Video Transcript: Levels of Commitment

Welcome back. We're going to continue in our study developing great  commission skills. We're going to be moving today into a new skill topic, and  that topic is levels of commitment. Now one thing that I want to clarify is we're  not talking about simply vision casting, in the sense of casting vision into an  existing congregation and attempting to move them toward ownership. We're  we're moving back quite a ways, all the way into the community with potential  newcomers. We're thinking about levels of commitment, starting with people that are well outside of our orbit as a church, and moving them one step at a time all  the way to the point that they are beginning to really invest in the church, and  their ownership of vision is increasing, but again, we're moving way, way back to get a running start at this. So when it comes to levels of commitment. Here's  what we're talking about, moving people toward vision ownership, from less  committed to more committed to completely committed. Now that can be a  journey of a long, long time, but that's what's in view. We want to think in terms  of the big picture of the Great Commission go and make disciples. Well, if we're  going to go and make disciples, we have to ask the question of whom, well, of  people in the community, the lost, the Son of Man came to seek and save the  lost. And so we're starting with the Lost in view, and we want to see them  become found and then become engaged and more and more involved. So  that's the scope of what we are looking at today. Now the key to this is having a  strategic plan. We have to have a plan for guiding that movement from low level  commitment to very high level commitment, and word to the wise, we want to  help people make that move from low to high commitment as quickly as  possible. Now, one of the reasons that we want to focus on rapid movement is a couple of realities. One is, of course, the sooner people are engaged, the better  for their sake, as well as for the sake of the church. Sooner is better. But also,  you know, we live in a time when the population is constantly shifting. I know  that ministries that I've been involved with in the past in a couple of major US  cities, we had folks that would come in and leave the church, not just leaving the church to leave us behind, but you know, their career path would bring them into the area, and then three years later take them out of the area. So we want to  engage them at deeper levels, levels quicker, so that they can experience real  growth, and so that if they do end up leaving us and moving on to some other  place, they're they're going much better equipped in terms of great commission  ministry than when they first arrived. So the key is having a strategic plan for  moving from low to high level involvement. And the problem is not having a plan. If we don't have a plan for moving people through levels of commitment, it  becomes very random and essentially doesn't exist at all. So what I'd like to do  is spend some time walking through this progression of levels of commitment,  from low commitment to high commitment, and this is going to be reflective of a  church's Great Commission vision, if we truly have a vision of not just going and  making converts, but going and making disciples who are growing in their faith, 

who are learning to live in obedience to the commands of Christ, that's very  important that we we guide them through these levels of progression. One  analogy that just popped into my mind. It would be, for instance, if you have a  school program of K through 12, well, we don't want people to get to the second  grade level and just stay there. So year after year after year, they're still second  graders. We we need them to move through the progression. And so that's what  we're going to that's what we're going to do with this approach. So let me get  started with that. The first level, the first level that I want to look at. I'm calling  this observing the observing level. This is where the journey begins. Now,  observance has to do with a person out in the community becoming aware that  our church exists. They know we're there. They understand that that we're there  now that, of course, is a very, very, very low level of commitment. Just being  aware. Let me give you an example. A number of weeks ago, I had occasion to  be working with the church in another city, and there are some circumstances  developing that might call for me to spend quite a bit of time in that city. And so  one of the things that I would want to do in working with a particular church in  that city is connect with people out in the community so that I could get to know  them, and hopefully, by the grace of God, bring them to that church. And so I  decided that, well, one place would be a fitness center, so let me, let me see if  there's a fitness center nearby, and there was. So I went by to visit that fitness  center, and a person, a young person there, guided me through a little tour of  the facility, and I said to her, I might be coming to this area, and I would be  working with such and such a church down the street there. I said, you know  that church? Are you familiar with, with that church? And her response was, oh,  yeah, I think that's that big church down at the corner of this street and that  street. Okay, that would be an observing level. She knows that the church is  there. She has a sense that it exists. She knows what it looks like. She knows  where it's located. Now, obviously this is a very, very low level of commitment,  but at least the church is on her radar screen. And had it not been on her radar  screen, I was placing it on her radar screen, so the lowest level of commitment  would be observing. Now move to the next level, considering this is the point  when an observer begins to consider actually paying a visit to the church.  Wonder what that church is like. I wonder who those people are. I wonder what  goes on in there. There's a little bit of interest, a little bit perhaps, of curiosity  beginning to brew. I'm thinking about the possibility of maybe going to that  church sometime and checking it out. Still a very, very low level of commitment,  but higher than simply observing. So we move from observing to considering.  Now the next level is the visiting level. You know that that idea of consideration  has blossomed into actually checking it out, showing up one Sunday as a visitor, moving into the church, attending, most likely a service. You know these days,  as it has been for years and years and years, the most frequented front door of  the church is the Sunday worship service. Now there are other points of entry 

that we need to develop as a great commission church, but very often that's the  starting point. Folks will will attend a church service. Maybe they'll attend  something else that the church is providing. Maybe there's some kind of event or seminar, maybe it's a Wednesday night, something or other. But somehow a  person is moving to that that point of actually setting foot on the property of  stepping into the life of that church as a visitor and checking it out. Now visiting,  of course, is a much deeper dive than just considering so we might, we might  think of that as a big step, observing low level considering low level visiting, big  step forward. Now next in line comes the attending level. Now this is what I'm  referring to, in regard to folks who are visiting regularly, such that their  attendance has become routine. They're there as often as they're not. You know, I know times have changed in the American church, where if someone comes  two or three times a month that's considered regular attendance. And so what's  happened at the attending level is that our occasional visitor has become a  regular attender, a repeat visitor, to the point that I'm really not thinking of this  person as a visitor anymore. I'm thinking with this person as a regular attender.  Now, one of the primary data points that we record in the church is attendance.  You know, we count the people that are there. And the frequent question is, you  know, how many people were there on Sunday? We count numbers of people.  We count offerings. You know, those are two of the main data points. I don't  want to discuss the merits of those two things as data points. I just want to state  the obvious that we tend to track attendance figures, and we reason that if the  attendance figures are increasing, that that's a good thing. Now I'm not going to  tell you that that's a bad thing, but I do want to suggest that we misinterpret the  value of that data point at the level of attending, folks can still be more or less  spectators and not be participants. They might attend, but they're not engaged  other than showing up, sitting in the seat, receiving whatever is going on at that  activity, participating somewhat within the framework of that activity. But then  when it's over, they're out and that's the end of it. So attending regularly is a  significant move forward, but it's incomplete, and when we when we see rising  attendance figures and interpret that as a very positive, healthy sign, we might  be giving attendance too much credit. Again, attending is just a record of how  many spectators showed up, not so much how many participants were involved. But now, as we go to the next level, we are stepping into a much deeper level of  commitment. It's the connecting level. Now, when a person moves into a level of connecting, a transformation is taking place, and they're beginning to shift from  just being a spectator to being more of a participant. And there are two elements involved in this idea of connecting. One of them is people, and the other is  ministry. Connecting with people means that I've gotten to know a certain  number of folks that are also part of this church. I'm connecting with them. I see  them at church on Sunday or whatever activity it is, maybe I just joined a small  group with a set of people, and so I'm getting to know them. I'm getting to be 

closer to them. I am connecting with them, and as I connect with them, I'm  connecting with the church at large, but also the idea of ministry. I'm connecting  to a certain ministry area. Maybe it's just the worship. Service, but maybe it's  say, a men's group, or whatever it might be, I'm engaged with a ministry, and  perhaps I'm even starting to help out a bit in a particular ministry area. So as you can see, we're progressing to deeper levels of commitment. Now the next level  of commitment, the serving level. This constitutes the biggest single step. You  know, when someone moves from connecting to serving, what they're saying is  that, you know, not only is this a church that I regularly have been attending,  gotten to know a few people, but this is my church, and I am now taking an  ownership role. I am putting a stake in the ground here because I have taken on the responsibility of serving in some way. I'm part of the team. I'm not just the  consumer. I'm now providing ministry by participating at a deeper level. My  ownership is taking root. I'm sensing that I belong here. I want to be a partner  here. I want to play a role. I want to be part of the team. I want to take on a  piece of the ministry workload. Now, at that point, the ownership level is really  getting much higher, and then the final stop on our progression of levels of  ownership would be the inviting level. Now this is a very high level of  commitment because it involves that person who is making this commitment. It  involves their taking on a high risk. And what is that high risk? Well, it's the high  risk of inviting someone else to come, someone else from outside you see what, what you're saying at this point is that not only is this my church, but I think it  could be your church too. And so I'm inviting you to join me at my church. Now  that's a very, a very high level, and no one, no one invites people to come  unless they have a strong ownership of the Ministry of that church. Now let me  share a little little story with you, one of my previous churches, we had a practice every year of our elders getting together and going through Our membership  roles and simply discussing each and every member of the church. Now, what  we were trying to do is annually, do a bit of an evaluation of that person's growth in the faith, that person's participation in the church. You know, we want to make sure that that we were doing our job as leaders of helping people develop  spiritually. So we would sit around the table and we'd go down the list and each  each of the staff people or elders at the table would share what was known  about that particular person, or that married couple, and we would try to figure  out, so does it seem like this person is making progress in their faith? Well, they  are regularly attending, you know, he's involved with such and such a ministry.  She's involved in leading a women's group, or whatever it might be, we would  just do a little bit of taking stock of where that person is. And one of the things  that we started asking about was we started looking into whether or not these  folks seem to be bringing others from outside into the orbit of our church's  ministry. Now we didn't have a scientific way of knowing that. You know we  weren't running around with pen and paper making note of this and that we just 

wanted a general sense. And you know, we got to be a somewhat larger church  at 200 300, 350, but we were never so huge that we didn't know each other. And so always, as we go around the table, there'd be a lot of information that would  be forthcoming about a particular person or a particular couple, and at one point, we became aware that there was one woman in our church that was personally  responsible for bringing 22 families into our church. Some of these families  came in as unbelievers and found Christ through our ministries, were baptized  and entered into a life of faith. Many of them were folks that had a faith history,  but in recent years had sort of drifted away, and so there was a bit of a renewal  of their faith. And still others were folks that were recently relocated to our area,  and this one particular woman just always had this on her radar screen. She  would meet someone new in the community, and she would make a point of  inviting them to come with her and her family to her church. Well, you know  what? I've worked with a lot of churches over the years. The way, the entire  church doesn't include 22 families. So here was one sole individual, 22 families.  Let's say there's three or four per family. That's a lot of people, and she was  having that singular impact on all of those people. But here's the thing, she did,  that because she was totally sold on the vision of our church to go and make  disciples. She knew that if she could get people to our church, that our church  would receive them well, and that we would clearly articulate the gospel. We  would bring people to Christ by the grace of God and grow them in their faith.  Now again, talking about timing, here's a principle, the quicker a person can be  assimilated through the levels of commitment, the greater his or her experience  and contribution can be. We want to get people to we want to get to people  sooner rather than later. Because what that does is it fosters ownership, and the more folks that own the vision, the more significant impact the vision can have.  Now let me, let me ask you a question. The question is this, what would it take  for someone to make our church his or her church home? This is a question that we asked in our church. As we were trying to refine our process, we tried to  determine what exactly needs to happen in a person's life, for that person to  decide that that our church should become His Church her church as well. And  so here's where we landed with that. We decided that three things were  absolutely essential. One was what we call the dynamic, welcome. Secondly, a  sense of being cared for, and, thirdly, getting people involved, making sure they  knew that they belonged with us. So I'm not going to take the time to unpack all  of the details of this, but let me just, let me just summarize when it came to the  dynamic welcome. What we did was we we put a team together that we called  the welcome team, and the folks on this team took on the responsibility of  making sure that that first time newcomer to our church would have a quote,  dynamic experience. Now, dynamic is very subjective concept, but what we did  was this team walked through, particularly Sunday morning, everything that we  wanted the newcomer to experience. If Sunday morning was their their first 

entrance into the orbit of our church, you know, what were they experiencing  from the moment they drove into the parking lot to the moment they drove off at  the end of the day. And so they they dissected our Sunday morning and  prescribed this is how our newcomer reception has to work. So let me just share one element of that to give you the flavor, one of the things that this team  decided was that if a family came in that had children and those children were of the ages, that they should be in one of our kids classes. They wanted to make  sure that the parents and the kids were very comfortable with that, and so the  protocol was this, about 15 minutes before the start. Let's say the start was 10  o'clock. So at 9:45 the primary teacher for a given class. Let's say, I don't know.  Let's say elementary kids, ages second and third grade. That person would be  standing at the door that was the entrance to that classroom, and the role that  that teacher would play for that 15 minutes before the service and up to about  10 minutes after the service, the role was to be there to meet new parents and  their kids, So as new parents would come in with a kid that fit that age bracket.  They would be escorted to this class, introduced to that teacher. The child would be introduced to the teacher, and inside the class, a teacher's aide would be  working with the kids already in the class, and so parents would be introduced.  They would know who the teacher is. They would know what the classroom  looked like. They would leave their child with that teacher. And then, of course,  about 10 minutes after the hour, the teacher would walk in and would take over  that class. Following the service, the parents would go back to collect their their  children, and they would be again greeted by that teacher, whom now they knew by name and by sight. And we found that that little exchange greatly upped the  comfort level of parents and solidified the relationship of parent and child with  teacher and class. Now that was just a little snippet of the entire dynamic,  welcome experience, but you can see the level of analysis that went into that  and the level of effort went into establishing that protocol. So we knew that  people would need to experience a dynamic welcome that first time. Here's the  thing, it's challenging to get people to come to church the first time, but it's even  more challenging to get them to come back. And we found that the dynamic  welcome went a long way to giving us a second opportunity to interact with with  those folks, a sense of being cared for. Just use common sense there. Think  through. What is it that we need to do as a church to demonstrate care for  people, not just give lip service to it, but actually provide care for people. Figure  out what that protocol should be, put it in place, and then getting involved. We  decided that involvement should include a couple of elements. One is that a  person would need to be involved with some kind of discipleship opportunity that they were growing in their faith by being discipled. They were in a class, they  were in a study, they were in a one on one discipleship with with one of our  disciplers, something along that line. The other side of that was they needed to  be serving in some way. You know, if they could be growing in their faith through 

discipleship and serving in some way, that there, they would be getting involved  in their sense of belonging would escalate. So those three elements welcome.  And care involvement, and we went to great pains to make sure that those three elements were always there. Now, remember that key element of movement, if  we look at all of those different elements, ranging from observing to considering  to visiting to attending to connecting, to serving to inviting, the big jump came  the big jump came at the level of service. So the goal was, how quickly can we  help the newcomer move from that that first time visit, into being involved in  service? Because we knew that by that time, more than likely, if that person had  not been a person of faith by that time. He or she was a person who had come  to faith in Christ, a person who had plugged in to growing spiritually, and now a  person who was plugging in to serving in some way. So the quicker we can  make that happen, the stronger our church can grow. So that wraps up our  discussion of levels of commitment. Next time, when we get together, we will be  looking at the dynamics of change. So may God bless your ongoing studies in  the name of Jesus amen