If you are in a church leadership position you probably have to attend meetings. One of the most common complaints that I hear among ministry co-workers is that there are too many meetings, that they last too long, and that they are boring. Why do we have so many meetings?

First of all I want to point out that there are plenty of meetings in the business world as well, and many people there have the same complaints. Some companies do a better job than others of holding effective meetings. But why are meetings necessary?

Here are some of the reasons that I can think of for having meetings:

• to communicate information
• to gather input or brainstorm
• to make decisions
• to provide accountability

Some of these things can be done in other ways, at least to a certain extent. One-way communication of information can often be done by email, provided that everyone on the leadership team is committed to reading their emails.  Minor decisions can also be made by email.  But there is a limit to what can be done electronically.  Lengthy discussions on important issues don’t work as well on email, in part because some people can respond several times a day and have a lot to say, while others might only check their email every other day.  Controversial or highly emotionally charged issues are almost always better discussed face to face.  Brainstorming sessions work best in real time rather than by an exchange of emails.

Another reason that we have lots of meetings is our desire for consensus. We want to be sure that everyone is on the same page, and that everyone is heard.  A dictatorship doesn’t need any meetings, unless the dictator wants them.  Fewer meetings require greater delegation and a high degree of mutual trust among the leadership team.  With fewer meetings, the top leaders will need to make more decisions on their own and in informal one-on-one conversations with other leaders.  Each church and ministry organization will have to find its own balance between independent action and group decisions.

The reasons for meetings discussed so far are mostly task oriented, but there are also important relational reasons to meet together:

• to build deeper relationships among the team
• to care for one another
• to learn to work together as a team
• to inspire and encourage

It is a mistake to focus our church leadership meetings only on “getting the job done.”  The command to love one another applies to leaders as well, and we have an obligation to nurture healthy, loving relationships among the leadership team. The love and mutual respect among the leaders will help things to go more smoothly when difficult issues must be faced.

In his book The Unity Factor: Developing a Healthy Church Leadership Team, Larry Osborn recommends two meetings each month for the church board.  One is a business meeting similar to those in most churches, and the other is a fellowship meeting focused on relationship building and caring for each other.  When members of the leadership team form deep, caring relationships with one another it transforms the group.

Osborn shares an incident in which a young father needed to step down from the board due to his family schedule:  “As he told me his decision, his eyes began to fill with tears. I knew him well, but I had never seen him cry before.  He wasn’t the type.  When he finally spoke, he said simply, ‘I’m going to miss the guys’” (p. 31).  Is that what happens when someone steps down from your church board or leadership team?  Or do they rejoice that their term is complete?

In a future post I will share some thoughts about the effective use of meeting, but for now I wonder how you feel about the meetings that you attend at your church.  Do you feel that there are too many meetings, or that they are ineffective?  Do you have some insights on effective meetings that you would like to share?  Please leave a comment to share your thoughts.

Disclosure: The book link above includes an Amazon affiliate code.  I receive a small payment for books ordered via that link.

As I seek God’s direction for my future ministry I have been reflecting on something that I have often taught in the past, namely how to find God’s calling.  In order to discover God’s calling it is helpful to distinguish a number of different aspects of calling.

The Call to Follow Jesus

The most basic calling is the call to follow Jesus as His disciple.  Implicit in our response to the offer of salvation is the commitment to become one of Jesus’s followers.  It would have been inconceivable to the NT authors to imagine a person who believed in Jesus but had no intention of following Him.  Every Christian is called to follow Jesus.  The call to follow Jesus forms the foundation for all the other aspects of God’s calling.

The Call to Serve

Closely related to the call to follow Jesus is the call to serve Him as part of the Body of Christ.  The church as the Body of Christ is arranged in such a way that every member has something valuable to contribute and every member is needed (see 1 Cor. 12).  Every Christian is called to serve in some way as part of the Body.

Not only are we called to serve in a general way, but also in a particular ministry (or a few different ministries). God’s sovereign distribution of spiritual gifts has equipped us each to serve in specific ways.  The call to serve in a particular type of ministry is given to every believer, although it might take us some time to discover our divinely appointed area(s) of service.

I think that spiritual gifts are fairly permanent, although different gifts may be emphasized at different points in our lives, and God in His sovereignty may sometimes give an additional gift later in life.  Understanding how God has gifted us provides an important form of guidance as to the primary way(s) in which we are called to serve.  We may occasionally be called to serve in other areas, but if we can spend the majority of time serving in areas that match our gifting our ministry will be more effective and we will bear more spiritual fruit.

We can consider the example of the Apostle Paul.  God had prepared him and gifted him in certain ways, and before long it was clear that he was called to be an apostle, which means he was called to go out to places where there were few Christians and plant new churches.  That was his life calling.

The Call to a Specific Situation

In addition to a basic life calling, we each need God”s guidance about specific ministry situations.  I can think of three ares of specific calling.

Calling to reach a certain people group

Sometimes God calls us to focus our ministry efforts on reaching a certain people group.  It could be a certain ethnic group, age group, occupational group, etc.  The Apostle Paul was called to focus on the Gentiles rather than the Jews.  For him this was a life long calling.  I suspect that this will usually be a longer term calling because once we take the time and effort to learn to reach a certain group it makes sense to continue to use what we have learned.  Most people are called to reach others similar to themselves because that is most natural, but some are called to cross-cultural ministry.

Whichever group we are called to reach, we will do it primarily by using the spiritual gifts that God has given to us.  Two people called to the same group might end up doing quite different things to reach them.  For example one might focus on relief work to help the poor among the target population while another might train church leaders.

Calling to a specific geographic area

God may also call us to serve Him in a certain geographic area.  If we are called to reach a specific people group then we need to go to where they live.  There may be other reasons that God calls us to a specific location.  In the case of the Apostle Paul, he was called to go to many different places to plant churches, so his geographic calling changed quite frequently.  But there is still evidence that God wanted him in certain places at certain times.  At one point God did not allow him to enter the Roman province of Asia, of which Ephesus was the largest city (Acts. 16:6), but later he had a fruitful ministry there (Acts 19).

Calling to a certain organization

Finally we usually also experience God”s calling to a specific church or ministry organization.  Like Paul, a few might be called to launch a brand new organization, but most of us will be called to existing churches or ministry organizations.  Our basic ministry calling and spiritual gifting will be a factor in this, as well as any calling to a specific people group or geographic area.

Note that these three areas of specific calling are interrelated, and might occur in a different order.  In my own case, my wife and I first felt called to missionary service outside the U.S., a very broad geographic area!  Later we felt God directing us to Asia in particular (still very broad).  As we continued to seek His direction we decided to join OMF.  At that point we were limited to the countries in which OMF had work, and through continued prayer God guided us to serve the Chinese in Taiwan.  When we returned to the U.S. it seemed like a natural step to serve in a Chinese church.

What about full-time Vocational Ministry?

I”m guessing that some who read this article might be considering full-time vocational ministry.  How does that calling relate to the others?  Those called to full-time vocational ministry experience all the other callings as well, with the additional call to lay down their secular employment and serve God full-time.  Some ministries such as preaching are usually reserved for those in full-time ministry due to the extensive training required and the considerable amount of time necessary to prepare a quality sermon.  Those employed full-time by a church have a lot more time to invest in ministry than those with other jobs.  But other than that I don”t think that there is a big difference from the callings experienced by every Christian.  We are all part of the Body of Christ.

So what is God”s calling on your life and what are you doing about it?

Marc Cortez, who teaches theology at Western Seminary in Portland, has written a series thought provoking of articles on What’s Wrong with our Gospel.  We often divorce the Gospel from its context in the biblical story of redemption and focus almost exclusively on our individual experience with God.  Just listen to a typical baptism testimony and you will see what I mean.

Here are some of the other posts in this series:

• Problem #1: The Self-Centered Gospel
• Problem #2: The Individualistic Gospel
• Problem #3: “Getting In”
• Problem #4: The (un)Social Gospel

What do you think about these articles?  How can we share the Gospel in proper biblical context?

The challenge of establishing an effective English Ministry in Chinese churches is neither new nor unique.  I have frequently heard of similar issues faced by other ethnic churches, and I have suspected that these issues were present in the past as well.  I took a special interest in German speaking churches in the U.S. in part because some of my ancestors came from Germany and in part because Germans formed one of the largest immigrant groups in the early history of the U.S.

Through the Google Books project I have been able to access some of the earlier books on the German Lutherans in the U.S. and it has made interesting reading.  In A brief history of the Lutheran church in America by Juergen Ludwig Neve (1916) we read about heated debates in the early 19th century over the introduction of English language worship services.  Some of the immigrant generation saw English worship as essential to reaching the next generation while others feared it would lead to the abandonment of their German language and culture.  Neve’s section on “The Language Question” on p. 82 is worth reading.  In this case the English worship service proposal was voted down and the English speaking group left to form a new church.

Change a few of the details and it sounds like what has taken place in many other immigrant churches.  Although most Chinese churches now accept the importance of having an English worship service, I have been told that in the 1980′s there was considerable controversy over this issue.  It seems like there is something here that may apply to many different immigrant churches.

Most immigrants desire to hold on to their language and culture, and to gather with others from their homeland.  It is understandable that they also want to pass their heritage on to their children.  But it is also understandable that their children want to adapt to the culture of the new country so that they can fit in there.  When this tension inevitably shows up in the church it makes it challenging to reach the next generation.

It is usually encouraging to know that the challenges that you face are not new, and it is even better if you can learn from the experience of others.  Do you know of examples from other immigrant churches, either contemporary or in the past?  If so, I would be very interested in hearing about them.

We have settled down in Seaside, OR (map).  A few days ago I put Oregon plates on my car, which somehow felt very symbolic.  Now we are Oregon residents.  So I thought this would be a good time to records my impressions of this small town in which we are currently living.

Life in a small town

Life is refreshingly different in a small town (pop. 6000).

• At the local DMV I took my number and was helped 10 minutes later.  Quite a contrast to the wait at the Concord DMV.
• People actually slow down to 20 mph in the 20 mph school zone signs.
• Most people are helpful and friendly. At the DMV my number came up before I had had time to finish filling up a form. The employee said to just bring up the form and he would help me to finish filling it out.
• We have a Costco and Staples about 20 minutes away, but for other stores such as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s we need to go into Portland (a 1.5 hour drive). So we need to plan ahead for shopping.

It’s great to live in a place with a slower pace of life.

We’re not in Concord any more

Things are a lot different here:

• This is a tourist town, so things really slow down in the winter.  I saw one restaurant in the small downtown area that already has a sign saying “Sorry we missed you, see you in February.”
• It rains a lot here (76 inches per year vs. 20 in Concord).  That’s why everything is so green.
• The back yard of the house where we are staying ends at the forest, so we can literally start hiking from the back yard.  Very cool!
• The beach is only 2-3 miles away.  This is the Oregon coast, so it is often cold and windy.  Great for a walk, but not so good for sun bathing (I don’t enjoy sun bathing anyway).
• The house where we are staying is above the “tsunami line,” so we should be safe here in the unlikely event of a tsunami.

Last Sunday afternoon I spent some time cleaning out my office at church.  The most time consuming part of that was going though my files to decide what to keep, what to toss and what to pass on to the next pastor.  Sorting through the files brought back a lot of memories.  Here are some of the kinds of things I found:

• sermon outlines and teaching materials
• master copies of handouts for meetings and classes
• minutes of meetings
• notes on ideas that were discussed but never tried, and some that were tried and didn’t work out
• documents describing ideas that did work out well, some of which led to key turning points in the ministry

The teaching notes are worth keeping, but the meeting notes are on their way to recycle.  As I went through the files I reflected on the hundreds of hours that I have spent in meetings.  Topics that seemed vitally important at the time look pretty minor in hindsight.  I wonder if we really needed that much time spent in meetings.

The encouraging moments came when I saw the name of a person who had been a participant in a meeting or attended a class and reflected on what that person is doing now.  Obviously I cannot keep track of everyone who have been part of CFC over the past 17 years, but there are plenty who have grown deep in their faith and who are serving effectively somewhere.  In the final analysis, ministry is not about strategy, plans or policy.  Ministry is about people and their growth in Christ (Phil. 1:6-11; Col. 1:9-10).  Sometimes we lose sight of that.

Where do you turn for good material for small group Bible studies?  I confess that I have often been frustrated when looking for good Bible study material.  Many studies are organized by topic and often take verses out of context, with the result that the main point is something that the study writer wants to say rather than letting Scripture speak for itself.  There are some that are inductive studies centered on one main passage, but sometimes they have poorly thought out questions or lack important background information.  Few studies are written by anyone with a knowledge of biblical Hebrew and Greek.

What do I look for in a good Bible study guide?  Here are some things that come to mind.

• Focus on one main passage so that it can be studied in context
• Questions that cause group members to dig into the text to look for answers rather than merely sharing their own opinion or experience
• Questions that go beyond “what” to uncover the “why” and “how”
• Include any background information essential to understanding the passage without becoming overly academic
• Uncovers the main point of the passage and makes that the focus of the study
• A focus on life application that is based on correct interpretation of the passage

I admit to being picky, but I think that it is important to learn how to “rightly handle the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).  My solution has been to  set up a small team of people who love the Word to help me write the Bible study material for our small groups.  Usually each person writes one or two studies each term and sends a draft to the writing team.  We give each other feedback and make improvements.  Then we gather all the small group Bible study leaders for a monthly pre-study in which we run through the studies for that month.  After seeing how the pre-study goes, the writer can make further improvements.  Then we send out the final versions to all the study leaders.  It’s quite a bit of work, but it allows us to come up with some pretty good studies.

I want to share some thoughts about collaboration between churches in creating Bible study materials, but blog posts are supposed to be short so I will save that for next time.  In the meantime, what are your thoughts about looking for good Bible study material?