Listening for a future for Eastern North Carolina Churches

In the South Roanoke Baptist Association we have been doing a process we call DARTS. Discovering Associational Realities Through Spiritual Journeys. We have taken the journey of prayer, the journey of Bible study, the journey of intensive and extensive self reflection among our churches. We are now on the journey of pulling together what it all means to see if we can hear God speaking to us. We are about half way through that pulling together journey and I can say that I do believe that God is speaking to us and that He is laying out a fresh vision and mission for the churches of the South Roanoke Baptist Association.
Here are some of the conclusions that we began to see in the first part of the listening journey.
1. None of the New Testament Churches ever worked alone, they were all part of the larger body. The local church is not the Kingdom of God, it is a congregation of believers who collectively make up the Kingdom where God rules.
2. The local churches networked to impact the world by
a. Sending out mission teams
b. Meeting needs of famine affected areas
c. Supporting struggling churches
d. Interchanging workers
e. Collecting cooperative monies for ministry
f. Holding each other accountable
3. There is no real networking of churches to impact the Kingdom or community in Eastern North Carolina other than through W.M.U.
4. Over 90% of SRBA churches are plateaud or declining
5. Church members greatest concerns are aging congregations, little interest in church programming, insignificant evangelism efforts and dealing with a changing world
6. The existing focus of SRBA is not of interest to most churches
7. Lay persons tend to be more interested in working together with other congregations than most pastors seem to be
When you step back from the above conclusions some pretty clear thought seems to jump out. At least they do to me. I think these must become guiding principles as we listen to the Spirit call us to a fresh vision and mission for the churches of eastern North Carolina.
1. We are being untrue to the New Testament model when we are not working together with our fellow churches to impact the Kingdom and Community. If this is true, and we agreed that it was, then a primary task of the Association must then be as a catalyst to engage churches in networking to impact the Kingdom and Community.
2. When churches networked in the New Testament they seemed to move in two dimensions. Impacting the Kingdom with new mission churches and impacting the community with benevolent ministries. This then would call the Association to serve as enabler for individual congregations to network together in mission and ministry projects led by ministry teams of those persons who have a passion and calling.
3. Declining or plateaud churches are in too much of a survival mode to be able to hear the call to network and cooperate. The Association must serve as intentional instrument of church revitalization.
Summing all this up, I believe that as we listen to God we can hear Him giving us a vision of what South Roanoke Baptist Association would look like if we are genuinely following His lead and it would look like “Vital Churches networking to fulfill the Great Commission” Out of that vision He is giving us the mission to “ Serve as a catalyst for Church development toward vitality and for Church involvement towards Kingdom and community impact.”
Mull over this a little while and let me know what you hear.
Phil

My Favorite Week

Next week I get to do one of my very favorite things, that is serve as the Camp Pastor at Caraway, the R.A. Camp for Boys in North Carolina.
I am always humbled during this time to see God at work in the lives of these young men. Only heaven knows how many young men are serving him all across the world today as a result of hearing God call them to Himself while they were at Caraway.
Being the Camp Pastor is easy, the staff and leadership team have the best plan that always works so well. It is just harvest time. I am grateful to God for such a place and such a ministry and that I get to just watch Him at work.
So I will probably not have much up here next week. Before I leave I get to preach again this Sunday at the First Church in Washington. From time to time I want to share some of the great work going on in churches here in eastern North Carolina. First Washington is a good example. Pastor Jimmie Moore and his staff are one of the best I have ever seen. Their hearts are all pointed towards Christ and the results are evident. This is a church filled with talented caring people who are hearing God's call. They have just finished Pursuing Vital Ministry and are now living it out. They are one good example of how well PVM can work if the church will allow the program to work. I am looking forward to how God is going to continue to use this church to impact the Kingdom, He already is, but I sense that there are powerful days ahead. So my hat is off to First Baptist Washington, I know the Lord is saying of them, "I know your works and how you are faithful to your first love."

So they don't listen to you?

I just don't get it. You are a God called person, you have been given a message from God and you deliver it as faithfully as you can. The result is, you get ignored, you may even get attacked for being insistent that people listen.
You find yourself between the pressure of knowing that God has a word that He wants the people to hear and their resistance to hear it.
In Stephens sermon to the "rock in the pocket" congregation in Jerusalem, he called on them to remember Moses. He reminded them that Moses had tried to liberate Israel and they refused to hear him. In fact they insulted him. Moses said,(in my loose interpretation) "I don't get it, I am trying to do them a favor, I am speaking the Word from God and they refuse it and even attack my integrity."
Here is just a thought for those of us who find ourselves there from time to time. We are not God, we are not even God's replacement. We are His messengers. Our task is not to get people to do what God wants them to do. Our task is to tell, encourage and pray. When we assume the role of God and press for results, we will get discouraged and most often angry at the people. So, lets just tell them what God has told us (and we will take it for granted that we are keeping close enough to Him so that what we are saying is from God actually is) and then chill out. Let's, be His messengers and their shepherds. Let's not take their response to God's desire for them personally. Let's not associate their response to our failure or success. In fact we might actually see more response if people sense from us that we really do believe that we are just messengers and that we actually do trust God from that point on.