Where day one of the Large Church Initiative 2012 or #lci2012 was great food and awesome music, day two we spent listening to some challenging and inspiring messages.
The day started with breakfast and then our trip, in school busses, to FUMC Richardson.
Side note - This is definitely one of the prettiest churches I have ever been in.
Through the sessions and workshops I took notes, I'm just going to share a few of the things I learned from each one:
Mike Slaughter -
The main thing from his keynote speech is the idea that we have adopted an organizational model, instead of a missional model for ministry. Organizations tend to spend most of their time, money and resources maintaining themselves, instead of reaching out and being missional in the community.
When we change to being missional, we have a purpose and a passion.
He challenged us to think about multiplication instead of expansion in our churches. We don't need to build more buildings, or bigger buildings, but look at other ways our church can multiply it's DNA in other areas.
Two great ideas were restarts, and house churches.
With a church restart you reclaim buildings and save money, while starting a new congregation. The money you saved could go into other missional areas.
We need to find ways to, as he said "Minimize the brick, and maximize the mission!"
He also talked about being a mission focused church. To pick one significant mission focus to put your energy and money into as a church.
My favorite quote... "Christmas is not your birthday. On your birthday you can do something to honor yourself, but on His birthday do something that honors JESUS."
Clayton Oliphint
Rev. Dr. Oliphint is the Senior Pastor at FUMC Richardson
He talked about the role of leadership, using a passage from Nehemiah 6:1-3
"When you try to do something new, people will come to you and try to take you to 'Oh-no'.. They will tell you a million reasons why you cannot do what you are doing." - Dr. Oliphint
He told us as leaders we need to do three things:
1. Clarify the purpose -
Constantly ask "Why are we doing this? What is our purpose?"
2. Have Passion -
We have to be passionate and be willing to give our all whether we have 12 or 12,000 in our church, program, ministry, worship service etc...
We tend to end up with an "it will do" mentality. Thinking it's good enough, when we should be thinking "It will never do", constantly striving to do more, find new ways to be in ministry and serving those God has called us to reach.
3. Keep it About People -
Keeping numbers is ok, but remember each number is a person. We should be about the transformation process in people and in the world.
Lisa Greenwood
Lisa is the Contemporary worship pastor for Access, FUMCR's contemporary service.
She used the story of Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones... Ezekiel 37:1-11 to talk about how God can work through us to bring life, if we'll listen and obey.
Ezekiel was God's messenger and found himself standing in front of a valley of dry bones, to whom God told him to prophesy.
It made me thing about who or what those dry bones are in our ministries. Churches? Ministries? People? Cities? Do I have the courage to stand up and speak God's word, to prophesy to those?
"It's easy to see the realities. Dry, dusty, worn out, hopeless. But we are called to see the possibilities, to see the things that aren't there, to see what God sees. To often we thing that what it is, is just the way things are."
Too often we look at our positions or ministries and think, "I can't do anymore. And if I cannot make it happen, then it cannot happen."
We are not called to complacency, we are called to trust in God.
Trust God can do more than you could ever imagine...
Wow.. and that was only from the first half of the first day! I'll get notes from the workshops and final keynotes up later.
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