Leadership comm. 3

Hi Team,

I spent a great week on the Cape Epic last week. A mate and myself shared pain and suffering, joy and excitement of this amazing race together. It's a team event and any time you are more than two minutes apart can result in an hour time penalty. You are as slow or as fast as your partner.

We are a team, working together to meet the will the will of God and the purposes and ministry of Jesus in this church. We are the people who by God's grace have been given the privilege and responsibility to lead this church by the power of the Spirit. There are three implications to this:

1.       We are united in the Spirit: a team bound together and I see these regular communications as a means to foster our unity and common purpose. We are as slow or as fast as each other and we must continue as we have done to this point, in serving and caring for each other. Ministry can be tough and I encourage you to continue to support each other.

2.       We need to make sure that in all the things we do, the ministries we lead and in the tasks we accomplish that we are not powered by human ideas. We need to be praying, studying God's word and fellowshipping so that we might be filled with his Spirit and not human plans and purposes. Anything manmade will untimely come to nothing. God's work will be established forever and I want our church to be built on God's work and not our own.

3.       We need to be confident of the work of the Spirit in us. Be confident in what Jesus has gifted you to do, don't be embarrassed, don't be scared – step up to the plate and serve in the God ordained way that you have been blessed to lead Jesus church. Jesus has placed you in these positions to serve and bless those under your care to His glory. There is a great joy in leading God's people and in seeing his plans and purposes for your life come to fruition in the lives of those around you. Trust the Spirit in you to accomplish with you all that God has planned for your life: Ephesians 2:10 reminds us "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them"

Thanks to all of you for all the hard work you put in. I know that often those in leadership positions are overlooked for the work they do, people are sometimes unappreciative of the creativity and effort that is put in. So from me to you: thanks so much for blessing our church with your time, energy and talents!

As we journey towards Easter may you and your loved ones have a blessed time as you celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus who is the author and perfecter of our faith!

Blessings,

Brent

Leadership comm. 2

Hi Team,

If you are getting this mail it's because you are on the leadership team in some ministry of Protea Valley Family Church. And this is going to become part of  a regular, hopefully weekly communication to remind you of who we are and what we are about. Why am I doing this? There are a number of reasons:

·         I'd like to use these emails to pass on to you worthwhile information that will help you grow as a leader and grow the ministry under your care

·         I'd like to encourage you and bless you for the hard work that you put in

·         I see these mails as a process by which I can flavour your thinking so that we are all on the same page – to pass on to you the churches vision. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of things and we as a church must strategically ensure that we are doing things together in the way that God is leading us

·         I'd like to point you to resources for download/purchase that are worth looking at

·         When this is in a blog form, I see this as an opportunity to engage in comment and discussion around these communications that we can all be part of this process as a team

Let me start in this second comm. by reminding you that in the last communication we spoke about making disciples of all people, a Jesus mandate to the whole church, a divinely inspired instruction! Some years back the elders came up with this as the church's vision and it's been modified and sharpened a little as time has gone on:

'Inside, outside and all around'

Discipling the faithful INSIDE the church to be and to act like Jesus

Reaching the lost OUTSIDE the church with the message of Jesus

Serving the community AROUND the church with the love of Jesus

This comes straight out of the instruction that Jesus gives to the church at the end of Mathew 28 and in Acts 1. The two chapters I asked you to read are amazing chapters as they show the birth and life of the early church. That church lived these things out. Whatever ministry you are part of these three things need to become part of your focus, in fact they must become part of you. As I mentioned in the sermon on Sunday about being missional this distils into three things:

1.   Discipleship

2.   Mission

3.   Service

Most churches are often pretty good at doing discipleship. Most are OK with service. Almost all are normally pretty rotten with evangelism and hence the move to use something different in our case I want to use the word mission or missional because evangelism brings up images that are unhelpful.

I want to keep pushing you and those under your care to think about being missional. "Living sent" as Ed Stetzer puts it. Too often these things are seen as add on extras for those in paid positions or tasks for those specifically called to the mission field. If that's what you believe, you're wrong. This is for all of us, if we believe in Jesus this is OUR job. The leaders have to impress upon those under their care the importance of doing ALL THREE things well, that people might be served, saved and then trained up themselves to serve and save others. We must model this ourselves and then mentor those under us to follow our example. Paul says in Philippians 4:9  "What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. "

I see kids church as the place where this is ingrained from a young age and the homegroups where this is practically implemented and fleshed out. It's a tall order, but we can do this because He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world!

Leadership comm. 1

I want to start a regular communication with you to remind you of who we are and what we are about. From time to time I will send articles and links to articles that are worth reading. In time this will become part of a blog on our new website that is currently being developed for the church. For those that have no idea what a blog is check out Wikipedia's page.  I will from time to time send out similar mails with other information to other specific leadership teams in the church. And heads of other ministries will do the same for their teams too.

Why am I doing this? There are a number of reasons:

·         I'd like to use these emails to pass on to you worthwhile information that will help you grow as a leader and grow the ministry under your care

·         I'd like to encourage you and bless you for the hard work that you put in

·         I see these mails as a process by which I can flavour your thinking so that we are all on the same page – to pass on to you the churches vision. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of things and we as a church must strategically ensure that we are doing things together in the way that God is leading us

·         I'd like to point you to resources for download/purchase that are worth looking at

·         When this is in a blog form, I see this as an opportunity to engage in comment and discussion around these communications that we can all be part of this process as a team

Let me start in this first comm. by reminding you that every local church on this planet has a Jesus given mandate:

Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." – Matthew 28

This is your aim in whatever ministry you lead and the questions we need to ask ourselves every day are:

·         are we bringing people to Jesus by creating a community that is Jesus centred, Spirit filled and Bible based?

·         are we helping people to repent of sin and be saved by Jesus?

·         are we showing the relevance of the Bible to modern issues?

·         are we actually answering the questions people outside the church are asking?

·         are we teaching the full council of God or just the 'nice' parts?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

are we creating disciples of Jesus who are helping others to become disciples too?

My aim is to get you to ask yourself these questions personally and as a leader in this church, that you'd grow in faith and effectiveness. My prayer is that you'd become intentional about the ministry that you are part of, that you'd do things with a specific goal in mind so that Jesus might be glorified. You might be helping in the crèche, you might be an elder or part of a worship team – your role is to help meet this Jesus given mandate to the local church.

In the next comm. I'll remind you of our church's vision as to how we want to do this – go read  Acts 1 & 2 and we'll talk more soon!

The First Post

This is the first post on the new PVFC blog....cool :)