Creating Authentic Mission Statements

In my ministry role I often assist pastors and churches trying to revision what the future might be for their ministry. Often they find themselves in a challenging moment and they know they cannot continue with the status quo. They know they need a fresh vision to take them to a new level of ministry. They often have an idea of what that vision should be but need help articulating it in a way that people can rally around.

I also get to work with a lot of new churches. These new churches are in a unique position where they get to craft a brand new vision instead of trying to rediscover or revitalize an old one.

Both scenarios are very exciting to me and it is fulfilling to watch a vision emerge from a group of people united in faith and service to Christ. Many churches, whether new or old, choose to express that vision with some catchy mission or vision statement that encapsulates all they are trying to express in some succinct way.

Normally these statements are catchy and creative, worthy of being on a bumper sticker or a twitter post. But I must confess, there are times when I find mission statements less helpful than they should be. For mission statements to be helpful, they have to actually express the real mission of the church. They can’t just be lofty theological statements that sound good to theologians but mean nothing to the community. It has to be a statement the typical person in the community who has not been to seminary and might not be particularly religious will understand. 

For example, recently I saw one that said "to the glory of God and for the advancement of his kingdom we will take the gospel to every corner of the earth." To a seminary student that actually sounds like a wonderful mission statement. But to the average person on the street who is not quite sure what the glory of God is or what the advancement of His kingdom means, it is just a bunch of nonsense words. Even to a long term Christian who understands what the words mean, there is a real question about whether this church can really take the gospel to the farthest corners of the world. If they are like most churches, they are probably thinking more about how they can solve hunger right in their own community or address homelessness in their own community, rather than around the world. I’m not saying that a church should not have a huge world wide vision. I’m just saying that an effective mission/vision statement has to be something the people in the community can grab hold of. Unless your community is an international community that thinks about the whole world, a world wide vision might communicate far less effectively than you think.

If you are going to craft an authentic mission statements, start with an examination of stuff your church has actually done frequently in the last six months. Then look at how your church spends it money. Those two things will reveal your REAL mission. If you real mission is not what it should be, a catchy phrase of what you wish it would be won't change much. You will have to go deeper and change your real values before you can create an authentic mission statement. That may take longer than you want it to, but it will be a better statement in the end, one you will actually work toward achieving.

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Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves at the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New England. He has been a pastor, church planter, denominational leader and author in New England for more than 20 years. He is a happy husband, a proud father and adoring grandfather. He is a cancer survivor and believes that God works powerfully through times of suffering. He writes extensively and you can find all of his books at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Terry-W.-Dorsett/e/B00405U4NY

Why Should We Join A Church?

Hebrews 10:25 - "Not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near."

A few weeks I wrote a post asking if church membership really matters. You can read that post here. I was surprised how many people shared it and commented on it through social media. The post talked about churches that have a lot of names on their membership rolls of people who no longer attend and the reluctance to remove those names because it makes the church sound "bigger" than it really is.

In this post I want to touch on the same subject, but from a different perspective. In my previous post I focused on the perspective of the church who had all those extra names. Now I want to focus on the individuals who have their names on the rolls of churches they no longer attend. Here is a challenging question, why did we join a particular church to begin with? Was it to please our parents or grandparents? Was it because other young people our age were going through the confirmation/membership process and we just followed the crowd? Were we looking for new friends? Were we looking for business connections that a faith community might offer? Were we looking for a place to have a wedding, funeral or other family experience? None of those reasons are necessarily wrong. But they are probably not the purest motivations for joining a church. When we join churches for these reasons, we are seldom as loyal, committed, and involved as we should be. Joining a church for the wrong motivation often results in an attitude of what can we get from the church instead of what we can contribute to it. We might find ourselves gone for weeks, or months, at a time until a need comes up in our lives that the church might meet.  This is not healthy for us, nor is it healthy for the church.

So why should we join a church? The main reason to join a church is because we agree with their mission and purpose and we want to help move that mission and purpose forward. That does not mean we have to agree with everything in the church, but it does mean that we support the overall direction the church is moving in. It also means we need to do our part to help the church fulfill that mission and purpose. A church filled with people who have this type of motivation will be a healthy church and one that is making a real difference in the community.

Sadly, too many of us want all the benefits of having a church be there for us when we need it, but too few of us are willing to do the work to keep the church healthy between our times of need. That is not realistic. Though churches may be able to eek out some way to survive under those conditions, those churches will not be healthy or making the impact in their community they could be making. 

If we are going to join a church, we must be willing to rearrange our schedule so we are present more than we are absent. We must be willing to rearrange our budget so our financial contributions are enough to actually make a difference. We must be willing to rearrange our leisure time so we can volunteer. This is what it takes to make a church healthy. Yes, it is a big commitment. It is that very commitment that keeps many people from joining a church. But the challenging question we must ask ourselves is, why should we expect other people to do all the work to keep the church there for us so we can just pop in from time to time, enjoy the service, and then disappear for another 3 months? We need to be givers, not takers. We need to be contributors, not users. 

If we have found a church whose mission and purpose we agree with, then we should go through whatever process is required to become members. Then instead of just being a name on a roll, let's be the best members we can be. If we have not yet found such a church, then keep looking because when we find a healthy church and join it, it is a powerful experience worth all the adjustments in time, giving and volunteering.

Lord, help us find a great church and make a genuine commitment to it. Amen.

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Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves at the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New England. He has been a pastor, church planter, denominational leader and author in New England for more than 20 years. He is a happy husband, a proud father and adoring grandfather. He is a cancer survivor and believes that God works powerfully through times of suffering. He writes extensively and you can find all of his books at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Terry-W.-Dorsett/e/B00405U4NY

Moving Past Church Conflict

Commit your way to the Lord, trust in him, and he will act. Psalm 37:5

It was one of those meetings that I did not really want to attend. But I did not have a choice. It was part of my job as a denominational leader. The meeting was to help a church overcome a very significant conflict that had resulted in the pastor being dismissed. As a result, a significant portion of the congregation had left the church. The remaining members were in a lot of pain. They were discouraged. They were frustrated. Unfortunately, this was not the first time that this church had something like this happen. Several years before a similar event had happened and it had taken years to overcome the fall out.

When a church goes through such a situation, one of the greatest challenges is the lack of trust. Hurt people don’t trust each other. Sometimes they don’t trust themselves because they feel like they may have said or done something that made the situation worse. Though they often don’t want to admit it, there is even a certain lack of trust in God.

I think this lack of trust is one of the greatest things to overcome in a church that has been hurt. Though each situation is different, it is appropriate to create healthy accountability systems in an attempt to keep such situations from happening again, but there is no way to create a system that guarantees the problem will not reemerge. People make mistakes. By-laws, church constitutions, policy manuals can help set boundaries, but in the end, they lack the power to make people do the right thing. At some point, we simply have to trust each other. And we must accept the reality that from time to time our trust might be violated. We must be determined not to let the occasional violation of our trust in someone at church become the context of our entire faith experience.

That is easy to say. It is hard to do.

The only way I know to do that is to keep our eyes on the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only one who will never let us down. We must realize that the church is HIS church. He will build the church. He will make it what He wants it to be. If we focus on Jesus, it will help us move past the hurt and pain that sometimes comes with being a leader in the church.

Lord, help me focus on serving You and learn to release the pain that church conflicts have brought into my life. Help me be able to trust others again. Amen.

Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves at the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New England. He has been a pastor, church planter, denominational leader and author in New England for more than 20 years. He is a happy husband, a proud father and adoring grandfather. He is a cancer survivor and believes that God works powerfully through times of suffering. He writes extensively and you can find all of his books at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Terry-W.-Dorsett/e/B00405U4NY

Does Church Membership Matter?

Hebrews 10:24-25 “And let us watch out for one another to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.”

The first church I served after I graduated seminary ran between 200 to 250 in worship on Sunday morning. But we had over 900 members on the roll. That means we had three times as many members missing on a typical Sunday than we had present. While some of those missing members were elderly and no longer able to attend, hundreds of them were simply missing in action. Some of those missing members were still in the community and would occasionally show up for Easter or Christmas services. But many we had not seen in years. I am not sure the FBI could have found half of our missing members! Yet they remained on our membership roll. I remember wondering why we just didn’t cross all those names off our roll.

Though at the time I would not have wanted to admit it, I suspect that the reason that we kept all those missing members on the role was because it sounded a whole lot better to say we had more than 900 members than to admit we only had 250. Years later I look back on that experience and realize that the goal of our church was not just to add names to the roll, it was to multiply Christ-followers through evangelism, discipleship and missions. Adding names to the roll did not accomplish that goal. For a name on a roll to have meaning and purpose, the individual represented by that name has to be really involved in the church and growing in their faith. Our church had a lot of names on a roll, but most of those names meant little to the life and vitality of that church or to accomplishing the mission God had given that church. As harsh as it may sound, those names were empty of meaning and value.

There are millions of people across America who have their names on the roll of a church but who do not attend with any degree of regularity. My encouragement to those who find themselves in such a situation is to return to your church, roll up your sleeves and become active. Not just active in the organization of the church, but active in fulfilling the mission of the church. Be the Christian you claim to be! My encouragement to those who are in leadership of a church is to ask yourselves if it is time to meet with your long-term inactive members to determine their real commitment to Christ and the mission of your church. If they are no longer committed to the mission of the church, remove their names from the roll. Not out of anger or spite, but out of integrity and honesty. Membership should mean something. But if we continue to carry more names on the roll who are not active than who are, we have devalued membership and made it mean little. We must fix this. It might make our churches smaller on paper, but is highly unlikely to reduce the number of people actually involved. In fact, I think it will increase the number of those who are involved because when inactive members are challenged to become active again, some of them will rise to the occasion and accept that challenge. And that is good for both the individual and the church.

Lord, help our connection to our church be meaningful both to the church and to us. Amen.

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Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves at the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New England. He has been a pastor, church planter, denominational leader and author in New England for more than 20 years. He is a happy husband, a proud father and adoring grandfather. He is a cancer survivor and believes that God works powerfully through times of suffering. He writes extensively and you can find all of his books at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Terry-W.-Dorsett/e/B00405U4NY

Flannel Graph Memories

Proverbs 9:9 “Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still; teach the righteous and they will add to their learning.” (NIV)

When I was 15 years old I became a volunteer for a ministry called Child Evangelism Fellowship. As a volunteer I helped teach a weekly Good News Club. The club met after school and helped children, mostly from non-religious homes, understand the stories of the Bible, and especially the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Part of my training as a volunteer was learning how to use flannel graph to illustrate the stories. I collected a number of Bible scenes painted on to large pieces of flannel and had file folders full of various biblical characters that I could put on the scenes as a visual to tell the Bible stories. I had not seen flannel graph before and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I used those visual aids over and over again to help children learn biblical truth. Even after I was no longer working with Child Evangelism Fellowship, I kept all the different characters and scenes and used them to teach in a variety of settings, including to teens and adults, for many years. They were very helpful in illustrating the stories I was teaching.

That was 35 years ago. Now, I don’t know anyone who still uses flannel graph. Now we use video, PowerPoint, and interactive games on I-pads and cell phones as visual aids in our teaching. Every couple of years some new technology comes along and changes the way we teach. As a lifelong learner, I try to stay up to date. But sometimes I struggle to figure out how to communicate the message in whatever way is currently fashionable.

To be honest, there are times I miss my old flannel graph scenes and characters. They were easy to use and I was comfortable with them. Many children came to faith in Christ through them and so there was a real emotional and spiritual attachment in my mind to those teaching tools. But there came a day when I realized they were no longer as effective as they once were. Staying up to date with teaching skills is always be a challenge. At times I’m tempted to revert back to those old flannel graph visuals and do things like I did 35 years ago. In many ways it would be easier for me. But I always resist that temptation because I realize it would not actually communicate the message of the Gospel as effectively as I would like it to.

The question I ask myself often is “Do I want things to be easy for me or do I want people to actually understand the message?” If the goal is for me to teach the message of Christ, then I have to constantly upgrade my communication skills and abilities. I have to learn new teaching techniques that actually get the point across. I cannot just rely on my past training or experience. While the past does have value, I cannot live in the past. I must be a lifelong learning in order to continue the calling God put on my life as a 15-year-old to teach others Jesus. 

What about you? Are you a lifelong learner? When was the last time you upgraded your efforts to share the word of God? Ongoing training is essential and the message of the Gospel is worth the time it takes to learn how to share it well.

Lord, help us be lifelong learners so we can be as effective as possible in sharing Your Word with others. Amen.

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Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves at the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New England. He has been a pastor, church planter, denominational leader and author in New England for more than 20 years. He is a happy husband, a proud father and adoring grandfather. He is a cancer survivor and believes that God works powerfully through times of suffering. He writes extensively and you can find all of his books at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Terry-W.-Dorsett/e/B00405U4NY