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Too Busy Not To Serve & Missions Vs. Evangelism #ScriptureUnfiltered
66 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez and Pastor Ridley Barron talk about the role of believers as witnesses and the necessity of active participation in the church community. He delved into the challenges and excuses often faced when serving within the church, highlighting concerns such as being 'too busy' and feeling inadequate in gifts. The dialogue explored the importance of prioritizing church service, debunking the myth of being too busy, and stressing the need for intentional spiritual growth. Pastor Barron urged listeners to embrace their responsibilities with the skills endowed by Christ and encouraged personal engagement and the use of gifts for the edification of the church body, drawing inspiration from the book of Acts in a series designed to rekindle commitment and service.
Timestamps:
05:38 No excuse for not using gifts to serve.
09:03 Transitioning into responsible adulthood with prioritization and commitment.
09:47 Busy schedule with soccer practices and meetings.
14:18 Feeling guilty about not serving is confessing.
17:02 Marketing department expands team, learns from book.
20:43 Struggling to catch gospel conversations, praises church efforts.
25:43 Struggling to start churches, but still hopeful.
26:22 Expand missions, grow life groups, engage community.
29:45 Reach out to connections for event invitations.
36:03 Christian mission should reach local and global.
38:01 Somali presence in Kenya needs support.
41:48 Christians historically provide aid, face persecution.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Series on Acts
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to another sermon slice where we recap what pastor Ridley Baron preached about this last Sunday. And this last Sunday you opened up a whole new series. What did you say? 28 weeks series? It's gonna be like almost a year or over a year long. Right now we're looking at probably about 28
Building a Church Community
00:00:19
Speaker
weeks, give or take. 28 weeks. It's gonna be a long series in the book, Book of Acts.
00:00:23
Speaker
And it kind of makes sense. You kind of did a lot of setup about talking about the kind of the basics of faith, Christianity 101. What do we believe in the beginning of the year? We had an incredible Easter service, the biggest church attendance we've ever had. Yeah. And it's growing church. And now we're going back and I was like, ah, smart. We're going back into like, we talked about what we believe. And now we're talking about
00:00:46
Speaker
How do we deal with this together? Because that's
Role of Witnessing in Faith
00:00:50
Speaker
where we're at. We're a church. We're growing. We need to learn how to be the church, not just for our own sakes internally, but externally, which was kind of the main topic we even talked about today, titled Witness, where we talked about, I don't know what to say, I have sermon notes. I usually have a notebook, but today, last week, I forgot it, so I did it on the handout. We talked about Witness. We opened it up in Acts 1, and we talked about
00:01:15
Speaker
the five things to consider as we fulfill our missions as witnesses and every believer is this, every
00:01:22
Speaker
every believer should expect this, this, not that. It was a bunch of really good things. But there are some particular things I'd like to carve out in here. I don't want to repeat the sermon. So there are a few things. And the things that I thought were interesting is that you said that every believer is not only called the witness, which I think is pretty clear, but called the serve. Called the serve. Where does that come from in the Bible? And how do you interpret it?
00:01:50
Speaker
So we know that when the person actually becomes a follower of Jesus Christ, that one of the first things that happens supernaturally is the infiltration of the Holy Spirit into their life to direct them towards righteous living and those kinds of things. But what Paul immediately begins to do is to compare our relationship to the rest of the body of Christ
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
00:02:09
Speaker
as being part of the body.
00:02:10
Speaker
And he makes it very clear as part of that is that there's no such thing as a body part that's not important. Every body part has to play a role in it, even though it may seem like a minor role, even, you know, the foot or the finger or whatever has a role to play. And when a body doesn't have every part of it functioning, then the whole body suffers because the rest of the body either doesn't have things performed for it.
00:02:35
Speaker
or it winds up having to over-serve in order to cover up for the one that's not doing its job. It's like when you like kick your toe on a table in the middle of the night, the rest of your body reacts to try to compensate for what it's gone through. So yeah, that whole image of the body, which is not used once or twice, but multiple times in scripture, even by, you know, Jesus himself when he talked about, you know, the relationship of the church going forward.
Importance of Church Involvement
00:03:00
Speaker
And so our understanding of Scripture as we read it is that when we are given the Holy Spirit, one of the things that the Spirit gives to us is gifts and talents that are meant to be used for the encouragement and the building of the body, and specifically Ephesians chapter 4 verse 11 talks about that.
00:03:18
Speaker
It's one of those things in the word that I find is like one of the arguments for not being part, like it's a good, it gives a good understanding for why you need to be part of a local church. Like you just can't do Christianity by yourself. Right. Even if you can muster it by yourself, you're still called to help other people with their faith. And you're like, yeah, but
00:03:41
Speaker
They're all a bunch of, they're all immature. Be like, yes, yes, exactly. Which is why you need to come and help. And we're missing that from you. If you feel like they're all mature and that you're do it better and that you get hurt all the time from working with people. Yes. Come join the party. It's a painful one sometimes, but it's also wonderful and life-giving one. And there, it has your back when things go, go poorly sometimes, or at least in a healthy church.
Overcoming Excuses for Non-participation
00:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's 47 different times that I have counted in scripture in the New Testament alone where it talks about doing things for one another, encouraging one another, loving one another, praying for one another, serving one another. It's over and over and over again, this emphasis that we were meant to live in community and to do this following of Jesus Christ as a community of believers. Yeah, I find
00:04:31
Speaker
I want to get into this next section. I want to talk about, you mentioned it from the stage, but I'm like, oh, he didn't go into the details. So like podcast material, you said there's a lot of excuses for why people don't come and like start to serve in a church. Now there's multiple ways of serving. There is like unofficial serving because your neighbor needed help and maybe it's a congregation member, maybe not, but you go and help your neighbor next door, you know? And sometimes it can be an official capacity. Like I'm officially doing this podcast thing with Grove Hill.
00:05:00
Speaker
Uh-huh. And there's all kinds of in between. So what are the most common excuses you see for not serving if they're attending regularly? Easily the number one in Western civilization is I'm too busy. You know, I only have a certain number of hours during the week. They're taken up. And this is the snarky pastor in me that comes out. You've got the same 168 hours as everybody else. If you don't have time, it's because you don't choose to make time.
00:05:30
Speaker
It's not a priority for you. We don't have any problem making time for our kids sports. We don't have any problem making time to go see a movie with our family. We don't have any problem making time for vacations every year. So I don't see that as a legitimate excuse ever that you can't find time to do something, even if it's just sit down and be a letter writer to encourage people in your church. There are ways to serve. I think a close second to that is the excuse. I don't have any gifts to use, which
00:06:01
Speaker
I mean, I hate to put it as boldly as this, but when you make a statement like that, it is to say that God is a liar because God says in his word, I have given you gifts to be used for the edification and encouragement of the body. So when you say, I don't have gifts, you're saying, God, you lied about this. Man, the, I'm too busy. I mean, I think we've all been in a point where we were genuinely busier than normal.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yes. Whether it's actually busy. Right. It brings me back to like students at the school I used to work with. Oftentimes they'd tell me they're too busy, especially when we sent them, they went on an 18 month mission trip because they're training to be missionaries. This is a missionary training school and they would say they were too busy. I'm like,
00:06:47
Speaker
Show me your calendar. When you actually like sat down with them and did like the math, you're like, you have more free time right now than you will probably ever have for the rest of your life.
Prioritization and Intentional Living
00:06:59
Speaker
It's ridiculous. I'm like, and sometimes, and I think what the problem they ran into is they had too much free time. If you have too much open space, it actually becomes stifling. Having more responsibility actually helps you prioritize better if you don't have enough to do. That's a weird,
00:07:15
Speaker
weird conundrum you can get into. Well, it's interesting because I don't think there's a word that we don't use enough in our spirituality and it's the word intentionality. Your marriage does not happen by accident. It happens because you are intentional about devoting time to it. Your growth as a believer doesn't happen by accident. It's because you are intentional about practicing. Disciplines are going to help you grow. Your calendar gets out of control because you are not intentional about setting the priorities for your life. That's something we have to keep in mind.
00:07:45
Speaker
There's a fun principle I learned. I think I learned this intuitively early in my life and then got words for it later. I think someone told me it was called the law of the load, which is the sticky phrase now stuck in my mind. And it's like, if you don't have enough to do, you can't get traction in life.
00:08:04
Speaker
Mmm, which which is why it's good for young men to get married Early if they're if they're ready for obviously many aren't ready But if they're ready for it get married early because it adds more responsibility to your life It helps you get traction much like a truck that doesn't have enough weight in the back.
00:08:22
Speaker
Yes. When it's snowy.
Balancing Commitments
00:08:23
Speaker
Yes. But if you throw enough sandbags in the back and stuff, then it's easier to get traction when it's slippery. It's a funny thing, but I didn't do well with school. I didn't do well with a lot of things until I had way more to do. Then all of a sudden, I was much more disciplined with my time because I didn't have a lot of time to be disciplined with.
00:08:33
Speaker
I
00:08:44
Speaker
I have never heard that law. I think it's absolutely 100% true though, Dan, because you see evidence of it all the time. Young men who go through life, get married and start to have kids and suddenly they get serious about their faith. Yeah. It's like, oh, wait a minute. This is real life. The fraternity is over with, college is done. I'm not a kid anymore. I'm an adult who's responsible for not only for me, but now for people who are depending on
00:09:08
Speaker
And so they begin to look seriously at how they're spending their time, their money, how they're setting their goals for life. I had a real interesting conversation just last week with a guy I had talked to about the possibility of serving in a particular area. And I was very proud of him because this, this is a more genuine way to look at your life. He said, I would love to consider that possibility, but it's going to mean me scraping other things off of my plate.
00:09:32
Speaker
And I need to decide which is more important. And I thought, man, I wish I had a hundred people just like you because his commitment was, I think that's worth my considering, but I need to decide if it's a priority for me. That's a great answer.
00:09:47
Speaker
If if you're if your calendar is actually stacked and you're like i'm looking at my calendar It's still pretty open this week. Um, but i'm working for myself and I just schedule meetings with people um, but if you're looking at your calendar and like every evening has blocked is blocked out if you actually sit down and look at it and just write out what your typical week looks like and like every evening right now amy and I's evenings every evening has something because we have Because I have two kids in soccer practice and their practices are all over the place and no as an extra league
00:10:16
Speaker
That adds like i have soccer four nights a week and then wednesday. Wednesday's men's academy men's the men's leadership academy and then saturday is only available one cuz i have home group life group on sunday evenings. So i was trying to get together with regan recently he's like what evening you have all my.
00:10:36
Speaker
after seven on Tuesday. Like I got to be later. Okay. I'm hanging out with him tonight. But I was kind of like, Hey, every night's available. But if we weren't already pretty involved in Grove Hill, I would say like, Hey, we have to talk about our involvement and our kids in sports. And that would be a reasonable thing to cut back on because church is more important than sports.
Reasons for Non-involvement in Church
00:10:55
Speaker
And sports is a good thing. I love sports, lots to learn in sports made it all my life made me who I am character wise. Yeah, in a lot of ways. But there's a
00:11:03
Speaker
There's a point again where you have to look at your calendar and go, okay, what's the biggest priority of my life? By the way, the word party and its original Latin form was a singular word. It was not plural. You can't have priorities. You have a priority. Interesting. Single focus. Yep. I think when people say they're too busy for something, it is a priority problem, but it really
00:11:28
Speaker
It really reveals something about where their heart is with their faith. And I wonder even what's really missing when someone doesn't want to get involved. There's a reason behind that reason. You know what I'm saying? They're not prioritizing it for a reason. And I think it's probably like that second one. I don't even know. And I'm just kind of hypothesizing now. It might be that they have a self-worth issue.
00:11:54
Speaker
or maybe just don't take the church seriously. So you just asked me what were the two biggest excuses. Now I'm going to give you the two real reasons behind it and you just hit on one of them. It is number one, you don't have a real legitimate love for the church of Jesus Christ. You're using the church rather than the church using you. Or the second one, which is most likely in most cases,
00:12:22
Speaker
a real insecurity in our vault with Christ to understand the power of the resurrection that is in us is also that same power that drives your skill as a servant or a teacher or a preacher or, you know, whatever your spiritual gifts are. That's that same power that's at work there. So when, when Christ looks at Dan Sanchez and says, Hey, I'm going to make you a marketer. I'm going to give you certain skills with people and communication and creativity.
00:12:49
Speaker
He doesn't just give it halfway. He gives it all to you and says use this. The limitation is us. Yeah.
00:12:58
Speaker
Another one that I've come to, this is just me in the back of my mind that I have mostly a healthy skepticism, but sometimes an unhealthy skepticism. Yeah. But sometimes I could see it in my mind, which I'm pretty sure this is playing out in other minds, probably more men's minds. But if you're talking from the pulpit and saying, hey, I need more people to serve, there's probably some skeptics in the crowd that are saying like, man, he just wants some free labor. You know what I'm saying?
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's probably true. He just wants more of my money. He just wants more of my time. This is one big old Ponzi scheme. Yeah. And you know something else I recognize, too, that people do the same thing as sitting in the congregation. They'll hear those general announcements, hey, we need somebody. Their first, and this goes back to insecurity, their first response is, oh, he's talking to somebody else that's better at that than me.
00:13:47
Speaker
They automatically make the assumption that the request from the, obviously from God, hopefully leading that conversation is that the request from God is actually meant for somebody over there who can really do that much better than me.
00:13:59
Speaker
So there's the big ones. Either your heart's not really in it and you're just showing up maybe out of habit, maybe out of obligation, maybe your spouse has dragged you there or one of those things. And then we need to deal with that. Or if you're in that group, you're probably not listening to this podcast and
Pastoral Encouragement and Leadership
00:14:17
Speaker
that's okay. So this is a great place to address something else really important here because a lot of times when you talk to people about serving
00:14:23
Speaker
they will respond to you, Pastor, you're just trying to guilt me into doing something. Okay. So here's a, this is a statement of fact. If I didn't eat the cookie, you can't make me feel guilty about eating the cookie. So if you're feeling guilty about not serving, it's because you have a reason to feel guilty about the serving. I can't make you feel guilty if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So if you say to me,
00:14:49
Speaker
Pastor, you're just trying to make me feel guilty, then that's probably a confession, an open confession to your pastor, I've got something to hide. You are really good.
00:15:01
Speaker
at pushing people in your sermons. It's something Amy and I have noticed since we've been at Grove Hill. I'm like, the church is growing. Amy's not throwing secret friendly messages, like ever. He's always like, I don't know what you're all waiting for. You're always like, it's almost like egging them on, be like, come on, let's get up. Kind of like a good sports coach does, kind of like, hey, stop playing with the, like the daisies out in the field, get up, work.
00:15:28
Speaker
And that's probably where it comes from, a long line of really great coaches that I had the pleasure of playing for, and hopefully the kind of coach I was myself. And just this acknowledgement, this recognition, I was that guy at some point. I had to be convinced, you are fully capable of serving the body of Christ. When I first got called into ministry, my first thought was, what in the world is Jesus thinking? Why in the world did he want me to do this?
00:15:52
Speaker
And I believe even now I have not reached the full potential of what Christ created me to be, but the more I gain confidence in who God is, not who I am, but in who God is, the more I find freedom to be exactly what he created me to be. I've heard it said, I think this came from Lisa one week, but it's kind of like, you're not even looking for people that are like particularly skilled. You just need people to show up and show up reliably. Like reliability is everything.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yep. Is what we need. There's many variations of this statement, but God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called. You know, and another way that's been put, and I think probably even better is this. He's not looking for you to be capable. He's looking for you to be available.
00:16:41
Speaker
He can do it. Another thing I learned working for that college, you can tell I've worked, I learned a lot from that experience. Working with students especially is we had a draft because all the students had to work as a work college. They all had to work 15 hours a week and that plus other things is what paid for their tuition. They only paid for room and board. It was cool. I like that.
00:17:02
Speaker
but they all had to work. So we had a draft process. And as the marketing department, I started with one student. I ended up working all the way up to having, I employed like 23, 24 students. So I had a team of students and I had to get better at how to find people. And one thing that I found that were a liable, like I, at first I did what everybody does. You look for the most experienced person with the best resume, blah, blah, blah. And found that that was the least reliable way to find capable help.
00:17:28
Speaker
And what I found, I found through a book, um, called the ideal team player from Patrick Lencioni, Catholic dude, some of my favorite leadership books. And he said the ideal team player, which I think works across every spectrum, every place you could ever work with people, including the church, is you need people that are hungry, as in ready to show up and do work. Humble.
00:17:53
Speaker
and smart as in people smart. And I found that finding those three, it didn't matter what they did before, but if they showed up with those three things, you could pretty much accomplish anything because you could train everything else. And the other three, the greatest is humility. Because if you're humble, you can train the other two, especially the smart one, the people skills. If you're hungry and humble,
00:18:14
Speaker
the last one's cake. You could just learn how to win friends and influence people and you will become people savvy really quickly if we're able to get feedback and actually apply it. That's good stuff. You show up with a volunteer attitude and you're hungry, humble, at least those two, man, you can accomplish a lot for the kingdom. You can accomplish a lot for Grove Hill. You can be put to work and do a lot of different things. Yeah, I tell the staff here all the time, if you can find somebody who's
00:18:40
Speaker
capable of doing it at least 60% as well as you are, turn them loose and let them learn how to do it.
Church Growth and Goals for 2024
00:18:47
Speaker
Because you learn from making mistakes, you learn from tripping over your own feet sometimes, and that's the best training ground there is. But if you never allow people to have that experience and get their hands on it, then you miss an opportunity to train the future generation of leaders and servers. Yeah, it's not like you'd expect perfection when people are jumping into something new. Like I'm running the webcams,
00:19:08
Speaker
Not the webcams, the stream, the streaming cameras. That was the first time I'd like doing it for Grove Hills. The first time I'd ever run a streaming service like that. I mean, I stream sometimes from like my home video studio. So I guess I have a little bit of experience doing it from a single camera. It was the first time I was running a switcher quite like that. Yeah.
00:19:26
Speaker
somebody else who didn't know before it showed me a few things. And now I'm the one showing people how to run the stream if somebody else is running the stream. Yeah, that's cool. So we all learn and grow with each other. And I still make mistakes every week. Now that we have people in the overflow room, I'm like, now people are really going to see those mistakes when I make those streaming mistakes. A lot of pressure, bigger crowd. Yep.
00:19:47
Speaker
So where are we at with the church? You had Vision Sunday when we kicked off the new year in 2024 to update the church on where we were at with a bunch of goals. Where are we at with those right now? So back in 2020, just a couple of years after we started the church, sat down, spent some time praying and looking through this and came up with some goals for our church by the year 2025.
00:20:12
Speaker
The first of those goals was actually gospel conversations. We strongly encourage our people that it's not the staff's job to minister to the world, it's the church's job to minister to the world. And we, as part of the church, join you in that. But our goal is to have 50,000 gospel conversations by the year 2025. So far, in four months into 2024, we are somewhere around 25,000 gospel conversations. So we're about halfway there.
00:20:43
Speaker
And to be completely honest and transparent about that, I don't get all the gospel conversations people don't always tell me about. In fact, most of the time I catch them by accident because somebody tells me about some cool story that happened to them. But I'm pleased that we're halfway there with that one and I'm very, very thankful for people because our church is so good about inviting people to Jesus and having those gospel conversations, praying with people. Our goal is to have two new churches by 2025.
00:21:09
Speaker
We've been very close a couple of times to getting something off the ground. This is slow treading. Could we have already launched a church? Yeah, we could have probably already launched four churches. But if we want them to last, you got to make sure you do it right. And so in every one of those situations, we got to a place where we saw some warning signs and decided it was best to back off and take some time to pray about it. Our goal was 300 members by 2025. We've already passed that goal.
00:21:37
Speaker
Just recently passed 300, just like in the last few weeks, we already have 30 something new members this year alone. God has really, really been drawing people to our congregation. Again, a credit to our people because when people come in our doors, they love on them so well. And that's one of the things we hear lots of comments about.
00:21:57
Speaker
You're talking about active members, right? Cause you're removing people as they find different churches or you remove them. Yeah. And our church is one of those, and this is a really important thing. I think keeps the church healthy. Our church is really intentional about cutting off dead weight. We don't carry names on our role if they aren't here like for a year. Um, we, we removed them because part of our covenant is that you will faithfully attend the church.
00:22:21
Speaker
So if you drop out for six or seven months, we may reach out to you and check on you, see if anything's going on or whatever. But if you have actively pulled yourself out, we remove you from the role. I imagine they know that too. Do what? I imagine you communicate with them that too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh, you're sending birthday cards out. You're probably telling them. I'm like, I get enough mail in my inbox from Grove Hill.
00:22:44
Speaker
for all the birthday stuff, I'm like, I'm sure they're following up with, if they haven't showed up in a while, somebody's noticed and they're mailing. We have, out of those 300 something members, that does not include anybody who's a member of our church under the age of 18. That's just our covenant members. So probably we're closer to 400 actual members of our congregation, if you include those younger ones. Our average attendance goal by the year 2025 was 700. We are currently somewhere around 570 in that.
00:23:13
Speaker
And I firmly believe if we had a building that we would be higher there, there obviously is the limiting factors of Sunday school space, parking space, all those different things. And then our goal for budget financially was that we would have a $1.2 million budget. And this year we are actually operating under a $1.25 million budget. So we actually have exceeded that goal already as well. And financially our church is strong, our people are giving,
00:23:41
Speaker
Here's the ironic thing, okay? You know, the pastor is going to say this. We are actually on goal to meet our $1.25 million budget with only about 60% of our people giving to our church. We could easily give. Is that typical though, for a church? Actually, churches that are at 80 or 90% giving ratio? No, no, I think actually our numbers are probably healthier than most churches these days. Yeah. Um, some surveys out there, and this is not just in, even in Christian churches, but there are surveys out there that,
00:24:11
Speaker
somewhere between three and 4% of people who go to a church or a house of faith or whatever actually support it financially like they should. And is that 60% number based on the total attendance or is it based on covenant members? It's actually based, we call them giving units. So Dan Sanchez, his wife and his kids are considered one giving unit.
00:24:36
Speaker
My wife and I are another giving unit. So if she gives and I give, it's still considered a gift from the singular giving unit. So is it still based on covenant or non-covenant? No, that's actually based on, well, you know, that may be on covenant members. It may be covenant members. I think it is. I don't see those numbers. So when I, when I want those statistics, I call our treasurer and say, Hey, can you give me the latest numbers? That'd be an interesting difference.
00:25:04
Speaker
It would just be interesting to like what percentage of covenant units, which how many covenant units are there? That's another question because we'd have to refit calculate the number because covenant members are including like Amy and I, but then we'd only count as one as a unit. Right. So I'm a business guy. So I like to figure out how to slice and dice the numbers to make sense of them. Yeah.
00:25:24
Speaker
So conservatively, if you look at those numbers of what we're doing versus what we're capable of, we could easily be approaching a $2 million budget every year if our people just obeyed the commandment to tithe.
Challenges and Growth in Church Programs
00:25:35
Speaker
Where are we falling short on our goals? Planting churches is probably one of them. Planting churches, personally for me, just my vision for the church,
00:25:47
Speaker
has probably been the biggest... I hate to use the word disappointment because God's been so good to us and our people are so good. So I hate to use that word because I'm not really disappointed, but I really hoped by now we would have at least one congregation started. And that's not just new congregations. We have reached out to numerous churches that are struggling and dying to see if we could help with the revitalization process and there's been resistance there. So it's kind of out of our hands to some degree when that happens.
00:26:14
Speaker
But I still believe that all my heart is probably going to happen. Probably in Lewisburg to the south of us here, there's a really, really good opportunity for something to start in the next year. Got lots of families that already drive up from that area. So it would be a natural thing to get them replanted down there. An area that I didn't mention on here because we really don't have a goal set for it is having a more consistent missions program as far as mission trips, mission involvement for our people.
00:26:39
Speaker
I'm very thankful to our missions team that's just really getting restarted this year. We've got two mission trips scheduled this year and two more for next year. So that's an area where I see us starting to grow a little bit more, but I wish we could be a little further along than we are. I'm really, really pleased with our life group programs, which is a big part of our discipleship.
00:27:03
Speaker
Really thankful for that. I would love to see it grow a little bit faster because we've got people coming in at record numbers, so we need to turn around and get them plugged in into these groups quickly. So as you know, as part of that Leadership Academy, it's one of the areas where I've been challenging our guys to step up, start some new groups for our congregation because we desperately need those. So those are kind of three different areas around needing more life group leadership, needing probably more consistency in missions program, even though we have some picking up now.
00:27:32
Speaker
And then church planning, some major areas. Yep. So basically I would put those in three categories, multiplication, missions, and discipleship. Yep.
00:27:44
Speaker
If you're listening to this, it could be you. You could be one of those people. Do you have, are there, I always wonder like when you make big calls from the pulpit saying like, Hey, we need more people to serve here. Do you ever have names in mind? We were like, man, so-and-so would be good at this. Oh yeah. But they're not, I don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Do you go and ask them personally? Yeah. And here's the thing. And again, an area where I've tried to teach our staff is they, most of them are new to ministry leadership like this.
00:28:13
Speaker
The specific individual personal invite is usually way more effective than the general announcement from the pulpit. And so that's usually what I try to do. I will get up and make announcements like that and say, hey, we have opportunities here and here and here. And sometimes it's hard to not make those announcements without staring somebody down and going, you're the person I'm talking to. But usually what I try to do is come off the stage and either that day after the service or later in the week on a Wednesday night or whatever to kind of pull them aside and say, hey,
00:28:42
Speaker
I've been watching you and you really have some strong gifts in this area. I think you could be a good fit for that. Yep. And if you're listening to this and no one's actually personally introduced, like asked for you to do things, it doesn't mean you can't do things. Right. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who recommended doing this podcast. Yes, you are. You are. I came to Matt when he was here. I was like, hey, man, wouldn't it be cool if we did a podcast after the sermon, dicing up the sermon?
00:29:07
Speaker
And here's a great example of the Holy Spirit at work, Dan, because I think the Spirit nudged you at the right time because our staff had actually been talking behind closed doors about here's an area where we could really do some good stuff. None of us has a clue about how to do it. So we just kind of put it on the shelf. Well, it took Dan to come along and take it off of the shelf for us and put it into play. So if you're sitting there at home and you're going, hey,
00:29:31
Speaker
And I'm just going to use a bizarre example. Don't wait for the invitation. I really feel like that's calling me to bait. And they will be, but way more. I feel like that's calling me to bait bread for a ministry. Well, then come talk to us about it because it may be. That's exactly what we're looking for.
00:29:45
Speaker
you never know. So I need to be making some more invitations, but I'd love to see, I mean, I even probably need to be thinking about who I know, who, and I need to ask them like, hey, what are you doing right now? What are you doing right now? Because we could all, even if you're plugged in in some critical way sometime or you're serving in security or something, yeah, but are your friends like you need to invite them to come help you or, because you know what they're good at, you know what their gifts at.
00:30:12
Speaker
You could just give them gentle nudges like, hey, I think Grove Hill needs help in that area. Have you checked with so-and-so about that? Because they could probably use you. You're really good at X. Dan, that's a great conversation you just had right there. And I'm glad you brought it up. Because as this church has grown, I'm one man. And there are over now, at this point, over 800 people involved in our church on any given time.
00:30:37
Speaker
I can't possibly know all of them or know what their skill levels are. And we really don't have anything in place that gives us the ability to do that. So my best recruitment is to look at a member of our church who knows their friend or knows their neighbor and say, can you help us get them engaged so that they can use their gifts and the body can be built up.
Understanding Missions vs. Evangelism
00:31:00
Speaker
It's a segue from there. There's one conversation that I wanted to have with you. And it actually comes into multiple of the topics we've been talking about. And that is this conversation of missions versus evangelism. Like, have a really specific take on the difference between the two. And there's scholars that actually debate these two.
00:31:18
Speaker
out in Christianity. And I want to know, what's your take? Because I kind of see them being used interchangeably at Grove Hill, and I wanted to see what's the church's official stance on these terms.
00:31:33
Speaker
I'm going to be honest and tell you that I am probably guilty of using those words interchangeably when I don't think they necessarily always mean the same thing. For me, evangelism is a more specific act. It is the act of introducing someone to Jesus Christ so that they may have a
00:31:50
Speaker
a salvation experience, come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ and have a relationship with Him. It's the actual engaging them with the gospel. Missions to me is kind of the larger umbrella. It might include evangelism, but it might just include ministry to, encouragement of, resourcing somebody. So it's a much bigger, broader umbrella that causes us
00:32:14
Speaker
But the idea of missions is that we are going out as ambassadors for the kingdom of Christ to people, for whatever that goal might be. That's interesting. So you take missions and that makes sense to see it as an overall umbrella that a lot of these things fit under. Where do you put, because where I define missions and evangelism is a little different. I put evangelism as the work being done to spread the gospel in your context.
00:32:41
Speaker
And missions as being specifically cross-cultural, all the work and activities, because it's not just, to me, it's not just gospel conversations, though that's the tip of the spear. It's all the work being done to do evangelism cross-culturally, which is much harder than doing it in your context. Yeah. And I think the reason I say missions is a broader umbrella is because
00:33:04
Speaker
To me, evangelism is more about that specific conversation about what is your relationship with Jesus, but missions might be cleaning somebody's teeth to get you to that evangelism conversation. It might be helping farmers learn how to plant crops in arid areas of the world that don't get a lot of rain, so they can, you know, that kind of stuff. Why? So we can have that evangelism conversation. But it's also got the second focus of we want to bless people who need to be blessed.
00:33:32
Speaker
So if you can help somebody by cleaning their teeth, but you never get to the gospel conversation, that's okay. We've done what Christ would want you to do.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yep. You're building, building bridges. Yes. Um, where it's hard. So I consider working in a missions organization a number of years. We always talked about unreached people groups. And we talk about that a lot at, uh, in our Grove Hills, uh, before Sunday sermons, we are covering unreached people group every single month. Um, but I find all of that is like, to me, that's missions is when you're talking about reaching the unreached, which is ridiculously hard to do because all the easy ones have been reached.
00:34:09
Speaker
all the hard ones are the ones left. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm, you know, I'm very cautious to say, I believe when my definition of missions, mission starts the minute you step outside your door, but it literally goes to the ends of the earth. And most of us have a tendency to lean towards the ends of the earth kind of thought, but we forget like last, what's today? Today is Tuesday. Yeah. Last night here in our community, we have a food ministry that comes here to town every month and gives away food to families that are under resourced. We normally have anywhere from
00:34:40
Speaker
a dozen to maybe three dozen of our people who serve in that. Our church is doing missions. And I think that's a fantastic opportunity to hopefully lead to some of those gospel conversations. So what term do you use for cross-cultural evangelism? Missions. You catch all from me. I have to be honest about that. I like to differentiate between the two because I find that one can be
00:35:06
Speaker
I find it's so hard to get overseas to do that kind of work That there and there are and I've seen this happen to friends they were called to go overseas to India or someplace like that and The amount of pullback on it is incredible. Yeah in It comes out and comes out in a little from Christians from Christians specifically, which is really interesting I'm like the amount of people being like ma'am but we have a lot of
00:35:33
Speaker
You have missions in your own neighborhood. Why do you need to go to India? It's really interesting that people say that. I'm like, do you understand, even in my neighborhood, how many Christians there are for every unchristian? The ratio is ridiculous compared to India, where there are people who will grow up, live, and die. They will never walk next to a church. They will never even hear the name Jesus. They will never meet a Christian, ever. Right, exactly.
00:36:02
Speaker
That's a lot of people in the world. This was one of the major, I hope was caught by everybody, one of the major emphases on Sunday is this, that the commission that Christ gave us was a both and. You're supposed to be reaching across the street to your neighbor, but you should be participating and reaching the ends of the earth.
00:36:18
Speaker
If it's nothing more than making a commitment to support international missions efforts or whatever, that's great. But if you can physically get on a plane, get on a boat, go by train to get to somewhere else and be a minister, then that's an obligation that all Christians have.
00:36:34
Speaker
Have you ever done like a perspectives and missions course or heard of that before? It's where it was written by the guy who kind of coined the term, unreached people groups, or it comes out of that studying a lot of people in the space kind of contributed
Supporting Missions Locally and Globally
00:36:47
Speaker
articles. It became a really robust book that became kind of like the cornerstone of what modern missions movements are.
00:36:57
Speaker
One of the things they talk about is that every believer needs to find a part in missions somehow. When I say missions, I'm using it in my definition of specifically reaching unreached people groups, not even going and reaching people in- Western Europe.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, Western Africa or Eastern Africa like unless it's like reaching Somalis in northern Kenya probably not Somalia because they'll kill you there Maybe maybe I have some friends they get they get close But not like in Nairobi where everybody is generally a Christian in Nairobi well
00:37:37
Speaker
And if you don't like, of course, as many people can go great and then more, way more people need to go than not. Right. We don't have nearly enough Christian or boots on the ground. They say overseas actually working and doing the work, even if it's just enabling Kenyans to go reach Somalis, which those two countries are right next to each other. If you haven't spent a lot of time looking at African geography, one's very reached and one's very unreached, extremely unreached, but there's a lot of Somalis in Kenya.
00:38:05
Speaker
But then, if you're not a goer, they call it, then you can be a sender, someone who financially supports a lot of it, some in small ways, some in significant ways. You can be a mobilizer, someone who's mobilizing and helping the effort in going, usually in training or recruiting or marketing. That's where I've usually fit in my thing or enabling. There's a lot of government issues with it, and some people can help with that. And then, of course, interceding is the catch-all. You can't do any of those. You can at least pray.
00:38:34
Speaker
You can always pray maybe even releasing like releasing your kids to let them go Yeah, like that'd be sweet as some of my kids went overseas as much as that would be really really really hard Someone that's that's why it's called releasing right as parents who want to hang on to them But the truth is the safest place for them to be is in the middle of god's will. Yep. Yep Working for a college that specialize that I got to talk to lots of parents that wrestled with that you know, the interesting thing is I
00:39:02
Speaker
And I don't mean this to sound as final as it sounds, but I believe as you watch the world, some of our opportunities to reach the lost are coming to the doors closing on it. Because as the world has gotten smaller and we've had the opportunity for these last, you know, a hundred years to go to places we've never been with the gospel, like behind the iron curtain when it failed, that kind of stuff. I believe these countries are starting to close off. They're becoming more authoritarian. They're starting to shut down the gospel.
Challenges of Missions in India
00:39:31
Speaker
And so if we don't go now, that may be that literally millions of people do not get the opportunity to hear the name of Jesus because the door has been shut on us.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of always revolving, right? Like some are, some are becoming more open, some are closing, but I'd say it's, if you look at all the unreached people groups, it's getting harder specifically because India is just getting harder and so many of them are in India. If you looked at a, if you, there's maps out, if you go to like Joshua project, you can find like world maps with a red dot for every unreached people group. If you zoom in, like it's, India is almost completely
00:40:09
Speaker
Yes, and there's a lot of Christians in India like a lot There's just so many people groups there unique groups of people Christian group might live next to an unreached people group But because they don't interact kind of like we have unreached people groups here in Nashville I promise you probably haven't even crossed cross paths with many of them You probably don't even know they're there because you're culturally you never visit the same places ever right
00:40:36
Speaker
Well, and I, I just recently had a conversation and got to be blessed with a conversation with a guy who's doing a lot of great work for the church of Jesus Christ in India right now. And he believes in the next five years, their constitution will be rewritten to remove Christianity as an option period. Yeah. They're getting, they're getting intense. Like they kicked out all a compassion international a few years ago. And that was a big deal. You were like, whoa, you're talking about an organization that's or like taking care of thousands and thousands of kids. They're just like, Nope, leave.
Christianity's Role in Society
00:41:05
Speaker
and i'm even reading articles on a weekly basis of christian churches being burned and pastor being put in prison or put to death so i mean it's gotten real severe over there and we need to be praying for our brothers and sisters that are christians in that country that's intense but yeah it is i feel like christianity like people are becoming more and more hostile towards christians all over the place even though statistically like if you just look at all the work that christians do it accounts for like nearly all of like
00:41:33
Speaker
the good work that people wanted to see happen. Most of the nonprofit work people think are being done by nonprofits are being done by Christian nonprofits. As far as just taking care of people who have needs and helping them, helping the sick and the blind and the poor. Historically, that's always been the case. It's always been the case in humanity. That's why it's so funny to me that Christianity gets the brunt of all the persecution out there because
00:41:59
Speaker
The Black Plague, it was Christians that were ministering to people who were dying. During the greatest droughts of humanity, it was Christians that were delivering food. Greatest tragedies in the environment, Christians are there serving. And even to this day, disaster relief teams from the United States are going to other places to minister to people.
00:42:17
Speaker
Haiti after the earthquake, Israel after the earthquake, Mexico City after the earthquake, Thailand after the floods. I mean, they're all over the place doing the work of the kingdom. The biggest schools in America, universities in America were started to train ministers of the gospel and now they've turned into basically liberal holding places. So it's mind boggling how the enemy blinds the world from seeing the goodness of God.
00:42:46
Speaker
kind of coming full circle, we're called to witness and we're also kind of called to suffer. This is part of what being a Christian is all about, is going to help others even to our own detriment. Right.
00:43:02
Speaker
We got to do it locally. You do it here in our state, our country, and of course internationally. So if you're listening to this and you're like moved for one of those places, we need help. We need help with local home groups here locally. We need help with, what was the other one? There was becoming more consistent and then planning churches. There's like three different major pieces.
00:43:30
Speaker
So let's let us talk to you or find somebody, what it might look like. And even with the understanding that our church wants to support and finance people to go and be part of this. This is why we exist. If we never get a building built out here behind this office, that's okay. As long as we're doing the gospel. So let's serve, let's get connected, reach out to pastor, reach out to me or reach out to anybody at Groville and they'll connect you to the right places. Absolutely.