Tonight’s Elders Meeting — and New Poll

PROPOSAL

A two-day seminar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama beginning Friday morning and ending Saturday at 5:00, to make certain our guests can return home in time for church on Sunday. Classes would be taught by elders, ministers, and members at the University Church (and a few special guests) on a variety of topics focused on practical guidance on how to be the church God wants.

POLL

(I realize you can’t make a firm commitment without a date. This is just to determine if the idea is worth pursuing.)

Most weeks, the elders at my church (I’m one of them) and the pulpit and involvement minister meet for an hour before church on Wednesday night. I thought I’d share this week’s meeting so I can ask a question.

The woman who chairs our ladies Bible class met with us at the beginning of the meeting. She reported that their steering committee wants to change the school supply drive this year. For the last several years we’ve asked the church to buy school supplies for the kids at a nearby elementary school — in an area of deep poverty. We invite the kids and their parents to our building, provide a free pancake breakfast, and distribute supplies. It’s been very successful the last several years, and we were among the first churches in town to take this effort on.

But now several other churches and other organizations are doing the same thing, and some families get two or three sets of supplies while others get none. Therefore, the class proposes to change the program to adopt a different school — one that’s been overlooked in the past — and to gain some new synergies. There’s a new couple in town that’s bought a home across the street from an affordable housing development (a housing project) so they can minister to the kids in that project. A few couples in our church are praying about possibly doing the same thing, joining them in this effort.

Therefore, the class wants to adopt the school that educates the children in this project and distribute school supplies in this couple’s backyard at a barbecue. This couple already tutors some 20 or 30 of these kids. Hopefully, we can provide additional personal involvement in the lives of these children and make a difference.

Fewer children will be served, but they should all receive all the supplies they need and the group will be of a size where some real personal relationships can be formed.

After a few questions — to be sure we coordinate with other churches and nonprofits so no kids get unnecessarily overlooked — the elders gladly approved the change and thanked the women for their excellent work.

Next, we took up the missions program. We were fortunate to have received about $30,000 above budget in this year’s annual missions contribution, and we’ve been working for a year to establish a new strategy for more effectively doing missions as part of the work of the church, rather than just sending money.

The idea kicked around was to work toward supporting a domestic mission and a foreign mission, located where we can send volunteers and otherwise support both efforts. Both efforts would be team-based, that is, church plants, rather than the single-missionary model. Experts we’ve consulted with make clear that in today’s world, team missions are far more effective than single-missionary efforts. We’d do both alongside a supporting organization that can provide expertise and training to help make sure the efforts have the best possible chance for success.

As we talked though these ideas, we realized that our college mission trips have led many of our college students into mission work, a number of whom are presently being supported by our church. We considered how to best coordinate the teen and college works so that students have a chance to actually do Bible studies and convert people before they graduate, as these experiences in the past have led many students into ministry and missions.

Finally, we discussed Church Unique and our ongoing effort to set the church’s vision and strategy. As we talked about it, we realized that we’d just been talking about vision and strategy — as God moves the church more and more into mission and service — evangelism and social justice. We see God’s Spirit touching hearts and moving families and students to make life-altering, sacrificial decisions to further the Kingdom. The question therefore isn’t so much where we will lead the church as where God is leading the church and how we can best participate in what God is already doing.

At this point, several of the group had to leave for classes, but a few of us hung around to reflect further on the night’s conversation. One elder shared a conversation he and his wife had just had. She said that if they’d stayed in their home town years ago, she’d have been a teacher, she would be retired, and they wouldn’t have to work. But, he said, obviously deeply moved, if she conclude that if they’d done that, they’d never have been a part of the University Church — and that was worth far more than getting to retire early.

We then asked, how do we share what we have here? God’s doing great things and most of us are from churches that aren’t experiencing these wonderful things. How do we share what God has given us with other congregations? How do we spread the word — not so much about how to grow a church but how to be the kind of church that, as is true of one family, people will drive 1 1/2 hours two ways (3 hours round trip) every Sunday just to be a part of the congregation?

The elder who’d spoken earlier about giving up early retirement to be here suggested that we do the seminar that I’ve been talking about on the blog — a 2-day seminar taught by elders, ministers, and members from University Church and a few gifted men from some other churches we know. It was suggested that I poll the readership.

And so, a proposal and a poll —