Video Transcript: Role Clarity
Welcome back. We're continuing with our course developing great commission skills. And with this video, we're going to be taking a look at role clarity. Role clarity. You know, last time we looked at ministry clarity, a broader picture. Now we're moving into role clarity. Well, what exactly is role clarity? Well, let's think about that for a moment. It's helpful to have roles among staff and leaders that are clearly defined, regular evaluations and accountability that's going to keep us on task. Our concern is role clarity within the context of great commission ministry. You know, I realize that I'm talking about great commission ministry over and over and over again, but that's the point, right? This whole course is about developing great commission skills so that we can be great commission leaders who lead Great Commission churches. That's what this is all about. So we're concerned with role clarity in that we want our roles as leaders to be connected centrally with the Great Commission itself. Now, how are we going to do that? Well, I'm going to introduce you to a tool, and that tool is called the Great Commission matrix. Now in setting up our discussion in regard to the Great Commission matrix, I want to I want to speak to you about a paradigm shift. Conventional approaches to ministry are typically centered on the question, how do we minister to our congregation? Now the idea is that if we minister well to our congregation over and over and over again, very consistently, that again, that assumption that we talked about a few sessions ago, that that ministry, that gospel ministry, that great commission ministry, will then spill out of our people into the community is just going to naturally happen. But what I've learned is that that doesn't happen. That's a faulty assumption. So we want to shift the paradigm from that question, how do we minister to our congregation to this, how do we minister through our congregation in order to reach a lost community? Now the bulk of this video is going to center on a discussion of the Great Commission matrix and and, so I want to share with you that particular chart, the Great Commission matrix. Now don't panic. This is going to be on your screen for a goodly number of minutes, so you'll have plenty of time to think this through as I unpack it for you. So what you are looking at is what we call the Great Commission matrix. You'll notice that there is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis, the vertical axis on the left, from bottom to top. Starts with outreach, which is the Go element, and it moves up to evangelism, which is the make element, and it moves further up to discipleship, that is the disciples element, so in kind of a loose connection, from bottom to top, we have go make disciples through the means of outreach, evangelism and discipleship. Now you might recall that we have labeled those three as ministry movements. We don't have an outreach program in the church or an outreach team in the church. We have an outreach movement in the church, meaning that outreach threads through every ministry of the church. Every ministry in the church is going to develop the capacity to do outreach, to get outside of the church and build relationships with people. We move up to evangelism. Evangelism happens
when the gospel is clearly shared with folks who are outside of the faith. Evangelism is a movement. It threads through every ministry. Area of the church, so that every ministry in the church develops a capacity to do evangelism, and then we move up to discipleship. The disciples element, the maturity element, evangelism gets us across the starting line of salvation, but discipleship grows us in our faith until we reach maturity, until we become what true worshipers, worshiping the Father in spirit and in truth. Discipleship is a movement. We want every ministry area of the church to be discipling people, so every ministry in the church will develop the capacity to do outreach, evangelism and discipleship. That's what's going on with the vertical axis on the left. Now across the top of the matrix, you see these designations of ministry one, ministry two, ministry three, etc. These are basically placeholders that represent the different ministry areas of the church. So at the top of these vertical columns, you might see things like youth ministry or women's ministry or small groups ministry or whatever they might be. So these are somewhat generic in terms of how the chart is being laid out, but any and every ministry area can occupy one of those vertical columns. And of course, there can be many more ministries than just six. By the way. Word to the wise, I'm going to explain to you how this matrix works, and I certainly would encourage using this matrix, but perhaps not try to do this in every ministry area all at once. Select two or three priority ministries and start there, and then add another. Add another, add another, until eventually all ministry areas of the church are organizing their ministries through the grid of the Great Commission matrix. Now what we're doing with this you see, is we are equipping, we are empowering. We are mobilizing the entire church represented by every ministry area to get our folks prepared to go out and work in the harvest as skilled laborers. Now, one thing that I want to clarify, I have been accused with this model of sort of mistreating the congregation or using them in some way, shortchanging them, because my emphasis is on reaching out to the community. But nothing could be further from the truth. Here's what actually happens when people inside the church are equipped, empowered, mobilized for ministry and are given the opportunity to truly serve God well by going out from the church, you know, As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you to go out from the church to minister in the harvest, their own spiritual maturity is going to accelerate much more so than having them simply sit passively in the church and receive teaching that beefs Up, perhaps their knowledge, but doesn't engage them in ministry action. So no one is being shortchanged here. Everyone is being accelerated in their spiritual development. All right, so when you minister through the congregation, this is how you do that. Now, what you see in these little boxes, you see strategy 1, 2, 3, again. These are just placeholders to represent the actual strategies that you might come up with that would fill in those boxes. So let me give you an example, so that you can see how how this
works. Let's say, for example, that ministry area number three is youth ministry, ministry to teenagers. Now the question is not going to be, how do we minister to the youth of the church. The question is going to be, how do we minister through the youth of the church to reach the youth out in the community? Well, those folks who are leaders in youth ministry will come down to the bottom level of the matrix outreach, and will design two or three outreach strategies for how youth ministry is going to connect with teenagers in the community and begin to build relationships. Then they're going to move up to the next level evangelism, and they're going to design two or three evangelism strategies for how the gospel is going to be articulated clearly to the teenagers that respond to outreach. Then we move to the top level discipleship, and those leaders in youth ministry are going to design two or three possible tools, pathways of discipling, teenagers who have made professions of faith through evangelism as they grow in their faith. Now imagine that this is happening in every ministry area of the church. You see those little arrows down at the bottom of the matrix. What that represents is the reality of every ministry area of the church going out into the community to make connection, to build relationships, to draw people into relationship that open the door of possibility for sharing the faith, sharing the gospel through evangelism and then moving folks as they come across the line of salvation into discipleship up on the third tier. Now to be candid in real life, it never works quite that simply, quite that black and white, that clean, okay? But if all of these things are in place, ministry will begin to happen. Now the conventional church tends to use the Sunday worship service as the primary front door to the church. So the idea is that if we can get people to visit on a Sunday morning, and their experience with our church is positive, then maybe they will stay with us and eventually trickle down into what's, let's call it, the departmental levels of the church, where they Connect with children's ministry, youth, men, women, small groups, be on the worship team, whatever it might be, and most of those ministries are inwardly focused. And so the opportunity for outreach and evangelism somewhat dies there. But what we're saying is, no, we don't want that single front door of a Sunday morning worship service. We want every ministry to be an open front door. And not only do we want it to be open, we want to send that ministry out so that the doors to connecting with us are all over the community in multiple ways. That's how we really spread ourselves out and really go giving us the opportunity to make disciples. So the Great Commission matrix is the key strategic tool that's going to allow us to penetrate into the community with the love, the grace, the Mercy, the person of Jesus Christ. Now on a strategic level, I want you to think about a couple of things. I think back to our discussion in an earlier session of the four disciplines of a great commission church. Now combine those four disciplines, preemptive prayer, basic Bible, cost commitment, missional multiplication. Combine that with the Great Commission matrix, where every ministry area is able to go out
into the community to do outreach, to do evangelism, to do discipleship. Those two tools in combination, are your primary strategic tools that will both grow your people on the inside of the church in terms of their spiritual development, and will help you to reach people on the outside of the church that need Jesus, those people that are still part of that plentiful harvest. And you see, with all the things that we've been talking about through all of these videos, what we're doing is we're becoming more and more skilled at the labor of going into the harvest and gathering that harvest, that family, into the family of God, those scattered sheep. We are now part of that search and rescue mission that was first the property of God the Father, then God the Son, and now us through God the Spirit, as we reach out and we bring in that plentiful harvest, and we keep bringing that harvest in as the gospel moves forward until one of these days when it pleases God to do so, Jesus will return. The end will come and behold a multitude to numerous to count, praising God and saying, holy, holy. Holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is filled with His glory. Amen. Now I've got one more thing that I want to share with you inside of this particular video, and it comes from a book that I have actually written myself, along with a co-author, a gentleman by the name of Steve Ogne. Now, just so you'll know Steve Ogne has gone to be with the Lord a few years back, he was a man that suffered greatly from medical problems, but remained faithful through great travail. And what am I about to share with you, the leadership ladder was actually Steve's idea, and I worked with Steve to help him write a book that captured the essence of the leadership ladder in book form. And then later, after Steve had passed and gone to be with the Lord, I developed a workbook to go along with that, so that, you know, we would have a practical application of the book. What I would like to do in the remaining few minutes of this video is just explain to you how the leadership ladder works, and it ties in very well with the matrix. It ties in very well with the four disciplines of a great commission church. So let me go there, and what I just put up on your screen is an outline of the leadership ladder. We're going to be starting at the bottom and working our way up so the concept of a ladder, the reason Steve went with this particular image, think about a ladder with two side rails and six rungs Moving from bottom to top. The side rails are are identified as this. One side rail is called Building biblical knowledge. The other side rail is called Building biblical character. You know, we never, we never get to the point in this life where we know all the Bible we ever need to know like there's nothing more to be learned. There's always more to be learned in terms of Bible knowledge. There's also more character to be developed. Biblical character, we never reach that point of having figured it all out, of reaching perfection, of reaching absolute obedience. So until the very day we die, there's a need for us to continue to build biblical knowledge and build biblical character. And so the leadership ladder book and workbook help in our development in that way it helps, it helps us as leaders in terms of our self
development, but it also helps us as leaders to develop others in terms of their biblical knowledge and their biblical character. Now, using this analogy. The ladder, one of the things that I just want to point out is that, you know, the side rails of a ladder are attached to every rung. So as we talk our way up the rungs of the ladder, the six rungs of the ladder bear in mind that each of these rungs on either side is embedded into a side rail. So each of these rungs has to do with being part of each rung. Now I tell you what I need to interrupt for a moment because something has become unplugged. So give me about 10 seconds to take care of that, and I will be right back. Okay, I'm back. I apologize for that, but I just noticed on my computer that all of a sudden it said battery low, and my cord had become unplugged. Things ever like that happened to you? Okay, where was I? Side Rails, biblical character, biblical knowledge. And now we're going to take a look at the six rungs, starting at the bottom rung number one is called Living missionally. Now the idea here is that we and the people we lead are to adopt lives that are missional, lives that are on mission. We're out in the community, in our lives, our neighborhood, our schools, our jobs, our recreation, whatever we're doing. We're living missionally. In other words, we're looking for opportunity to come alongside and connect with people and help them get to Jesus, help them get to the into the family of God. The second wrong making disciples, this is the more content laid inside. It's not so much about relationship. We establish relationship as we live missionally, but when we get to the rung of making disciples, we're now looking for opportunity to actually deliver the gospel and perhaps to disciple people in their walk with the Lord. The next rung up, number three is called mobilizing ministry. This is the rung at which folks who have come to Christ and probably have come into the church are given the opportunity to serve in some way, they're being mobilized for ministry. Now the next level up is called leading ministry. So some of the people that become servants in ministry are going to move up to actually leading ministry and take on leadership positions in the ministry areas in which they work. The next above that, number five, is leading leaders. You know, some of those folks who grow into leading ministry will grow further into being leaders of leaders. And then ultimately, at the top run, there is planting churches. You know that's the the biggest multiplier of all is that when we start developing other churches, we multiply, not just disciples, not just leaders, but now we're multiplying churches. So that progression starts at the bottom, with us connecting with people through living missionally, helping them get to Christ, through making disciples, helping them serve, through mobilizing ministry, helping them lead by leading ministry, helping them advance their leadership to leading leaders And leading further into actually going out from the church and planting other churches, all the while continuing to be connected with the building of biblical knowledge and the building of biblical character. Now, one thing I want to point out before I wrap this up, we have observed that in many, many churches, those first two rungs don't
exist. You know, the mandate to live missionally, the mandate to make disciples, isn't really present. It's not emphasized. The church's ministries tend to start at the level of mobilizing ministry, getting people involved in ministry only. They're not getting involved in ministry that goes out. They're getting involved in ministry inside ministry to the congregation, not through the congregation. Now, some of those folks might become leaders of ministry, some might come leaders of leaders, but indeed, they're focused on leadership inside of the church, not leadership that goes out and then the top rung is not there either. There's no planting of churches. There's no significant multiplication outside of ourselves. So the six rung ladder has become a three rung ladder that only functions inside the church as we talk to ourselves, as we serve each other. So the model of the leadership ladder in both the book and the workbook is designed to help churches develop missional leaders in the church who lead missionally in the church, so that folks from the church can be sent out the side rails, building biblical knowledge, building biblical character. The rungs, living missionally, making disciples, mobilizing ministry, leading ministry, leading leaders, planting churches. So I encourage you to get hold of the leadership ladder. Some of what we cover in this course that I have created is is available to you free of charge through downloads. Unfortunately, the leadership ladder is not one of those. The leadership ladder is formally published through a different published, through a publisher, and I don't have the the permission to just give that away, but if you're interested, just go online and google the leadership ladder. Can Kenneth Priddy, Steven Ogne, and I'm sure you'd be able to find where to where you can get that book. So lots and lots of different constructs that we've covered here with this session. Final thing I want to say is this, in terms of reinforcement, you know, if we don't continue to press this issue, it's going to disappear. So in order to remain effective, we've got to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. How do we do that? We do that through regular evaluation and through accountability. We evaluate ourselves to see how we're doing, to see if we're following through, to see if we're getting the outcomes, to see if we're getting the lag measures that we're shooting for. And we hold ourselves accountable to being faithful to the Great Commission, being faithful to going and making disciples, baptizing, teaching obedience, all to the glory of God. So that wraps up this video. We've been taking a look at role clarity as we continue with our study. Now our next session, which will be the final session in regard to working with staff and leaders is going to focus on the skill topic, healthy communications. So until then, I pray for God's blessing on your efforts of ministry, your efforts at study and preparedness, and eventually, your efforts in moving the gospel into the harvest in the name of Jesus amen