Pastor’s Blog

Many people have asked if they can get a copy of the text or re-listen to the audio of the message from David Rasks memorial service.  Here is a link to the sermon page at Trinity Fellowship’s website, where both the text and the audio have been posted.

Recent Sermons Page

As I have prayed and prepared for the next step in the Education Summit, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the ‘Disciple Making Pathway’.   I’d like to ‘download’ into this blog entry some of my thoughts, partially to get comments and ideas flowing, partially so there is room in my brain to think about some of the other important questions raised by the Summit so far.  This entry contains two main parts, a description of the disciple making pathway itself, and then a more detailed plan for the Trinity Vision Small Groups

Trinity Disciple Making Pathway

As part of the Education Summit, we’ve been talking about improving our intentionality in making disciples.

Trinity’s vision statement says : Trinity Fellowship
is a body of believers whose goal is to glorify God
by growing toward maturity as disciples
of the Lord Jesus Christ – through faith.

If our goal is to make disciples, we should have at least an outline of how that happens in the body. Therefore we are thinking of implementing a simple, three-tier disciple making pathway that consists of the following.

First Tier: Newcomers
Newcomers will be enthusiastically encouraged to attend a Trinity Vision Small Group (see write-up below) whose purpose will be to get people familiar with our vision, it’s Biblical basis and its practical outworking, while at the same time allowing them to get to know others at Trinity and develop prayer and care for each other.

Second Tier: Learners
Once a person has been through the Trinity Vision Small Group, they will be encouraged to attend one of the other kinds of study and fellowship groups at Trinity: traditional small groups, Sunday Morning Small Groups, Men’s studies, Women’s studies and youth and young adult groups. These groups, in turn, will be asked to directly or indirectly foster discipleship by emphasizing the commitments of our vision statement:

to learn and obey His word,
to depend on Him in prayer,
to exalt Him through worship,
to love and care for one another
and to share His love with others
in order to make new disciples
in our community and around the world.

Third Tier: Leaders
As people continue to grow as disciples, they will be asked to become leaders in ministries at Trinity – Awana, teaching, leading small groups and Bible studies, men’s ministries, women’s ministries, youth, helping ministries, etc.

In order to foster continued growth among these leaders, the elders will sponsor, once a quarter, an evening or Saturday event for the Leadership Community – that is, all the kinds of leaders just named. The Leadership Community meetings will have three components:

Teaching some area of practical leadership skills, or challenging leaders to faithful leadership from the Scriptures.
Prayer for the needs of leaders and ministries
Communication and feedback between ministries, including calendar coordination.

Trinity Vision Small Groups

Purpose:
Intellectual – to get people new to Trinity familiar with our vision, it’s Biblical basis and its practical outworking.
Relational – to bring people new to Trinity together so they get to know and care for each other.

Plan:
Trinity Vision Small Groups will meet once a week for seven weeks. The first week will be introductory, will include a meal or other time of fellowship and will allow for the distribution of materials.

The following six weeks will address one aspect of Trinity’s vision and commitments:
Second Week – becoming disciples
Third Week – learning and obeying His word
Fourth Week – depending on Him in prayer
Fifth Week – exalting Him through worship
Sixth Week – loving and caring for one another
Seventh Week – sharing his love with others

Preparation:
Each of the current elders and one other experienced small group leader will prepare a draft of one of these weeks, along with instructions for leaders. We will divide the responsibilities and select key Scripture passages at an upcoming elders meeting.

Bob will revise and edit the six weeks of material and try to make it fairly uniform. The revised materials will be approved by the elders and ready for use before the end of the summer.

Implementation:
Once the materials are ready every Bible study group at Trinity (Small groups, Sunday Morning Small Groups, Mens’ Groups, Women’s groups, youth and young adults) will be ask to go through the Trinity Vision studies sometime in the next six months. This will mean that pretty much every current small group member at Trinity will have the opportunity to be exposed to this material.

Feedback from this major round of groups will be used to revise and strength the studies.

After that all newcomers to Trinity will be enthusiastically encouraged to attend a Trinity Vision small group. These will begin about once every eight weeks, and will be led by a rotation of the elders and other available small group leaders.

The second meeting of the education summit was held on Thursday, May 28th. It was a great time of thinking and brainstorming, as reported below. Now our task is to evaluate the ideas that have been coming out, to establish the pros and cons of these ideas, flesh out details, and come up with a coherent plan for moving forward in the area of education at Trinity. I’d like to ask you to prayerfully begin that evaluation process even as you read this blog, and to provide feedback by means of the survey link at the end.

We began this meeting by reviewing the guiding principles which govern the whole discussion – specifically the church’s vision statement and our ministry plan for the year. The focus of the vision statement is on building disciples through commitment to five core purposes of the church. The focus of the ministry plan this year is on building community – recognizing that we are all part of the body and developing and benefiting from the strengths of this God ordained community.

Next, we talked through many of the education ministries at Trinity, celebrating the many good things God has done through these ministries and noting areas where they require attention and improvement.

The areas of ministry reviewed were:
Age Integrated Sunday School
Age Graded Sunday School and Junior Church
Sunday Morning Small Groups
Regular Small Groups
Women’s Ministry
Men’s Ministry
Awana
L.I.F.E.
After L.I.F.E

Notes taken during the meeting are available here. (Those of us who took notes apologize for any mis-representation of the actual presentations by the ministry leaders.) Immediately following the presentations we asked ourselves what common themes seemed to emerge from this review. We listed several:

• Many ministries can celebrate the impact of studying Gods Word. Sometimes the depth of study of God’s Word is not a great as desired.
• Many ministries can celebrate the dedicated leaders God has provided. Often these same ministries aren’t doing as good a job as they would like at preventing burnout and providing for new leaders through mentoring.
• We need to improve communication from the ministries, and coordination and scheduling among the ministries. Ministries suffer from a common time constraint (not enough time to get it all done) and manpower constraint (not enough help / leadership)
• Most of our ministries are concerned with problems of discipline, especially the issue of people (children) being where they need to be rather than straying around the building.
• Many of these ministries are focused exclusively on Sunday – Sunday becomes a pressure cooker and the rest of the week a vacuum.

This led us into the actual brainstorming session, in which we asked ourselves what creative ideas could help us to modify our education ministries both to address the needs identified and to be more faithful to the church’s vision and ministry plan.

I have attempted to organize and even somewhat prioritize these brainstorming ideas. The following sequence lists them roughly in terms of effort required and impact on the life of the church. I have also attempted to pair contrasting or mutually exclusive ideas so that you can quickly see the impacts of the choices we will be making. This has meant occasionally adding the status quo as an option, even if it wasn’t spoken at the meeting. Finally, I have attempted to include every idea written down at the meeting, including those which don’t quite fit into the organizational scheme.

Structure of Sunday Morning

(1) Go from two worship services back to one

Sunday School – Worship

OR (2) Retain the ‘sandwich’ model but make the services shorter

Worship – Sunday School – Worship

OR (3) Go from the ‘sandwich’ model to the ‘parallel model’

Two Worship Services each with simultaneous Sunday School

Suggested Details:

Have different types of Sunday School with each Worship service, i.e. the first hour could focus on Sunday Morning Small Groups and the second hour on Age Graded Sunday School

Have different types of worship in the church services (traditional / contemporary)

OR (4) Eliminate Sunday School altogether

Two Worship services (probably with Junior Church)

Create a Disciple Making Pathway

• Trinity Vision Small Groups (six week Biblical introduction to Trinity’s vision and to Small Group fellowship)
• Other Groups responsible for fellowship and growth
• Leadership Community
• Create an oversight committee to monitor leadership needs and extend both personal and group invitations, and to communicate the need to step up and participate in leadership.

Add a Second Pastor or Trained Staff Person to minister in the area of:

• Disciple Making
• Youth
• Christian Education
• Evangelism Outreach

Strengthen Sunday Morning Small Groups / Small Groups:

• Combine the administration of Sunday Morning Small Groups and regular Small Groups.
• Focus on the small group aspect (not large / small alternation)
• Add a non-Sunday component to Sunday morning small groups.
• Allow for Sunday Morning Small Groups with a focus on adults or other non-family groupings.
• Create Fellowship/Relational Groups of three or four families.
• Create Non Geographic rotated small groups
• Assign everyone to a small group (shepherding groups)

Define the content of teaching and adhere to a scope and sequence.

• Do this for children’s ministries so nothing is missed.
• Do this for all teaching ministries.
• Give all teaching groups and small group activities concrete end dates and reshuffling opportunities.
• Focus teaching training of parents to equip families, rather than on training children directly.

Communicate the message that adults at church are responsible and empowered to care for children and to monitor behavior.

Men’s and Women’s ministries:

• Strengthen Men’s ministries, especially for equipping men as husbands and fathers.
• Strengthen Women’s ministries, especially for different styles of Bible Study.
• Eliminate Men’s and Women’s ministries altogether.
• Combine the administration of Men’s and Women’s Ministries

Eliminate Age Graded Sunday School, Life, AfterLIFE and all ministries that depend on age segregation.
-OR-
Add or strengthen demographic ministries to address single adults, young marrieds, post high school ministries, adoption support.

Do VBS

Do six months of regular Sunday school followed by six months of age integrated Sunday School or Sunday Morning Small Groups.

Create and maintain an organization chart with ministry descriptions and contact points.

Combine the administration of LIFE & AfterLIFE

Create an organization for Young Marrieds and Older Singles

Combine the administration of Children’s Church, Age Graded Sunday School, and Age Integrated Sunday School

Other Communication ideas:

• Improve Signage and Bulletin Boards
• Improve the calendar and reservation System
• Improve volunteer coordination (i.e. VolunteerSpot)

If you would like to comment on any (or all) of these suggestions, please use this form on SurveyGizmo.com.  This will insure the privacy of your comments and will give us a quick way to categorize them later.

Through a series of circumstances I recently latched on to an album called ‘The Ill Tempered Klavier’ by singer/songwriter Ben Shive. Ben has worked with Andrew Peterson, one of my favorite artists, and that was part of what led me to this album.

As happens to me too rarely, I was totally blown away by the whole album. I have listened to it over and over and virtually memorized all the songs.

As a service to the internet community, I’m planning to blog the words, as best I can decipher them, to the whole album. This entry gives the words to ‘Wear Your Wedding Dress’, which is also in contention for the saddest song on the album.

Get this album on

Get this album on Amazon

Wear Your Wedding Dress, by Ben Shive

Wear your wedding dress today my love
And I will bind myself again to you.
In joy and sorrow come what may, my love
Every day is the day to say I do.

Now come to me my darling, come to me
And lie beside me in the dark again.
Comfort me, my darling, comfort me.
Every day is the day to take me in.

Time is short, and we both know it is.
Today may be my only chance to thank you for your love.

So grieve for me my darling, grieve for me.
Think of me in death and close your eyes.
Then weep for me my darling, weep for me.
Every day is the day to say good-bye.
Every day is the day to say good-bye.