Episode Transcript
Welcome to another episode of the Revitalize My Church podcast. My name is Bart Blair. I'm the director of church revitalization for a ministry called Assist Church Expansion. And I'm here with my co host and my boss, Nathan Bryant, who's the executive director at Assist Church Inspection. Do you like that?
You like being called my boss? It's hilarious to be on anybody's boss. It's pret crazy. Yeah, there's probably a lot of people that would agree that it's hilarious that you're somebody, but you are's probably online. You are my friend, you are my ministry colleague, you are technically my boss and my podcast co host.
So we get to do a lot of things together. And I really, really have been enjoying doing this podcast at the time that this particular episode is dropping. Nathan, we're right at about a year of producing this podcast. Believe it ye. It's crazy.
Yeah, we set out in 2024. We've been talking about it for a while. We said we wanna produce a podcast where we can share the things that we're learning about church revitalization, renewal, restart and also engage some other people who are doing what we're trying to do in other, in other church communities, other tribes, other denominations. Learn from them. And I think I've learned a ton.
It's been a lot of fun. And for those of you who have ve been tracking with us for the last year, thanks. Thanks for tracking along with us and for listening to the podcast or watching on our YouTube channel. I will use this as a moment to mention that if you haven't subscribed yet, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, make sure that you do that. Our goal is to drop a podcast episode on the 1st and the 15th of every month, which is really hard to remember.
And if you subscribe to the podcast, you don't ever have to remember. It'll just naturally come to your mobile device on the days that they get released. So, so, so please do that, Nathan. We are picking up in the middle of kind of a series of conversations that you and I have been having inspired by one of our. I'll call him a new friend, a new ministry colleague, Terry Long from the North Carolina Baptists.
He shared some documents with us relating to how they partner with their churches in North Carolina that are going through a season of revitalization and renewal. And one of those documents had a list of 10 essentials for church revitalization. And we've gone through the first four of those and in today's episode we're gonna go through number five and number six on the list. Number five is gospel centered fellowship and number six is missional engagement. These are considered by Mr.
Terry Long, who may be an expert in this, to be essentials for church revitalization or church renewal. So let's start by letting me ask you some questions and letting you answer some questions. Let's talk about Gospel Centered Fellowship. Now that's kind of a big and sort of a broad term, but I think that based on my experience, and I'm sure based on your experience, we've seen churches that are in a need for renewal or revitalization who have some level of community and connection and fellowship. But I think what Terry is getting at here is that there needs to be something more intentional related to the way that we have community together in a church.
Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen in churches and what you think is is healthy for a church in terms of Gospel centered fellowship? Yeah. Most of the churches that we are working with that are in revitalization or restart or renewal are focus are functioning primarily off everything happening on the Sunday morning experience in large group context. Or they may have Sunday school, which is a smaller group. And for some of these churches that's really small because they're not as strong as they used to be.
And so there is this community that they're having and it's usually around the Bible, which is fantastic. But it's normally for the most part kind of surface because if you just come to church on Sunday mornings, there isn't much going on. And if you're coming to potlucks, that's great. You is some social engagement there. But there is no real space for people to have more connected Biblical community that is getting them into their very lives in being more accountable and open to one another and doing the one another's in scripture with one another in a more intensive, purposeful and meaningful way.
So it doesn't mean the relationships aren't meaningful. Relationships are very meaningful. In fact, a lot of these people known each other for 40 years or 30 years or long periods of time and have sacrifice for each other and care for each other and pray for one another. So a lot of that is going on. But there isn't the kind of the deeper fellowship of interconnectedness that allows for that true deep community where real discipleship is going to take place.
Because now we're into each other's lives. We're confessing sin to one another. We're being really vulnerable and open to one another. And you need to break that down to smaller groups. So that's not happening in a public way where that can really take place.
Because transformation is going to take place really at the level of relationship with one another in a Biblical community. And so they don't really have that. And because it's not their experience, it's not something that they've been part of or they've done before, they're usually pretty reticent to moving to it. They see it as something that, well, if you're going to have a prayer meeting, we understood all time Wednesday night prayer meetings. And I understand the Sunday school, but having this small group or community in that level is a little bit scary for a lot of folks.
Yeah, I was sharing with you. I think it was yesterday that I'd been visiting one of our partner churches this past weekend and had a conversation with the pastor's wife. And this particular church was going through their revitalization boot camp and we had sent them some pre work to do. And one of the pieces of pre work was to get their vision team together and read several pages of scripture and discuss those things together and to take notes. So that when I arrived to do the boot camp content with them, they had already done a little bit of that leg work and it had some time to process some of those scriptures that we were going to use in helping form the vision for that church.
The pastor's wife said to me they'd been there at the church for a year and a half. And she said to me, the time that we got together, read those scriptures and had those conversations were some of the deepest spiritual conversations that we've had since we've been here. And this is a church that does Sundayny morning Sunday school, Sunday morning worship service, and Wednesday night Sunday school or Sunday night Bible study. Right. So they're spending a lot of time listening to their pastor teach them about the Bible.
Nothing wrong with that at all. But they have no context in their community for when those that are listening and learning have the opportunity to discuss how to actually apply this. Where do I actually see this truth playing out in my life? Where do I need to see this truth playing out in my life? And then having that encouragement and that prayer time together and that thing that really does take your relationships to a completely different level and the accountability too.
It's one thing to be in a room and hear a message being spoken it's another thing being in a circle looking at one another and sharing about what God is teaching you through the word of God and what he's asking you to do. I used to say when I was teaching small group leaders, we can get people to actually confess to others what God is telling them that they'supposed to be doing. What's going to happen next week when they show up to the group meeting? It's like, oh, did you do that? Everybody wants to know.
And ultimately we want to be doers of the Word, not just hereers only. And it's the doing of the believing and doing of the Word that's actually transformative in our lives. So there's that whole accountability connection part that is not something that's in a traditional format, really at the same level, because we're all listening to the pastor and we all want to believe what the pastor is saying. The question is, are we all doing what God is telling us to do from the word that's being taught? And that's really where we want to get.
We want to get to that transformative engagement ofd what God is doing through His Word in the lives of people as they interact with one another in the body of Christ. I don't know any pastor that wouldn't point to the picture painted in Acts 2:42 and go, that's what I want for my church. Right. Where everyone has everything in common together. They're sharing meals, they're listening to the teaching.
There's this picture that you get when you read that text that goes, man, that must have been a really, really special community of people. Yet it's really, really hard to get our modern Western American Christians to think about living that way. Because it's a very communal way of living. And our culture is very individualistic. We're very individualistic.
Yeah. So it becomes very difficult to implement that in a church. What tips might you give to a pastor or a church leader who says, you know, we do a lot of corporate stuff, but it's all kind of surface level. Maybe we share some potluck together, maybe we have some times of activity, but we don't really have those communal places where we're bearing one another's burdens, where we're praying with and for one another, spurring one another on towards love and good deeds? Those things are not taking place.
What are some steps that a pastor can take to actually move in that direction to get that kind of culture? I think for one, he should go to another church that's doing something that he thinks makes really a lot of sense, is very excited about. So if he's talking with his peers and he sees something that's working, go see it in action and go to a small group and actually participate and say, oh, okay. Well, this is really interesting other thing. I think one of the big mistakes pastors will do in trying to create small groups or Biblical communities or gospel centered communities or whatever we want to call these entities that are smaller in number, that are trying to get after people obeying scripture and reading it and connecting together and being accountable to one another in living life together is they will hear something, they'll go to a training, and they'll want everybody to do it.
I don't think that that's what they should do. I think they should understand it Biblically for one, and preach and teach on that for a bit. But I think the best thing for them to do is actually create an incubator. So go find those four or five other families in the church that are solid and strong and do it together. Create that experience together.
Journey together in learning what it means to live in community with one another and held each other accountable and living gospel centered community and see the life transformation that happens there and understand the values and what's needed to make this successful and helpful and let them experience it, not just tell them to do it. So actually do the training that way and bring some people in, maybe who are you more experienced in it, to give them advice and counsel and to speak into them as you do it, and then launch your program outside of that experience so that the leaders that it will go and take on the responsibility to lead others in forming real gospel centered communities have had the experience of being in one and understand the value and how it works and how it functions. So I think that to me is a really, really big idea. And so lot of like, it's a slower way to go, but in the end, I think it produces the greater results on the other side. Yeah.
I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to point Back to episode 12 of our podcast where I had Adam Ehrlichman as a guest. And Adam is one of the leaders of an organization called Build Groups. And they provide all kinds of resources and training for churches that are trying to figure out how to develop leaders for small group ministry and how to implement a small group ministry in their church. You know, it's not a cookie cutter approach. Every church has its own culture and its own needs specifically.
But one of our partner churches that we're working with is using their training to try to implement small groups in their community. And so far, from what I understand, they found it to be really helpful. So you can check out episode number 12 with Adam Ehrlichman. I'll try to make sure I get that in the show notes here. If not, just go to our website, Revitalizemy Church.
Go to the podcast page. You'll find it. It was a great conversation. Let's shift to the other point that we wanted to discuss today here, Nathan, which is another key element and essential ingredient for a church revitalization or church renewal is missional engagement. This is something that you're not passionate about at all.
So we could have probably made this. We could have made this an episode in and of itself. But we're gonna try to limit our time on this. As you think about missional engagement, number one, how would you define that? What would you call missional engagement?
And then what do you see as being some of the benefits of missional engagement for a church that is in a season of renewal? Well, when we use the word missional engagement, we're talking about stuff that's happening outside the church, in the community of the people, the target we're trying to reach. So oftentimes we're doing mission stuff inside the church, hoping people come do it, which is fine. Like, we need to do that. Like, don't mishear me.
But mission engagement really has to do with what we're doing with our lives in the corporate nature of the church, the group nature of the church, and the individual lives of the members of the church to actually connect and engage that community. We're trying to reach for Jesus, who God's called us to reach. And so what are we doing in the field, so to speak? When we're talking about missional engagement, we're talking about what we're doing outside the church to connect with people who are far from God, to draw them closer to us and to ultimately to Jesus. There's a author, pastor, church planter named Hugh Halter you're probably familiar with, who wrote a book called the Tangible Kingdom.
And he spoke at a Canadian church planting conference a couple of years ago. And I remember watching his talk on that podcast. And he used this language. I'm not really sure exactly where it comes from. I didn't have the full context of it, but he used the terms.
I think it was M0 to M5. I don't know if that rings a bell to you for any reason, but he basically said if you think about the culture that you're trying to reach. You've got M0, which is people who are just like you, people already sort of in your culture just like you. They look like you, think like you. They're people that are already in your church.
And then you have M1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then M5 would be like, I'm gonna go to Pakistan and I'm gonna try to reach people for Jesus in Pakistan. And if I do that, I've got to learn a language, I've got to adopt to culture. I'GOT to understand their history, cult history. Right.
It's completely different. And, and what we really have to do is realize that the people that are. That the people that are most likely to come into our church if they're going to come to Us are probably M0 or M1 people. They're people who already think like us and believe like us. And so it's not really very missional if you think about it.
If we really want toa be missionaries, we have to think about engaging that M2, an M3 group, which is people that are still in our community. People who are part of our culture, but who don't necessarily think and believe the way that we do. And we have to adapt our missionary engagement to connect. But I would say even with them 1s in M2s, we still need to focus on them. The question to me is who is God calling us to reach as a church?
So it may be that the vast majority of people that's in your community are M100, M2, praise the Lord. They're easier to reach because you're more like them. So when you start getting to M3 and moving to M4, like, those people are really, really difficult to reach. So ideally, you want to be kind of in the M1, M2 space anyway. Ideally.
But we have to get our focus off from what we're doing in here. And we have to say one, who is our target and what are we going to do out there to reach them? And I think we have to think about what we're doing corporately, what we're doing in groups and what we're doing individually and how we are communicating a clear, unified way of our approaching it so that everybody in the church knows how we're doing this. Like, so, for instance, we may hold a big event that we're having on as an outside focused event. It might not even be in our facility, maybe outside, somewhere else.
Okay, that's cool. Now what are we doing as groups inside the church to actually engage that to invite people to participate and then what are we doing as individuals of how we're engaging and creating context for people to consider participating. So we're coordinating our effort in terms of how we do it. Those. I think we have to think in those three levels if we're going to be effective.
And then what is the way that we're moving those people back towards us? Now we did a whole episode on this conversation, but I still think it's really important that we think process as we think about evangelism. How are we gonna engage lost people? Create relationships, move those into deeper relationships, create spiritual thirst to move them towards the church and ultimately towards the gospel. So I think we have to think process as we're moving people in this whole thing.
But we have to define the target. That's the biggest thing. And then we have to think about what is our coordinator effort that we're going to be doing at these three levels to. To engage that target together as a church family. You are referencing episode number 17 of our podcast, which is on outreach and evangelism, the six principles of evangelism.
And the first principle of evangelism is that evangelism is a process or a process, depending on which side of the Canadian border you're on. A process and not an event. One of the other principles that we highlighted in that podcast episode is it principle number five, that God did not call the individual to reach the world, but the church to reach. Yeah. The church is God's team accomplishing his will.
So we really focus on the team effort there. Now, I'll give you another Hugh Halterism here. That kind of stuck with me. And that is even though I've referred to this conversation as missional engagement. He says the minute you use the word missional, you probably lose.
You should use the word missionary ish. We should be doing var is things right because. Because people by and large, they don't really fully understand the word missional, but they understand what a missionary is. And if we as a church are doing things in a missionary way, we're missionary ish in our outreach and in our connection in our community and our collaboration as a church, we have a much better chance of reaching and starting new relationships with people who need to know Jesus. And so we need to think missionary ish.
Yeah, I think that has to be for the whole church. Ok, let's say we get into having these gospel centered community with one another. While gospel is good for us, but it's also really great for those who don't know Jesus. Yet part of the conversation we need to be having at that level with our peers, with one another, who are in community with living for Jesus, is who are we trying to reach together? We need to be having that conversation and then what are we going to do together to reach them?
These are just basic conversations. We need to be having them thinking about it and then acting on it. The same thing is on the corporate level as well as an individual level in your household. Like, Lord, you've put us in this neighborhood. Do we know our neighbors?
Have we invited them over to our home? Have we connected with our kids friends and they go to school together. There's so many avenues that we are already participating. And that's a big thing for me too. Bart.
We talk about this philosophically is that oftentimes people try to create new things to connect with people, and that's okay. I don't necessarily hate it, but there's already stuff you're doing that's connecting you to lost people. How do we redeem that and then work together with others to maximize the opportunity God has already given us to reach the people that are in our life. But we have to refocus our energy outward, not just. And of course that takes a lot of effort because as I mentioned in the previous podcast when we talked about this, is that most of us are so full with our already Christian relationships and our own families, we have no more room for new people who don't know God far from us.
And so we're going to have to make some adjustments for us to have an opportunity within our own hearts to open ourselves up for people who are far from God, both in our neighborhoods and our communities and together corporately as a church family. And we're thinking and we're praying and asking God to use us to be his vehicle to connect with people who need Him. It's so very stretching, especially for longime established churches that have perhaps been stagnant or in decline for some time. For the people in those churches to really shift their thinking, to think like missionaries and to be thinking more missional in the way that they engage with their neighbors and the people that God has brought into their lives. Now, you and I have been in church planting for 25 plus years, and I think for us there's a natural understanding that when you're planting a church, you have no people.
So if you don't go out and meet new people, there are no people in your church. Right? Like that's the primary thing that you have to do. But when you're in a long time established church. I think there's a cultural expectation, especially when you talk, when start talking about baby boomers and older generational folks is that, well, if we just do church well, if we have the right programs, we do the right things, then people will come and find us.
Yeah, but you know, we're a quote Pastor Jeff Bogue from our fellowships national conference a couple of years ago, he said, you know, we're no longer the home team, we're the church is the visiting team now. And so because we're the visit team in our culture, yeah, in our culture, we have to sort of figure out how to. We have to figure out how to play on their turf and go where they are and meet them where they are so that we can..grain ourselves in their, their lives. Relationally. That's ultimately what we need because we need them to know us, like us, trust us.
If we're ever gonna have a legitimate opportunity to communicate the gospel to them, whether that's in a worship service on a Sunday morning or on a cocktail napkin sitting at a coffee shop. Right. In one way or another, we want permission to communicate the gospel. But there's gotta be a certain level of trust. And so when we're doing this missional engagement, these missional activities, the goal isn't always to push the gospel between the eyes down their throat.
It's to how do we build trustworthy relationships with people who don't yet know Jesus so that we can eventually get the permission to go? Absolutely, I think. And that's again back to the philosophy we have to be thinking process. So we're starting with trying to connect with them where they are, build relationships with them, connect them to more people within our faith community who. And build those relationships and then bring them into the community and then get them to hear the gospel when the Lord opens their heart to that.
So we're taking time, working a process and we're thinking about it, but our focus is outward. So we're thinking missional engagement. How are we actually engaging people who are far from God in our communities, outside the church? What are we going to do? And the other thing I think that's kind of reflective of that, and I think I mentioned it in the previous episode as well, is then we have to be ready in expecting that God is actually going to bring some lost people into our church.
Are we ready for them when they come? So we're going to do miss Engagement. We're going to focus on reaching outside our four walls. But as God starts to bring them to us, we need to be ready to receive them and give them a space where they're welcomed and they're comfortable and we're not in the way of them coming to know Jesus, doing everything we can. We're not going to compromise the scripture, the gospel or the Bible, no way, ever.
But we don't want to be the thing in the way of keeping them from moving forward with Jesus. Yeah, I'll make one little side comment, which in and of itself could probably be in another podcast episode, but I'm gonna just throw this out here and leave it and then I'll let you have sort of the final word on this podcast episode. What I do want to caution people from believing or thinking is that putting on events that are missionary ish naturally results in people attending church. You and I, man, the church that we're a part of together. 25 years ago, we used to put on really, really big events.
Really big events. Your brother was really good at putting on big. And there was a time, I think, where we sort of expected that if we put on these really big events that it was naturally gonna result in new people showing up to church the next week or the following week. And the lesson that we learned was we could introduce ourselves to a lot of people at those large events. We could become people, become more aware of our church from those large scale events.
But the large scale events in and of themselves were not ultimately what resulted people in trying our church. 99 out of 100 times it came through a process of people getting to know people in our church, building those trustworthy relationships and eventually coming to church because they saw us as trustworthy. Right. Just because we pulled off the big event wasn't necessarily the catalyst for trying church. Ye, totally.
And the other thing is, to me, and I mentioned this in the previous conversation is, is we have to think about our missional engagement. What is the process? What are we doing to move people from point of contact to the next step, to the next step, to the next step? It's not just enough to connect with people who are outside the church, even relationally, which is awesome that you have now that we have. What are we going to do with them?
How do we move them from the relational connection that we made to a deeper relationship with us and with others? And then how do we move them from that to a move towards spiritual interest and thirst? And then how do we move them into the church context? How do we move them to the gospel? So I think we have to be thinking the whole process and we have to be intentional about how we're moving people and we have to have a plan for how we're doing it together, corporately, group wise, and as individuals for the church.
We're gonna wrap this up. That was a pretty good conversation. We could talk about this stuff all day long. This is great. Y could Gospel centered fellowship, missional engagement, or being missionary?
Ish our two essential ingredients for a church that's wanting to renew, revitalize, or restart. Hope that this has been helpful for you, Nathan. Anything else that you wanna add before we call this one done? There's a lot more, but that's all for now. All right, that's all for now.
Hey, thanks again for tuning in to the Revitalize My Church podcast again. If you haven't ever subscribed, make sure that you do that. Leave us a rating in a review wherever you listen to the podcast or share this episode with someone that you think might find it to be helpful. Until then, I'm Bart Blair for Nathan Bryant. We'll see you next time By.
