#4 Momentum

#4 - Momentum:
Starts With You,
Moves To Your Leaders,
Lodges In The Hearts Of Your People,
And Becomes Tangible When It Touches Your Community.

Hi!

I hope you’re finding this adventure worthwhile. If you’re like me (and many others), the process of learned to love the lost is like a roller coaster. One day you’re high, then the next day reality strikes and you’ve got every day junk to deal with, so you’re back to the ground. This is part of why prayer is so important.

If you’re feeling like giving up, guess who’s pushing for that? For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 6:12) Don’t give up!

Before you read further, pray for a minute that you hear God’s voice as you read the rest of this.

Working ON Your Ministry
Michael Gerber, in his seminal work, The E Myth, writes that the most important action an executive can take is to work on their business, not just in their business. The same is true in ministry. It’s easy to get so caught up in doing ministry that we neglect to build the ministry. The purpose of my letters is to help you build momentum in your church by working more on your ministry, rather than just in your ministry.

Over the next few letters, I want to help you begin to build some systems that will sustain and increase the momentum in your church.

Please take a minute to pray, asking God to give you an undistracted fifteen minute window to speak to you just now, as you read.

Review:
Momentum starts with the Holy Spirit and you, it moves to your leaders, then lodges in the hearts of your congregation. Once that happens, it becomes tangible and concrete when it touches the community around you.

Everything we’ve begun doing so far is designed to build up latent momentum in you and your church. “Latent” is a scientific word for “pent-up.” As you are praying, your heart is breaking (also, enlarging). As you’re sharing with your people and studying with your leaders, they’re hearts are breaking and enlarging too.

As you preach how much God cares for those who are not yet part of his family, your congregation will begin to want to do something more than attend church and care for each other. They’ll want to do something to reach their friends, neighbors, and community. Wouldn’t it be great if they were pushing you to do outreach, rather than you having to push them? I think it can happen. Your prayers, preaching, and personal example are powerful tools for motivating members to love the lost.

The Third Study
Let’s talk about the third study in our Capturing God’s Heart series.

Come and See
In John 4, Jesus meets an extraordinary woman. She has a damaged past and a dubious present. During their short conversation, the woman decides that Jesus is the Messiah. What should she do about this?

John 4:28-29 says, “Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.’ They came out of the town and made their way to him.”

This woman doesn’t have a lot of education. (Though she’s got a lot of reputation, because of her past.) She’s only been a Christ-follower for a few minutes. How can she articulate her new-found faith? She uses two verbs: “Come.” And, “See.”

Over the years I have taught my people half a dozen evangelistic strategies. This one is the simplest: Come and see.

It’s the same approach used by Philip on the day he meets the Lord. “’Come and see,’ said Philip.” (John 1:46b)

This is our third study in our Capturing God’s Heart series. sometime this week have a conversation with a group of people that you are close to and ask them to invite their friends to “Come and see.” what God is doing. (Wow! Just the thought of that gets me excited.)

Tell your friends about how much God loves those who are yet-outside his family, and what the Lord has been doing in your heart. Tell them about how you’ve been praying for lost people in nearby cars while you’re at stoplights, or in line at grocery stores. Remind them that they have never locked eyes with someone who doesn’t matter to God. And that everyone they know is only one prayer away from an eternal relationship with Christ.

Then ask them to pray. Pray for lost neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, etc. Give them a time period – maybe “seven friends for seven weeks.” While they’re doing that, you pray for your congregation full of inviters. Somewhere in there, show them Col. 4:4 and ask them to pray for you.

Here’s what our Capturing Gods Heart has covered:
- Becoming Fishers of Men (Matt. 4:18-22)
- The Day of Good News (2 Kgs. 6,7)
- Come and See (John 4)

If you’d like to make it a four week series, you could begin by preaching my favorite sermon, which is called, The Prodigal Father (from Luke 15). Or, you could insert it as week 2 or 3. There’s no magic to this, you just want to expose your friends to God’s heart, from Scripture, for the lost. If you’d like a copy of The Prodigal Father, let me know and I’ll email it to you.

Building (or Rebuilding) Your Outreach System
Alright, let’s talk about doing things that will touch and attract unchurched people to your fellowship.

What will touch and attract your neighbors?
Right now, your church has a reputation in your community, and chances are, your reputation is not what you think it is. Many churches have no reputation at all because the people living around them aren’t even aware that they exist. Some churches have reputations for the negative things they’ve done. A few engage the community in acts of service, or a large annual event (a summer Family Fair, or Easter Sunrise Service, for examples).

Whatever your reputation, you’re going to have to enhance and improve it if you want to increase your momentum in the community. In my experience, increasing your Friendliness Factor is the fastest and easiest way to make immediate improvement.

Five Ways to Increase Your Friendliness Factor
1. Preach about being friendly.
If you want to increase your Friendliness Factor, I encourage you to start by talking to your people about being friendly.

You can do this in the application section of several of your Capturing God’s Heart sermons: “What does it look like to be friendly to people?” “What does it look like to be friendly to them in the grocery store?” “What does it look like to be friendly in the neighborhood?” “What does it look like to be friendly when they visit our church?”

Or, you could actually preach a sermon or two on the subject. Here’s a tool that might help:

2. Teach your people to “LINE-UP.”
Several years ago, (during a message on “Come and see”) I taught my church a system called, “LINE-UP.” I put a whiteboard on stage, wrote each of the letters vertically on the left-hand size, and then filled it in this way:

LOOK for someone you don’t know.
Every time you come to church, instead of concentrating on your friends, make it your goal to extend God’s love to someone you don’t know. What do you do when you find someone you don’t know…?

INTRODUCE yourself.
“Hi, my name is Hal Seed. Have we met before?” (If not, “Nice to meet you.”) Once you’ve introduced yourself, ask the other person questions. We all love to hear ourselves talk, so let the other person talk.

NEVER sit alone. This is the Eleventh Commandment. New Song’s middle name is “Community,” and in order to be in community, we ought to sit together. So once you’ve introduced yourself, say, “I’m going into the sanctuary now. Can I invite you to sit with me?”

ENGAGE in conversation. During the greeting time, you’ll meet some people around you. Once the church service is over, engage them in conversation (once again, by asking questions, not by talking about yourself.)

USE the R.U. New Café. Once a month, we hold a free lunch for all newcomers. Anyone can come, as long as they are new, or bring someone who’s new. So once you’ve engaged in conversation, say, “Hey, next Sunday (or whenever it is) we’ll be holding a lunch called The R.U. New Café. I’d like to invite you to be my guest. – It’s free, and if you come, I can come. It’ll give me a chance to hear more of your story, and I can introduce you to our staff and leaders.”

PRACTICE the 3/10 Rule. The 3/10 Rule is, talk with three people you don’t know during the first ten minutes after the service. Most of us want to talk with our friends, but if our friends have been coming for awhile, they’ll still be here ten minutes after church. Whereas all newcomers will be gone in the first ten minutes unless someone engages them in conversation.

The LINE-UP strategy has served us well. You will have to start a monthly lunch to implement it fully, so you may need to shorten your acrostic to LINE until you get that in place. But add the UP as soon as possible.

3. Talk about how friendly you are.
No doubt you’ve heard of the concept of “Self-fulfilling Prophecy”? It’s the idea that what you believe will happen is more likely to happen, because you expect it to. You’ve probably also heard of the “Mirror Image,” which is the idea that how other people see you is how you tend to see yourself. Jesus used this phenomenon when he gave Simon the new name “Peter.” – He was saying, “You may not think of yourself this way yet, but I see you as a rock, so I’m going to start calling you Peter.” (Which means “rock” in Aramaic.)

Now, honestly, I believe that New Song Community Church is one of the friendliest churches in the world. And one reason we are is because we remind ourselves that we are. Every weekend, just after the greeting time, the person giving announcements begins by saying, “I hope by now you’re discovering that New Song is one of the friendliest churches in the world.” We script this right into the announcements.

Three months after we began saying that, a lady in our latest membership class said to me, “I kept coming back because this really is one of the friendliest places in the world.” They’ve been saying it ever since.

4. Upgrade your Greeting Team.
If your church is like most, your Greeting Team is largely comprised of older, introverted males. Why? Because these guys don’t have kids at home anymore, which means it’s not hard for them to church a few minutes early. Often, introverts volunteer for the Greeting Team because they feel a little uncomfortable at the beginning of the service. So filling the role of Greeter helps them fit in.

First time guests always ask the unspoken question, “Are there people here like me?” If your first line of greeters is a homogenous group of older males, most of your first time guests’ initial answers will be, “No.”

Upgrade your Greeting Team by recruiting a few younger people, both male and female, if you don’t already have them. Remind them to smile, be friendly but not accosting, and show sincere interest in everyone, especially newcomers.

5. Give your people incentive to invite others.
Most of your people live busy lives. They love coming to church, but rarely think about inviting others just because it’s not on the top of their to-do lists.

At New Song, we have found that people really will invite friends if they know that what they’re inviting them to is going to be relevant, really good, and won’t embarrass them or their friends. So 3-4 times are year, we offer exceptional opportunities to invite friends. We call these opportunities, “Church -Wide Campaigns” (CWCs). In the past two years, are attendance has grown by 500. 100% of that growth has come from CWCs.

CWCs are the most effective strategy we’ve found for reaching the lost of our community. Next week I’ll describe them for you.

Taking Action
(There are a lot of these this week, but they don’t have to be time-consuming. Put them on your to-do list and check them off one at a time.)

Assignment 1 = Make a note to include “What our Friendliness Factor looks like” in your Capturing God’s Heart sermon series, or do a week or two of sermons on it.

Assignment 2 Adapt and improve LINE-UP for your setting and decide when and how you will teach it to your church.

Assignment 3 = Pray about who/how/when/where and whether to start an R.U. New Café, or a newcomers desert, or something that shows hospitality to newcomers and connects them with your core.

Assignment 4 = Adopt or adapt our “I hope by now you’re discovering that ______ Church is one of the friendliest churches in the world” announcement script and ask your announcements people to memorize and use it every week.

Assignment 5 = Evaluate and upgrade your Greeting Team as you are able.

And … email me (robnigro@sbcglobal.net) or post your comments here to let me know what you’re thinking and how things are progressing.

1,000 blessings!