Emergent Brethren

Hey everyone, so sorry that its been so long since I’ve posted. I have some ideas in my mind, but haven’t taken the time to get them written down. I’ve been very busy in my CLT work. I hope to post my other ideas soon!

Anyway, next February 9th-13th, the National Pastor’s Convention will once again be coming to San Diego. I always enjoy meeting various Brethren from around the country to join this rich event. Do you know of anyone who might be coming? If so, could you please send me their name and congregation? In past conferences, there’s been up to 13 Brethren from around the country attend that I know of, and who came.

I like to host a dinner each year for all Brethren who attend. Its a great time to connect and reflect on our learnings. However, the sponsors will not give me information on who’s coming. So, I just have to rely on a sign at the message board, with my phone number on it.

So, if you know of someone, please let me know!

Thanks!!!

Jeff

I just received a flyer in the mail, advertising a conference to help churches retain their visitors. The conference is called, “Sticky Church”, and promises to help churches “close the back door”.

Stickiness: what an interesting concept! (I first learned about it in the book, The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell.) How sticky is your church? What do you do to promote stickiness to your visitors? Once upon a time, when I was a pastor, Bring-a-Friend Sundays were very popular. I got pretty good at promoting this idea and getting the church to draw a big crowd. Sometimes, we would almost double our worship attendance for that Sunday! The church people would get excited to see such a crowd! But the following Sunday, maybe a few would come back. Within a few Sunday’s, no one was returning. Though we had an exciting day, it was depressing that we didn’t find anyone who really wanted to be a part of us.

Bring a Friend Sunday is definitely one of those “attractional” church activities. Many today are trying to discard the attractional model for evangelism by becoming missional — going out to where the unchurched are, building relationships and doing ministry.

As you engage your community, how sticky are you in moving people into your fellowship? What kinds of things are you doing?

At my insight session at Annual Conference (Engaging Our Communities with Jesus), I named some of the creative ways that congregations are using to engage their communities. Some of these creative ideas include:

♦ Community Movie Nights: Showing recently run movies that display family or Christian values and inviting the neighborhood.

♦ Websites: This is this is how people shop these days, especially younger generations. A church can put for more information onto their webpage about their church than they can a yellow pages ad. Two samples include:
> www.myglendalechurch.org: good example of blogging, telling challenging or inspiring life-stories.
> www.creeksideconnected.com: example of well laid-out site with streaming video and audio of sermons.

♦ New Church Plant Mentality: Viewing the neighborhood as if the church is a new church plant. Waynesboro congregation in Shennandoah district sent two members to the new church planting conference.

♦ Community Gardens: At least two congregations, Cincinnati and Virginia Beach, are opening their property to neighbors to plant gardens. Working together on your individual gardens is a great way to building relationships!

♦ Skateboard Park: Virginia Beach has created a safe place for neighborhood kids to skate.

♦ Tractor Show and Community Dinner: This wouldn’t work in many communities, but it works for the East Chippewa congregation!

♦ Parent’s Night Out: Fridays, 6-9pm: Waynesboro, VA.

♦ Classes for the Community: Computer, Conflict resolution, job counseling, ESL — Harrisburg First

♦ DVD Handout: East Chippewa has a professionally produced DVD to introduce their congregation to their community.

For those of you who might be interested, the insight session was video taped and will be available on DVD at no charge. On the DVD, you’ll hear other creative ideas and the stories of four congregations who are engaging their communities in vital ways and growing as a result. Just let me know. My contact info is on the “Contact Us” tab, or respond with a comment to this post.

In case your interested in some books to help your church become more “sticky”, check-out the book list at the Sticky Church website.

May your outreach efforts be blessed and sticky!

Jeff

Last night, I hosted a prayer/worship experience that I called “Passages: Conversations with God.”  My thought was to offer somethinga that would help us connect with God in a variety of ways, using prayer, worship, and some spiritual disciplines.  Last night we used the Jesus Prayer and a passage from Luke 10.  The other thing I wanted to try was the 5 questions that I found in “Tangible Kingdom”… because I am thinking about using them as the framework for “the sermon time” in a new worship experience that I would like to launch this fall.  I was not sure how the questions would go… but it was the best part!   I didn’t want to delve deep into historical analysis of the scripture, etc.   I wanted to engage the Scripture as the Living Word of God and allow the Holy Spirit to guide our conversation.  It was totally awesome how rich and deep that time was.   Here are the questions that we used to guide our conversation.  1. What did you like about what you just read? 2. What didn’t you like? 3. Was there anything you didn’t understand? 4. What did you learn about God? 5. Regardless fo where your faith is at right now, if you were to apply what we learned about God to something in your life this week, what would that look like?

I can’t wait to see how using them goes several weeks running.

Light the Night is a way to impact your community on the night of trick-or-treating with the message that Jesus is the light and that the light overcomes darkness.

We’ve done it for years now in different communities and have found it to be the single most attended event by the community hands down. Where we might get 2 to 20 people from the community to attend an on-site dinner, concert, VBS, or children’s event, we connected with 400 to 500 people through Light the Night last year.

The idea is to have one or more homes in the community host the event. It is critical that you do not have it on church property.

You put up a welcoming banner (preferably the same one is used by all the homes hosting no matter what church affiliation) and literally flood the home with light – bank lights, spot lights, Christmas light, every light object you can gather – and invite people on a night dedicated to evil and darkness to experience the light.

You have games (with candy or tickets for prizes), puppet shows (giving the message of the night), free food (cotton candy, hot dogs, popcorn, etc.), music, drawings, and gift bags with information about who is hosting the event.

The two great things for our churches have been that it is something that can pull in every person in the congregation to help with and that it meets people where they live – literally. We saw a lot of community building as parents stood around visiting with neighbors they may have never spoken to before while the kids ran around playing games. It has not been unusual to see parents literally dragging kids away to “finish trick-or-treating” only to return a few minutes later because kids knew a good thing when they saw it!

For ours, we put people into ministry teams: set up and tear down service team, evangelism team (they handed out the gift bags and were charged with simply talking to parents), intercession team (who prayed over the neighborhood and event site), administration/children’s team (who ran the games), administration/planning team and food service team.

A church in State College, PA, started Light the Night seven or eight years ago. The vision for it is to get all the churches in your community doing it to have the greatest impact. It’s one thing to know people go to church, it’s another to see home after home in your city proclaiming the message of Jesus.

Lisa G. Yoder & Gary D. Yoder
Grandview Church of the Brethren
S/C Indiana District

We are now about 6 months into doing a 2/3 service at Grandview Church in S/C IN District. Our 2/3 service is our solution to several problem areas we see across the country in most small churches: inability to come together to name one missional focus, power-struggles over worship style, and having a worship place to invite new people into joining.

Thus, we’ve gone from blended to what we are calling a 2/3 service. One service is split into three parts and incorporates two distinct worship styles. The first part is strictly traditional worship (hymns, responsive reading, offering, etc.). The second part is for church family events (like baptism, baby dedication, VBS presentation) and sermon. The final third is strictly contemporary worship (IWorship, worship team, flags, children with ribbons and instruments, etc.).

If you want to attend a traditional worship service, you only stay for the first two-thirds. If you want to attend a contemporary worship service, you come for the last two-thirds. Yet, everyone in the church is together for the same sermon at the same time.

The traditional people feel like they have a stable service they can count on and like. The contemporary attendees are much more free than they were in the blended service; they don’t feel now like if they act like they enjoy the praise and worship they are offending someone else in the congregation who does not.

Our children are released from childcare for the third-third to worship with parents. On about week 3 or 4, parents suddenly realized they could relax – it didn’t matter if the baby toddled across the row – no one noticed in the more casual atmosphere. Children didn’t have to sit stone still – they could grab a sand shaker or ribbon and actively worship. It was great to watch this realization come over the parents. We are considering renaming this section “family worship” as we don’t feel “contemporary” is a good tag anyway.

What do we do for transition you are probably wondering (that’s always the first question). We have brought back the Brethren greeting time. As people enter who are coming at the start of the second third (because they want a contemporary worship experience), we break with a countdown video. Everyone greets one another and then settles back in together. At the end of the second third (after the sermon) we have a prayer ministry time in which those who are leaving can exit and children come in – we start in with an IWorship song to give the praise team time to gather and get things going again. We’ve just started trying a countdown video during this second transition as well.

The number one thing we hope to accomplish with this style is to be able to set aside the traditional versus contemporary underlying tensions long enough to come together over ministry focus. Some leadership have misunderstood and thought the two-thirds service was going to cause dramatic church growth alone (which it has not – though a number of people who left the congregation because of the blended worship have returned to attend the traditional service, and we have some families more engaged now that we have the contemporary worship). We are now concentrating on getting leadership to identify and go with one God-given ministry focus. We are also launching ministry teams this summer with a full launch this fall (but that’s another post).

We are happy to answer questions about how we make the transitions work, what impact it has had on the children’s department (our greatest care was placed here going in), how we resource it with both people and ministry resources, etc.

Pastors Lisa G. Yoder & Gary D. Yoder
Grandview Church of the Brethren
S/C Indiana District