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!