Purpose Driven Church Ch8b - Applying your Purposes

And on we go. Hopefully the next few points won't be marathons like the first two. But let's see.

3) Educate your people on purpose.

This is thought provoking for me. Often I tend to see the teaching of the Bible as an end unto itself - that people should come out of the Sunday service with a better academic understanding of the part of scripture that was preached on.

This, however, is challenging - "You only believe the part of the Bible that you DO."

The key point here - the objective of Bible teaching (and other Spiritual education) is to influence peoples' behaviour, making them better at the five purposes of the church (which, in case you haven't read any other posts, are Evangelism, Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship and Ministry).

What Warren is saying is that there's a really important process at work here. He uses a baseball metaphor, unfortunately, but it is in a fairly simple diagram, which I reproduce here:

People are consciously moved from "1st base" to "3rd base", and then to "home", which is repeating the process and helping to reach others for Christ.

What this demonstrates is a really clear understanding of how training in Spiritual things actually works - and although I know my Bible backwards, I wonder if this just shows how little I really know. This really is about "turning an audience into an army".

4) Start small groups on purpose.
Since there are people at different points in the circles, it makes sense to specialise. Small groups are set up for seekers, for team members, for specific needs and for growth.

In our situation, we currently have growth groups operational, which is appropriate for our people. But if (as I hope!) that we really get into a serious effort to reach our local area, one of the first things we'll need to set up is a small group specifically aimed at helping people become Christians and developing good habits of maturity.

5) Add staff on purpose.

This is something we've actually been doing in our search for a staff member for the church. It's not enough to find someone who has a good personality and competence; it's important that their passion is about one of the purposes of the church (and clearly, it needs to be a purpose that your church is actually working on!).

One interesting thought - if he were starting a new church today, Rick Warren would recruit five volunteers for unpaid staff positions - a music/magnification director (worship), a membership director (fellowship), a maturity director (discipleship), a ministry director (ministry) and a missions director (evangelism). He would aim to eventually make these people part time and then full time.

6) Structure on purpose.
Once again, Warren talks about putting people into teams based around the purposes of the church rather than traditional departments. This is interesting precisely because it is both so counter-cultural and yet so logical. The reason I say this is logical is because each team will know exactly what it is aiming to accomplish, its boundaries and its goals.

7) Preach on purpose.
Here's a point on which I disagree a little with Warren. He says that a church needs to ensure that preaching focuses on each of the five purposes during the year. I can see the benefits of this, but my own opinion and training is that the preaching should be more based on the Word of God itself than on categories we place it into. That said, maybe it is worth asking the question every time one preaches - "What purposes does this passage impact?"

That said, Rick suggests that this shouldn't take up the entire year. He says "A four week series on each of the five purposes need only take up 20 weeks a year". So maybe there's something to this.

Maybe we could do both. Perhaps we should ensure that during a typical year we got some stuff from the psalms (on worship), some material from Paul (discipleship), some stuff on the Great Commission (evangelism), A pastoral epistle (fellowship) and some teaching on spiritural gifts (ministry).

8) Budget on purpose.
I have never really had too much interest in budgets, but it is interesting to ask what a church's budget says about its priorities. Simply put, you should be spending the majority of money on what you think is most important.

9) Calendar on purpose.
Again, interesting - Warren says you should calendar 2 months of each year to give special emphasis to each purpose. This would be linked to the teams discussed in structure - each team would be given the task of emphasising that purpose church wide during their months. He gives the warning "Don't fool yourself- if you don't schedule your purposes on your calendar, they won't get emphasized".

10) Evaluate on purpose.
This, at least, is simple and understandable. If you wish to remain effective as a church, you HAVE to ask yourself "how are we doing?" every so often. Again, a metaphor I like - Imagine NASA doing a moon shot with no tracking! And evaluation must be involving each of the purposes.

Whew! Made it through all of them. Once again, this is good stuff. Next time we'll be reaching out to the community . . . .

Oh, and just in case stuff happens - I'm taking the kids to the SCG tomorrow night, so there is a distinct chance that we might not make it back till very late. This could mean we don't get to blog then. I'll try, though, because I'm starting to get excited about all this . . . .