Church Growth and Health--Preaching, Witnessing, Assimilating

The common thread of our studies this week relates to church growth and health.

We talked about the need to preach the Word. Roger agreed with this and said, "Amen to that Bro. Randy, I know that there is no substitute for the "word of God". Salt may have one, sugar may have one,teachers may have one, but there is no substitute for God's holy word. That is to our benefit as well as to the ministry, we don't have to choose between the two, we have one gospel and that is all we need!!!!"

Then we also focused on witnessing and received some good tips for that. Corey has much experience in this area, and I am looking forward to his sharing about that. Sean gave several practical tips for witnessing that came from the material he is studying. Here is one of them: "He [the author] gave another point in getting back the control of the conversation when a person gets sidetracked or changes the subject is to say 'Let me ask you this question', he gives an example of a person saying, 'I went to church and the pastor was caught doing something, or a person was a hypocrite and so I quit going'. He would say 'Let me ask you this question, will you answer for this or will the person doing the act answer for it?' His point is that people are more willing to talk about things if you ask them for their opinion instead of making them feel like they are being told something."

Beyond that we discussed the importance of letting people know what they are getting into when they make a commitment to join the church. This is sometimes difficult to do when you want to be welcoming to those who might be interested. In most of our congregational churches, in the past, all a person had to do to join the church was to come forward during an invitation and let their desire be known. In the last several years, some of these same types of churches have been requiring people to attend a "class" or "session" that explains the commitment they are making when they want to join the church. I think there is quite a bit of value to this. For others, though, this is too non-traditional. One thing we do, however, when people want to join our church, is to read our church covenant to them, and ask them if they are ready to begin to attempt to live up to the ideals that are expressed there. Tyler's study sparked our discussion about this. He said, "The DVD was about the character of a preacher. He went into great detail about not drinking alcohol. I agreed with everything he said. He also talked about the fact that we need to tell people who want to join our churches about it in detail and explain to them why it is important." Roger raised the issue of the importance of challenging people to understand what they were getting into. Sean gave a great testimony about his personal experience along this line.

In some of our comments for the rest of the week, let's focus some more on assimilation: taking people from being "attenders" to becoming "members." What do some of you think about a "class" requirement for those who would want become official members of your church? What would be the advantages? What are the disadvantages? How well would it be received by your more traditional-minded members? Would such a change be worth it? Is such a requirement "wrong?" You may comment in relation to the general discussion in any of your posting areas or even in the comments section below this post. Let's think about this a little.