In response to the teaching that the Holy Spirit has given a spiritual gift to each believer, one elderly man, who had been attending the church for twenty-three years, was overwhelmed that he had been asked to serve communion. Maybe our attempt, in spite of its eventual demise, was validated by such small steps as these.

On the other hand, there were those who bucked the concept. Accustomed to previous ministers’ making visitation calls, they could not understand why this was not a part of our pattern. Al explained that the minister’s role was to help develop these gifts on the part of the laity. When visitation was necessary, in his role as the player-coach, Al would take men from the church with him in an attempt to teach them how to take over.

Even though they had acquiesced when we had explained that developing the gifts of the Holy Spirit was a major foundation to our philosophy, the application which expected them to do their share of what the pastor was being paid to do was difficult to understand.

For Al there was no textbook available for a consulting source when he became enmeshed in these problems. He had to find out by doing. In my evaluation, for a young man facing tremendous problems with limited experience, he did a remarkable job. We spent hours together. I was grateful that God had blessed Al with a sense of humor, because he was able to laugh on many occasions when it might have been more appropriate to cry.

I remember the first Pastor’s Class I conducted, in which I began by asking the people to tell who they were and give some background. “After all, it is hard to discuss if we don’t know a little bit about one another.”

The first man was one of the members of the church board. “ My name is Richard, and I am a retired letter carrier.” As he spoke, the wife of the Board chairman gasped, “I didn’t know you were a mail man!”

We can never know everything about anyone, of course, and if this had been an isolated incident we could have accepted it. But, more and more, as people opened to one another in the discussion groups, they discovered facts which should have come out in the previous years of church attendance. That Richard had been a letter carrier clearly revealed the basic elements of his livelihood. If these primary facts were not being communicated, how could they possibly expect complicated trials and needs and despairs to be freely shared?

———————————————

Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy

Using our Circle Church new methodology in the Service of Worship and Instruction was an area in which we feel we made a real mistake. As Al Nestor pointed out later, “To so many of the Zion Church people, this service was their one point of continuity in a drastically altered world which they found difficult to comprehend and of which many were afraid. To come Sunday after Sunday and find things the same was reassuring. Suddenly that too was changed, radically for some.”

Although we had explained the philosophy, and had tried to interpret how it found its out-workings in methodology, and they had agreed to it, the actuality was hard for them to bear. I think if we had cautiously educated the group in our philosophy and its scriptural base, and had suited the methodology to Zion’s individual personality rather than transplanting what had been done previously at Circle Church, we could have prevented much of the shock reaction which occurred. But the, of course, even fewer Circle Church people would have stayed!

October and November were months when small tremors rumbled through both congregations as to whether we could actually pull off the venture. This precipitated more prayer on the part of us all. As a Circle Church staff, we spent hours encouraging one another. There were months when I put in almost as much time working on Zion with Al as I did with Circle. I felt our whole philosophy was at stake. The days fluctuated between a feeling that we were going to see a real victory and one that nothing on earth could make it go.

Despite the damaging effects of mounting criticism, we saw some lovely examples of the triumph of the human spirit. Al’s greatest trouble was accustoming his people to the concept that each had been given at least one gift of the Holy Spirit to be used for ministry in the community. It seemed to be foreign to them. For those who actually experimented with expressing what was locked inside there was delight and fulfillment.

We were excited when a middle-aged man taught a discussion group. He had never spoken to a group before. And, in fact, was so nervous about doing things in public that his wife would pray when dinner guests were present. Unsure about the new experience, he studied for hours every night. When the day finally arrived, he did an excellent job.

———————————————

Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy

This past week I had the privilege, as a Caucasian, of spending an entire day with two choice, humble, darker-skinned servants of the Lord. They are from South Africa. As ministry executives, they had been here for a week-long meeting of world leaders regarding the state of the church.

“So, what do you think Jesus would say if He addressed the American church on a Sunday morning?” I asked. “Say our Lord had the opportunity to speak by a video feed to all the congregations in the United States. What do you think He would say?” My question seemed appropriate, because while here, the two had a chance to visit a number of churches.

“‘Stop playing church,’” was their almost immediate response. The words were said in love and not meant to sound harsh. It was the same kind of thoughtful comments I had heard on previous occasions from church leaders of other countries.

In my opinion, one of the great illusions of the American church is that she is not backslidden. Yet, this is a message I almost never hear from our pulpits. Granted, it’s not an easy topic to address. But, if it is preached in a compassionate manner, my guess is that many Christians would be open to it.

Possibly a bigger problem is that all too many in the clergy are backslidden. What do you think?

———————————————

Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy

So, we at Circle Church reached an impasse of sorts with Zion Church. Our people who attended several times with a subdued willingness to participate at Zion Church found the hesitant efforts of welcome in startling contrast to the warm, gregarious atmosphere we had worked so hard to establish at Circle Church.

On the other hand, Zion people, who were basically an older, more reserved group, and had known one another for years and years, were unable to assimilate these newcomers with the short, short skirts and lists of degrees.

The methods employed on Sunday morning during the services also made for difficulties. Zion people had never heard several people pray at the same time, nor Scripture being read from different points in the congregation rather than being intoned from the platform. The choir was moved from the front of the auditorium—where the congregation could see every nose blown, every purse searched, every head that bobbed in sleep—to the balcony in the back.

Using recordings in place of special music was a dangerous innovation to many. These conceptual dilemmas were symbolic of the whole confrontation—the difficulty of mixing the new with the old, current styles with familiar and much-loved traditions, reaching out with pulling in.

From our Circle Church vantage point, there was a continual temptation to criticize what we interpreted as narrowness and small-mindedness without struggling for the grace to try to understand the background of experience that limited so many of those people.

Later, after we had gone through the Zion year, we realized that if we could not look at our role and ask, “What did we do wrong? What areas did we push that weren’t important? How could we have approached it differently?” and then uproot satisfying answers to these questions—if we could not force ourselves to do this as opposed to blame-finding, and finger-pointing, and judgmental attitudes, then the whole effort had been useless. We would have learned nothing about ourselves and our limitations. The experiment would then have been a failure in the ultimate sense.

———————————————

Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy