Helping Our Churches Become Communities of Change
A few years ago Steve Midgley gave a talk at the CCEF National Conference giving a handful of practical steps we can take as leaders to develop a community that reflects gospel change. I’ll give a few highlights below, things that stood out to me personally, but if you’d like to listen to the talk in its entirety you can click here to purchase it from CCEF.
Begin with your own humility: “Here is where you begin in the business of side by side ministry. You begin with yourself, with humility. We begin with our neediness, we are only ever sinners before a holy God in need of his forgiveness. Begin with humility. Before we open our mouths to presume to speak with others. Before we counsel or preach, begin with humility. Before we seek to be the agent of change in the life of another, begin with humility. Be deeply persuaded of your need for grace because change begins with us, with a heart that knows its need for Christ.”
Incorporating the Body: Ephesians 4 – “In our churches we’re tempted to slice out the crucial element of personal one-anothering ministry.” Our goal is to equip the saints to do the work of ministry, enabling them to fulfill the role they’ve been gifted to play.
- How ready are you to take risks in your church community? We will never discover the hidden talent in our communities if we always go to the same people.
- How does it go when things go wrong? How do you handle mistakes? It’s tempting to try and camouflage them but it’s much more fruitful if we highlight our failings. “If we are embarrassed by our errors we’re communicating that this is a place for perfect people, where we won’t count on anything but excellence.” Highlighting our mistakes communicates grace. “We seek to be a church that is a hospital for sinners rather than a museum for saints”
- How does your church respond to new ideas? What happens when someone wants to try something completely new?
- When choosing people to pray up front who do you pick? Do you pick only the eloquent or do you pick people who struggle a bit with their words?
- Who do you pick to give testimonies? Allow people in the middle of their process to speak about that process, about the wrestling. Don’t fall into the temptation to only present stories that are on the far side of change.
- How much do you talk about your constant need for change and growth? A church that isn’t changing is one of two things: 1) It has reached a state of sinless perfection. Or 2) It is a church that has forgotten that God intends it to keep growing into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
Speaking the Truth in Love. We do this as we walk together. This isn’t an excuse to get something off my chest or elevating myself above you to drop truth upon you. This is speaking to one another as one sinner to another. “Failing to speak the truth in love means we will not grow. We will stay immature.”
Ideas from his own church to make people feel more equipped to speak the truth in love:
- To speak the towards change in others people needed to experience change themselves. They began running “How People Change” courses.
- Becoming comfortable talking about the way God is at work in us so we can see the way he is at work in another person. They changed the way they did prayer meetings. They carved out time for people to share what God was doing in their lives.
- Emphasize community. They changed the way they did coffee on a Sunday. By putting the invitation for coffee in bold underneath the songs and bible readings in the bulletin they began to communicate that chatting after the service was an informal time of worship that followed the formal worship we just completed. Because every Sunday there are people to rejoice with and people to mourn with and it will be to God’s glory as we do both.
- Acknowledge the difficulty. They named their weaknesses as a culture and continue to push into them together.