In very few of the books that I studied in serving the literature on training small group leaders did I find a systems view of the church. That is an awareness that the small group is one part of a much larger whole. But if you're going to be a leader of a small group, or a Sunday school class, or a cell, or a task team in your church, it's very important that you have a view of the larger church and that you don't begin to imagine that your little cell is the whole, but rather that it is a representation of the whole. No place does this come clearer than when we come into the worship services of a congregation. 

Now there was a time when we didn't relate the cell groups, Sunday school classes, ministry teams of a church to the worship service. We would talk about the service of divine worship or the celebration of worship, whichever phrase strikes your denominational leaders as the appropriate way to express coming together before God. But we have this joint meeting of all of the Christians to honor God and his work. And then, we have parish life and that's everything else. 

But sometimes we don't directly make the connections between the service of divine worship and the parish life. We treat them as though they're two separate entities. 

Now in considering your group and its role in the larger church life, one very important picture to have in your mind is this - that the church at worship, in its corporate worship, is a powerful experience for the people in your group to keep them from becoming hopelessly provincial. You see, they can become so consumed with the small group and its activity that they're not aware of the larger work of God in the world. They're not aware of the history of the Christian faith. They can get their care and support needs met in a small group, but they can't have their vision expanded easily to the whole world if we don't take them away from our group and to meet with other Christians.

Now, this is where you have a privilege as a small group leader of bringing the whole resources of the church worldwide to the help and attention of your people as you focus on the worship experience of your own local church.

Now let's talk about the opportunities that you have. As you take your group, you've met with them and you have a chance to get them excited about doing things beyond the hour that you're with them or the two hours that you're with them in your group. Where does it fit into the overall plan of things over at the church? Now what I would like to do is I would like to do a schematic diagram of a worship service and show you where groups fit in and where your group could fit into the corporate worship of your particular congregation. Let's a use a large area here, and let's call this the worship space such as it is in your denomination. And what we generally know about worship spaces is that there are places for people who will watch and there are places for people who will lead. 

And generally, as we're on our way to that worship space, we encounter a number of functionaries - individuals who have specifically assigned posts and they will make contributions to our well-being in the service. It may be that there are some people out in the parking lot, and these people are guarding our cars so that they are not burglarized while we're in service. Our minds are relieved. And it may be that there's a whole cadre of people set up over here to provide the simultaneous Christian education for our children for any portion of the major service. They may not actually be physically present with us, because, in some church communions, there's a tradition that says that at a certain point, it's acceptable to dismiss the children into some other Christian education activity. And so, there will be a whole array of people who will do that.

And then, there will be people that we've encountered on our way in who handed us bulletins. They seem very much like palace guards, but actually, they're there to welcome us into the place. There may be registration desks, and there may be people who are providing coffee and refreshments in various places, and manning book tables or "womanning" book tables as the trend has become. And so, they're staffing these book tables, making materials available for serious students. And there may be missions education displays showing the larger work of the Christian community throughout the world. But the people that you pass from parking to coming in, and then, when you're in, the ushers, then, they wait upon you. These people all have their role to play.

If you have a medical emergency, if there's disruption in the service, suddenly you begin to realize that these people play the same role in your church services that white blood cells do in your body. When an infection occurs, they mass around it. Well, when someone has a heart attack, several people show up quickly. They seem to know what they're doing and the person is helped medically. 

So you have this entire support contingency. And perhaps to the casual observer, it doesn't have team consequences. But to you, as a small group leader, you may know that there's an opportunity for your small group to engage in a group-wide service by coming down and taking one or more of these posts. We'll deal with that in a later part of our series. 

But as we look at it, we know there's this elaborate support structure. And we also know that the platform itself has any number of individuals or groups on the platform. So you'll have a speaker, and you'll have people who know how to lead the music, and you'll have choirs that are being filled with people, and you have musicians, and you have technicians that are watchful with the equipment and so forth. And so, you're watching that the production of this service of worship involves a lot of specialized activity and an enormous amount of volunteer help. 

Well, those places of volunteer help are opportunities for people to engage in a church in a non-teaching way. See, only a fraction of people have gifts of teaching. But there are many people who would like to contribute to the overall help, and strength, and well-being of the church. If they're given an opportunity to serve in some other fashion, whether it be food service, or grounds keeping, or directing traffic, or whatever, they would be glad to do that to help in the overall scheme of things. 

But we haven't dealt yet with the attendance issue. How about the attendance of the service of divine worship? Who's looking out for that? It used to be, as you know, in the farming families, Mom and Dad - primarily Mom. She dressed the kids, and got them ready, and saw to it that the consciences of the family were in tune to reserve Sunday as a time to go. But that's not so much the case anymore. Yes, Mom is still important to that, but what's happening increasingly is if you as a small group leader don't focus on helping your people get the appropriate worship, they won't value it. They won't know it's something to do. They won't realize the benefits from it. And indeed, on a first visit to a service of divine worship, there are many people who don't have an appreciation for it. They don't fully understand what's really going on there. And as a result, they need to be encouraged and trained so they can enter into a service as participants. 

Because you see, when you're sitting here as a spectator, it's not always apparent to you that you're to be actively engaged in that service of divine worship. Now when you were a kid and you were sitting next to your mom or dad and they would poke you when you were out of line, you thought, "Well, I'm supposed to give attention. Surely, that's to give attention." And if you're a man that's active and you have a spouse who is willing to help you be socially appropriate, you get an elbow once in a while when you nod off. You didn't get enough caffeine before you sat in the service. 

But just giving attention is not what it's about. Because there's actually a far more active form of participation available here. The singing of the hymns, the following of the scriptures, and taking notes during the sermon, a whole variety of things, participating in the prayers. It can be a very active experience to people who have a will to make it an active experience. But generally, it requires some preparation of heart and mind before the service in order for the service to do the most for you.

You see, services of divine worship have been conducted according to liturgies and according to orders and forms of service that have evolved over two millennia. Now you can say, "Oh, I don't go to one of those churches." Well actually, when we study churches, every church has a liturgy. Some have a liturgy that's so informal it's not to be apparent. But there's always an expected scenario of event that's going to come to pass. And in order for you to bring your people from your small group to one of these services of worship, you have to, first of all, know which service of worship you're going to regularly attend so they can predict your attendance. And here is where churches are discovering they have enormous power to their lay leaders to use their facilities in a more effective stewardship of their wealth.

You see, if you had a 100-seat auditorium and you could use it 10 times, you wouldn't need a 1,000-seat auditorium. If you had a 1,000-seat auditorium and you could use it 10 times, you wouldn't need a 10,000-seat auditorium. You could make much more use of an auditorium if you had a way of arranging participation in the service. 

Now we already know how to produce services. We know if we're going to have a service at 7:00 Saturday night as an addition to our Sunday services, we know we have to get an usher team to agree to come and to usher for that service. We know that we have to have Christian education people that are willing to come and attend that service. We know we have to have some choir people. The guess factor in all of our churches has been, "Can we get anyone to come and watch the service we're going to conduct?" 

The reason for that is that have lost the essential fundamental definition of what a leader is except at the level of the task. You see, the task of all these different people, whether it's in the choir, or playing the instruments, or in the band, or preaching, or ushering, or whatever, those tasks are clear. And so we could say, "Please organize a group, an usher team, a task team, a communion service team, or whatever around this particular service time." 

And we don't seem to have any problems because the people who lead those teams say, "I'm looking for ushers for the 7:00 Saturday night service, and that means I need you there from 6:15 to 9:30. And will you help me? I'm going to have two shifts, and we're going to alternate weekends so you would be in shift A or B, depending on what your schedule can handle." And the recruiter goes around, lines up those people. Pretty soon, you have all the ushers ready to show. There's just no one there for them to usher. 

Now if we take this thing just one step further and say, "But if we had leaders in our church who are leading cells, and groups, and Sunday school classes, and other things, we could get the leaders to contract to be at that worship service, and we would have that attendance at that worship service. Because the leader would then begin to shape even their invitation as to who they invite to their group around the service of worship they're going to take their group to. It's almost like buying a box seat and filling it each week. You make that arrangement. Now at the ballgame, you'll buy a block of tickets and you hand them out and people meet you for that particular time, and they don't say to you, "Well I don't attend ballgames Thursday night at 7:30." 

"Oh, you don't?" 

"No." 

It's his denomination I guess. Usually, when you ask a person to come to sit in a box seat at a ballgame, they say, "Sure. When is it and where is it?"

Throughout our society, specially arranged times for meetings are accepted except in church where people have the notion, "I could worship when it's convenient for me and for my family." That's because they're leaderless. They've been trained as spectators, to be passive demanders on the church system, and they don't understand that there is a million-dollar decision being made when a small group leader says, "I'll go to the Saturday night service, because that makes it possible for the Sunday morning sanctuary to be emptied by that number of people." They don't understand the consequences of not having group leadership. But if you're a leader and you attend a given service, and you invite your people to join you in that service, and every time you invite a newcomer, you begin to prepare that newcomer for worshiping with you at that service. And you arrange things before and after the service with those people so that there's an even larger social impact to the service than just attending for that pick of the time.

Say, "Why don't we come and go to the service at seven and let's go out for something to eat afterward," or "Why don't we meet together for supper and get finished in time to go over to the service at seven." And just an amazing number of creative ways of making things happen so that you can get people to the service that you have made a commitment yourself to be able to take part in regularly. And in some cases, your church staff won't care which one you choose. But as the churches get toward full in certain services, they'll begin to look for people willing to move their groups to worship during a particular hour. And you say, "I don't know whether I can get my group to do that now or not." 

Well, how would you tell? Why don't you start visualizing it with your group, telling them that you're just planning this and thinking about it? They're looking for someone to do this. Then you begin to explore. "I've been exploring it and our schedule would permit us to do that. How would it fit your schedule? How would it fit yours?" Begin to talk to them one on one as a group, and pretty soon you'd see enough of a consensus coming, you could imagine at least a good portion of this group could worship then.

You say, "But two-thirds of them will not change their worship." But there are a third of them that will. Ah, now what are you doing simultaneously to leading people to worship. What's the other thing you're doing all the time, all the time, all the time? Leadership development. Right?

You're developing an apprentice, you're developing an assistant, you're looking forward to the time when you're going to find a new apprentice to go with you. You've made a decision you're going to help out at that new service. Or you want to if at all possible. So when you choose your apprentice, who do you choose your apprentice from? Your new apprentice, the one who's going to help you build the next group? Choose someone who's willing to join you in that new service. Okay?

And then, as you're ready to start the new group and turn the old group over to your apprentice, what do you do? You know who in that group are willing to shift, and so you say to them, "Would you be interested in helping me to form the new cell?" And two or three people would go with you. They would help you. Your group would grow a little faster right at the start. It would be like giving birth. The original group would lose just a few more people than they otherwise might. But not enough to hurt it. So the leader that is going to stay with the normal worship is staying there, and you as the leader that's heading for the new worship, you form the new cell around the new worship time. And it's just a matter of time until new seekers find their way to your cell. And then, they find their way to faith in Christ. And then, you introduce them to the advantages and benefits of worship in the Lord's church and what happens?

They come with you to Saturday night service. And then, when they're telling their story about their faith to some other person, they're surprised that other people worship on Sunday morning because they worship on Saturday night. As far as they know, true Christians worship on Saturday night. Because that's what they do. And then they think, "Oh, there are Christians that worship on Sunday morning." Oh, their idea of a Christian church has expanded. 

But for them, it's a perfectly natural thing to go a separate hour. The people that wouldn't come, it's a natural thing for them not to go the second hour. We found that we can't force people. You can only lead people. But we found that if we don't have a mechanism for leading people, then we can't lead people either. And so what's going to happen is, is you become an effective leader, recruiter, inviter to a small group. In just a matter of a few months or a matter of a year or two, you'll have a group following you and in wherever possible, you'll take them to the service hour that fits into the overall strategy that uses the church's resources most effectively. Even if that means 10 services on a weekend.

Now immediately, people begin to say, "Ah, it sounds like you're trying to split our church into little pieces." We've already done that with small group leaders. The real care comes through there. Which service you attend probably is going to be influenced more by the style of music offered during a particular service and how easy it is for your people to appreciate worship with that style of music. 

And please understand this: people are looking for something to change in their lives. They want contact with the Almighty. They want to know God is real. And musicians are that specially gifted group of people that have a way of bringing and routing our emotions and our senses more effectively than almost any other class of people in our congregation. Worship and music have gone together as far back as we have records. 

David, who was the Psalmist of Israel, ordained and ordered for all kinds of choir activity to take place and sponsored it as part of the world [inaudible]. And so music style has been with us. But what we've learned is every age has a slightly different slant on music styles. And that people who have a music that's in tune to the artists of their generation can be exuberant in the presence of that music. And they feel quenched by music from other generations.

In every age, and in every decade, and of every generation, and every cohort group, there are a new set of artists that come forward. And it's easier to get people to worship to the music of an artist that sees life as you see it than it is to get them to worship to the music of an artist now long dead, whose music-related very effectively to earlier generations. 

Now there are always classics that come through in every piece. We were playing the radio the other day, this rock piece and yet it was one of the block pieces set to modern rhythms. And the kids were just thriving on it because it was such substantial stuff. So there are classic pieces too.

But the enjoyment of or, let's say, the ability to give one's self to the service has a lot to do with the style of music that's being offered at a particular service. So the question you'll ask yourself is, "The people that I'm able to lead and follow, do they have the ability to appreciate the worship style of that particularly given service?" Because that will make it much easier for them to feel like that they have been to church, they have been with the people of God, they have been in the presence of God if they have that worship. 

Now you prepare your people for whatever the worship experience is going to be. And if you're a small group leader, although you're informed by their current preferences, you know this - any service conducted and led with great energy can be a service that can have a positive effect on the life of your people.

Now the styles can be widely variant. I mean, you can be in services where people's hands are over their shoulders most of the time. They're clapping wildly and loudly. There are other services where people are very, very quiet and very reserved. There are services where people get down on their knees on kneeling benches and get back up. There are services where only written prayers, pre-written prayers are appropriate or seem to be appropriate. 

Across our denominations, there's this huge array of worship styles. And what we've discovered is the people in your cell group can learn to appreciate any well-done service of divine worship. Whether it's the exuberance of the soccer game or whether it's the quiet of the chapel, they can appreciate it. Because there are other values for them to be found there. And you need to be aware of these values. 

You see, as you take your people onto the premises of the church, as they see the mission's activity, as they watch the opportunity for using talent, as they see the service positions that are open, as they look around and see that the Christianity that you're talking about is something that's embraced by dozens or hundreds of other people, it does something for them. It broadens their view of life. But in addition to that, you have an opportunity to take them to meet other people in the Christian world that they wouldn't meet in your small group. So you take them over and you introduce to the staff member who is the staff member of that. You introduce them to the senior minister or to the preaching ministers that are available to them. 

And by making these acquaintances, you can talk up the church, you can talk up these people and you can make these people aware you're not alone in your ministry out there as a small group leader. You have a counselor of the church you can back up, you have a recreation director, you've got a youth department, you've got children's education people. And the more they see of the kind of resources that you have available to you, the more they trust your ministry as a small group leader. 

Not only that but sooner or later, you're going to have somebody in your small group and their problems are going to be outside your scope to handle. They're going to have such big problems that you're not competent to manage them through that crisis. So what are you going to do?

Do you say to them, "Well, we've got to get help someplace?"

No, you say to them, "Remember, so-and-so that we met when we were over at the service?"

"Yes."

"Do you know that person specializes in counseling in that area?" Or, "That person helps us do the referral and find good helpers for these kinds of problems."

"Oh really?"

Now you're not talking about an abstract idea. You're talking about John or Susan - somebody they have already met. 

And they say, "Oh. Well, why don't we schedule an appointment with them and get them to tell us who it is that we should be seeing for further help." 

"Well, sure. Go ahead. Give them a call. I'll be glad to do that."

And what you've done is you've tied your people into this much larger resource space. Not only that but then, when the church has announcements in its bulletin and it talks about the Harvest Crusade, or the Revival Meeting, or the City-Wide Prayer March, or the various things that are going on in the Christian community, you're able to say to your people, "By the way, there's more going on here than just us. And our church staff is going to be going over to the Evangelistic Crusade next week. And they've invited all of us to take part. I'd like to go over at least one of the nights. Which night would work for us? Why don't we go as a group? It would be more fun if we did that. Let's have a box lunch and then go on to the meeting." And you begin to promote the attendance of the city-wide rally in your own group. But it's one of the things that your church is taking part in, so you don't feel like you're being an outlaw and renegade in doing that kind of thing because it's something that has already been approved, if you please, and sanctioned in a proper way by the church staff itself.

So what we're talking about is taking your ministry as one person with 10 people and suddenly, your group begins to see you as a person who is a part of a much larger system that has all kinds of resources available. And the worship experience takes them far beyond where they were. And then, we're into explaining communion to them, explaining baptism rituals of the church, explaining how the formal blessings of the church work, explaining the kinds of things that we do when we're gathered together as a larger group of Christians so we're not developing Adamism. What we're in fact doing is we're developing a sense of participation in a larger haul. 

Now what church staff wouldn't love to have small group ministers who loved and cared for people and stayed in touch with them between meetings and shape them to apply the scriptures during their meetings, and reported that activity on a regular basis, and got help for improving it with the staff, and showed up and filled a place in the auditorium, and was present to help in city-wide activities and efforts. What church staff wouldn't want that kind of a volunteer leader in their church? You just simply won't find it except for a very, very small church where the pastor has been commissioned to do it all and can't let anyone else minister. And those churches generally grow to 40 or 50 people. But beyond those, virtually any size church would be thrilled to have a leader that is at worship with their people. 

Now just one word about the balance of worship times between the cell groups and the main worship services of the church. We've had numerous reports of cell groups that have grown to 17, 25, 30 people. And we have discovered that in those cell groups, they almost always either grow because of worship music or they have to have worship music because they grew. The cause and effect relationship is not clear. 

But here's what we found. If you have a small group, sharing is a dynamic that keeps you together. When you get past a dozen or so people, since there's no time for people to listen to you, you feel like you're wasting your time to come to a group to listen to two or three people share when there are 15 or so of you there. So it makes more sense to formalize the teaching and begin to do more worship music. When you do that, that takes the group from the 15 or 20 it's become to 30 or 35 in some cases. And what you wind up doing is you grow yourself to a house church. 

But here's the problem. In a house church, a layman who's leading it cannot get around to do one-on-one ministry to 35 people without burning out. So it's not a reasonable size unit. It becomes a house church. 

So whenever we've seen the worship time in a cell begin to expand beyond 5 or 10 minutes, then we have learned that what's happening there is this is growing past cell to a house church, and that means the care needs of people are not going to be attended to without possibly burning out some of the leadership.

So that's why we encourage modest amounts of worship in the small group and taking people to the large worship. Because the benefits are numerous. And they include protecting the cell as a listening place for caring for people.


Última modificación: miércoles, 8 de julio de 2020, 12:51