Bringing Serving Back

Someone named “anonymous” (it’s weird how many people are named that) left a question last week asking about serving/volunteer issues, especially with us now having three portable campuses. He (or she?) asked how we encourage people to serve, and whether people see the staff as the one’s who are supposed to do everything, and if we hear a lot of “If we had a building…” So …

(1) I did a post on the issue of how we encourage people to serve. You can check it out here: http://www.vinceantonucci.com/2007/09/serve-this.html

(2) We definitely haven’t gotten this one all figured out, and often hear people around the office saying things like, “I need a few more volunteers!”

(3) We started our church out too staff-driven (in large part because our Core Group/Launch Team were basically all non-Christians. And so I would strongly encourage those who are going to be starting churches – get everyone serving, and give high-level leadership positions to the high-capacity volunteer leaders God has given you.

(4) But … no … we do not hear a lot of, “Isn’t the staff supposed to do this,” or “If we only had a building.” And this is the beauty of reaching people who are truly unchurched non-Christians. They have virtually no expectations of church! They believe what you tell them! And so if you say that everyone is supposed to serve, and that the staff are equippers of volunteers, they say, “Oh, okay.” They DON’T say, “But at my last church…” because they don’t have a last church. They DON’T say, “But the way I’ve always heard it…” because they haven’t heard it, and if they have, they’ve already rejected it. They DON’T say, “If we only had a building…” because, well, we don’t have a building. We are a church without a building and so, for most of them, it’s never even occured to them that we could (or should) have a building. And for many others, the idea of having a building would be a negative, because it would make us more like other churches, and they don’t want that. I seriously could write about this all day. Reaching lost people instead of saved people saves you from a WORLD of problems. (It will also give you a whole different set of problems, but they are, in my opinion, the kinds of problems you WANT to deal with.)

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