church, this would be the perfect opportunity for your group’s members to register.
Below is a short documentary of the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that was held in Cape Town, South Africa, last October.
Here’s the intro from the website:
Cape Town 2010 has been called the most representative gathering of Christian leaders in the 2000 year history of the Christian movement (Christianity Today). Four-thousand Christian leaders representing 198 countries attended the Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. The Congress was brought together by a globalized leadership team from Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, India, North America and elsewhere. Several thousand more leaders participated in the Congress through the Cape Town GlobaLink, Cape Town Virtual Congress and Lausanne Global Conversation. Learn more about this gathering by watching this short documentary.
Here’s the trailer for 58: THE FILM from Live 58, a Christ-centered global initiative to end extreme poverty in our generation:
The film releases in October. Here’s the synopsis:
WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED. WILL WE DO EVERYTHING IT TAKES?
Premiering this October, 58: is the inspiring true story of the global Church in action. Witness bravery and determined faith in a journey from the slums of Kenya to the streets of New York. Confront the brutality of extreme poverty and meet those who live out the True Fast of Isaiah 58 and create stunning new possibilities for the future.Travel from the sun-scorched plains of rural Ethiopia to British shopping centers, from Brazilian ganglands and the enslaving quarries of India to western churches, businesses and conferences.
58: invites audiences to discover the incredible work of God through His people in our hurting world. Meet ordinary people, hear their stories, and see their struggles and their victories as 58: shows the relentlessly loving God at work through His Church bringing hope to the darkest challenges of our day. Experience eye-opening reasons to lift our expectations of the future.
Woven with Biblical truth, this film draws audiences into life-changing examples of the True Fast of Isaiah 58 — a young British woman prevailing over the pressures of consumer society, Ethiopian Christians working to restore their environment, an American business owner promoting Fair Trade coffee and connecting his local community with the work of ending poverty, a local pastor in India working to be a Good Samaritan to those enslaved by bonded labor, and the sacrificial generosity of New York youth giving up their own food for the sake of those with even less. These impatient revolutionaries and ordinary prophets present viewers with an empowering vision of the Church rising up to its remarkable potential to end extreme poverty, by bringing God’s words through Isaiah to life in our time, in our day.
Experience 58: this October on television, online, on DVD, and at screening events throughout the U.S.
This is a guest post by Loren Pinilis. Loren blogs on time stewardship at Life of a Steward.
For a long time, my desire has been to not waste my life. I wanted to do great things for God and to bring him as much glory as possible.
But I was going about it all wrong.
My thinking was refined by Dave Harvey’s Rescuing Ambition
I had an individualistic view of good works. Productivity was all about what I personally could contribute and accomplish. I looked for ways to use my strengths and to follow the callings and burdens that God had given me.
But I’ve realized the New Testament model for effectiveness is strikingly different. Instead, we see God working through his church. We see the passion of the apostles to build up this corporate body. We see God creating, refining, and growing local congregations of believers — and expressing his love to the nations through them.
This should radically change our view of productivity. We shift from a model that focuses on personal effectiveness to one that centers on organizational effectiveness. The most important thing is the team record, not the stats of the players.
This organizational productivity is not about finding fulfillment in our ministry. It’s not about making sure our gifts are utilized to the fullest. It’s about what’s best for the church.
There is a relationship between personal effectiveness and organizational effectiveness. God did, after all, give us strengths and gifts that he intends for us to steward well. But when spiritual gifts are discussed in the Bible, it’s in the context of the church. These gifts are given so that we join with others who have complementary strengths – and together we build up the church, serve the needs of others, and fulfill the Great Commission.
The danger, however, is when the church becomes merely a vehicle for us to pursue our personal ministry goals. In the desire to maximize our own individual productivity, we end up devaluing the local church. Instead of the church being a functioning body, it becomes some Frankenstein’s monster of individual parts sewn together.
I like the way Dave Harvey puts it: “The church shouldn’t merely accommodate our ministry; it should help define it according to the present needs of the church. This means if you have a burden for adult education but the church needs someone to teach kids, then grab the milk and cookies and get your lessons ready.”
“Having a heart” for a particular area of ministry is a signpost pointing you to an area where you may be the most productive. Passions are often God’s way of showing you how you can contribute to the greatest organizational effectiveness of the church.
But the performance of the body is the final measure of success — not our fulfillment. Not our individual accomplishments.
If the pursuit of our lives is to bring God glory, let’s make sure we’re doing it in a way that honors him and his body. Let’s do what will help the church the most — asking first “what needs to be done,” rather than simply “what would I like to do.”
Fantastic. Here is the mission, vision, and philosophy of ministry for a mercy ministry that just started at my church:
Mission
The seventeen-mile rugged descending road from Jerusalem to Jericho is the setting for the Good Samaritan to display mercy and restoration to a beat-up man and robbed stranger. Jesus tells us to go and do likewise. Luke 10:35-35
It is not enough to bandage the wounds of the beaten up man. It is necessary to give him a donkey ride to the inn in Jericho so that he can be fully restored.
“From crisis to Christ-centered restoration.”
Vision
To meet the basic needs of the hungry, homeless, and unemployed while teaching life skills that will lead them to be community minded and part of a Christ-centered church.
Philosophy of Ministry
It is a privilege and honor, not a sacrifice, to serve the low income/no income persons in a Christ-like way.
Ministry Programs
We will be there for a person’s crisis. But, far beyond just crisis food and financial response, we want people to be restored. This will happen through the following development programs . . .
Here are two reasons why I’m so enthusiastic about this. First, it affirms the need to not only meet immediate needs, but also to teach life skills and restore people so they can become self-sustaining. Second, though this is not easy, they see this as a privilege, not a sacrifice.
I commend this as an example of a mercy ministry founded in good thinking (and good theology) regarding relief and restoration for those in great need.
William Wilberforce:
No man has a right to be idle. Where is it that in such a world as this, that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?
In other words, be constantly on the lookout for good that you can do. Use the time and energy that God has given you not to make your own life easier or more restful primarily, but rather to meet the needs of others, both nearby and on a global scale.
Here are some easy things you can do right now, in just a few minutes:
This is what true productivity is: Being creative and thoughtful in finding ways to use our time and skills to become fruitful in good works.
The other day I came across an excerpt from the new book by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
Only weeks earlier, I’d sat in my Seattle office holding back-to-back meetings about how to quickly fix myriad problems that were beginning to surface inside the company. One team had to figure out how we could, in short order, retrain 135,000 baristas to pour the perfect shot of espresso.
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage. If the barista only goes through the motions, if he or she does not care and produces an inferior espresso that is too weak or too bitter, then Starbucks has lost the essence of what we set out to do 40 years ago: inspire the human spirit.
I realize this is a lofty mission for a cup of coffee, but this is what merchants do. We take the ordinary—a shoe, a knife—and give it new life, believing that what we create has the potential to touch others’ lives because it touched ours.
Here’s the point: the ordinary is not ordinary. Rather, it is in the ordinary that we are able to build people up and, yes, inspire the human spirit.
When you clean house for your family, or pour a cup of coffee, or take your car to the wash, you aren’t just doing small, mundane things. You are building building people up. You are making things better, and making a statement that people matter. Or, that’s how you ought to see it.
And the doctrine of vocation takes us further than this. For it means that, when we serve others in the everyday, it is actually God himself who is serving people through us. God is hidden in the everyday. This is true if we are believers; and God is also working through unbelievers, even if they don’t know it (Gene Veith makes this point very well in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
when he discusses why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer “give us this day our daily bread” when we actually get it from the grocery store, who got it from the bread company, who got the ingredients from various other spots, and so forth).
In fact, the doctrine of vocation even takes us one more step. When we, as followers of Christ, serve others for his sake, we aren’t just serving them. We are actually serving the Lord himself. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23-24; see also Ephesians 6:7-8).
Acts 18:25: “[Apollos] spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus.”
Acts 18:26: “When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him the way of God more accurately.”
