Accountability Team / Prayer Partner

Question: Do you have an accountability team/prayer partner in your present church?

Response: If by accountability partner you mean someone I meet with on a regular basis that I report to regarding my habits and thought life, then the answer is no. However, I do have several friends that know they are free to ask me about anything at any time. Usually they never have to ask. If I am struggling in an area I usually approach them. Most of these friends are pastors.

Within the local church, our Elders pray for and with both, Mendy and me regularly. Among my leaders here, there are some we are closer to than others. We share our more personal prayer items with them.

Outside of New Life Alamosa Mendy and I have two couples to whom we usually turn for prayer about major issues in our lives. These couples also pray for us regularly just as a matter of supporting us.

On a somewhat related matter, one of the things we are moving toward here in Alamosa is to put in place what are called “Overseers.” These Overseers would consist of three to five pastors of other churches that I would nominate to our elders for selection as overseers. Their role would be to pray for the church and for me, but should there be some question of inappropriate behavior on my part or a failure to perform my duties, our elders would contact the Overseers. The overseers would investigate the matter and depending upon their findings, they would either exonerate me or determine appropriate disciplinary measures. In a worst case scenario they could remove me as Senior Pastor. I like this approach for several reasons.

1. It’s high on accountability.
2. It protects the congregation from having to discipline their pastor. In those situations where congregations have had no other vehicle to rely on but their personal discernment, the church often suffers horribly and seldom recovers.
3. It also protects the church from a politicized process.

While it is certainly not a requirement, at some point I will visit with RCF’s MLT about putting a similar process in place, should I become your pastor.

Inspiration

Question: How do you know the difference between something God inspired and self inspired?

Response: After all the years I’ve been a believer, I still struggle with this one from time to time, however there are several things I keep in mind.

1. Is the inspiration consistent with the written Word of God? God will never lead you to do something that is inconsistent with His word.
2. If it is something God is calling me to do, is it consistent with the spiritual gifts he has given me?
3. Very often, when God is inspiring me to do something, if I look back into the previous months, maybe years, I can see a pattern of thinking or events that has led up to the moment in question.
4. Even though I am not always sure, there are times that I am sure. Those times have to do more with how the inspiration comes. I can’t describe it. It just comes in a way that I know that I know it’s God. That’s very helpful when the inspiration might require immediate action with no time to go through the normal patterns I might employ to discern whether or not it is God’s voice or mine.
5. What does my wife think?
6. What do those whose counsel I’ve learned to trust say?
7. What do my intercessors say?
8. Last but not least, when I know that I am working hard at hearing God’s voice, I trust his ability to speak and not my ability to hear.

Child Evangelism Fellowship

Question: How familiar are you with the ministry of CEF? How do you see the ministry we do through CEF fitting into the "Simple Church" model?

Response: I am more familiar with CEF (Child Evangelism Fellowship) than most parachurch ministries. I helped out a small church for a while when their pastor resigned. They were connected to CEF and I had several discussions with their CEF missionary. I think it is a wonderful and important ministry doing great things. I particularly like the Bible Club idea. I think that approach is much more effective in reaching kids, and parents, than most of the outreach things we do in children’s ministries. I am thrilled that RCF obviously has a relationship with CEF.

How does it correlate with a process-based ministry design? First of all, we would have to have our process defined before we could identify where and if any particular ministry fits into a model. We don’t, so that makes it difficult to answer. However, we are talking about a model for defining how we will function as Ranch Community Fellowship. Parachurch organizations, by definition, are organizations that function alongside of but outside the structure of a local church. Therefore the model we define to organize the church will not directly impact CEF. Obviously, though, both want to bless the other, so how does that happen?

Even though we have yet to define a process that RCF will commit to for making disciples, we know that every disciple needs to be in ministry. Ministry is not optional, so part of the process we define will consider how we move people into hands-on ministry. To help people embrace ministry, we might find ourselves putting together a menu of ministry options that would be put before people, with one of those options being to join a team of people who are working with Child Evangelism Fellowship.

I am not sure how RCF and CEF currently relate to each other. However I am confident about this. The more intentional we become in defining and implementing our process for making disciples, the more people we will see getting involved in ministry. That means there will be an even greater number of people that will come alongside those already involved in CEF to help with that ministry.

Baptism

Question: What are your views on water baptism, as Pastor, when and how would you direct this discipleship process?

Response: I grew up in a tradition that practiced infant baptism as well as believer’s baptism (baptism after professing faith in Christ). As a young man in college, I began to feel the need to be baptized by my own choice rather than the choice of my parents and for that baptism to be by immersion. One night in an Assembly of God Church on Kanawha Blvd. in Charleston, WV I shared those feelings with an Elder of that church. He suggested there was no reason for me not make that move and since the baptistery was full, why not do it right now. I took him up on his suggestion and it was one of the most powerful moments of my young life.

Largely due to that experience as well as my understanding of God’s process for making disciples, I will administer baptism only by immersion and only for those who have come to faith in Christ. Recently I did make an exception though.

I baptized a 90 year old woman not long ago. She was concerned about her physical ability to dip down under water and then to come back up without injury, even though I would have been helping her. In her case, we sat her in a chair. I filled up a five gallon bucket with water, and poured it over her. She beamed. The church cheered. It was a precious moment in her life and one of my most precious memories of my time here in Alamosa. If I had been legalistic on the form of baptism, we, and she, would have never had that moment. I am confident God took delight in the moment, as well, for he is always more concerned with what is going on in the heart than he is the exterior form of things.

I’m not sure what you mean by how would I “direct this discipleship process?” If I did not answer the question in what I wrote above, please send it again with a little more explanation to AskPastorEd@gmail.com. Thanks

World Evangelism

Question: In view of the Simple Church Process. how do you see world evangelism working at RCF Church ?

Response: The ultimate goal of a process-based ministry is a life that is truly transformed by the grace of God. Perhaps the greatest evidence of that transformation is when people involve themselves in helping transformation occur in the lives of others. We must always be involved in making disciples, and while we are most responsible for those nearest us, making disciples knows no geographical, political, racial, or religious boundaries. When it comes to world evangelism, I think the US church has a greater responsibility to make that happen than the church in any other nation.

There are some staggering statistics out there regarding the number of full-time Christian workers in the United States compared to the number of full-time Christian workers in other nations. The same is true for financial resources. No nation on the planet is already as evangelized as the United States yet more resources in terms of people and money are spent on the US than anywhere else. The Gospel message is readily available in the United States to anyone who wants to hear it, but that is not true elsewhere in the world. With the vast resources God has granted the US church, we have a greater opportunity and responsibility to reach others. Having said that, how do I see the RCF role working within the context of a process-based ministry?

I need to start with a disclaimer. Since we have not yet defined the process and their corresponding ministries, you need to understand that this is only an idea and not a, “It’s going to happen this way,” answer.

The church needs to structure and facilitate mission to other places. If I correctly understand what you are doing with your Mexico ministry, what I mean by “structure” is very much like that. The church structures a mission opportunity in which everyone is invited to participate. By facilitate, I mean the church allows and encourages individual members to develop their own mission opportunities and recruit a team from within the church to support them in that.

By the way, I like what I think I am seeing with the Mexico ministry. I think I am seeing not a one-time shot but an ongoing partnership in ministry. It also appears to me that a significant portion of your resources for world mission is going into this particular ministry. I like that. I am much more in favor of concentrating resources in one area to make a significant impact than I am in favor of diffusing our impact by spreading them out over many places.

Having said that, I would still like to develop a relationship with a ministry that is strategically focusing on a people group connected to the 10/40 window. The nations within the 10/40 window are the most under-evangelized people in the world. If I am the pastor of RCF, I want our church to be making a difference in some of the darkest places on Earth.

Simple Church

Question: What is meant by “Simple Church”, and how does it fit into your understanding of how we “do” church?

Response: “Simple Church” is the title of a book by Thom S. Rainer & Eric Geiger that I recently read and found helpful. However, the concepts found in that book were in my heart long before a friend introduced me to it. Before having ever heard of the book, God had led me to “get back to basics” so to speak. I’ll get back to what I mean by that in a second, but it will be helpful to give you a little background first.

A couple of years ago, I found myself struggling on where to focus my energy. That struggle was in regard to both where to focus on ministry within the church and what ministries to connect to outside of the church. Few people realize how much it takes to support to just one ministry within the church. The ministry objective has to be defined. The leadership structure has to be determined. Leaders have to be recruited and trained. Funding, both in terms of how much and who controls it has to be clarified. How do we publicize it? Who is our target audience? What are the reporting structures? This is to say nothing of leadership’s involvement when some sort of conflict or misunderstanding arises.

Multiply all those aspects I mentioned above, plus the aspects I might have left out, by each ministry in the church. Now add to that all the worthwhile, well-intentioned ministries and organizations that focus on people outside of the local congregation and you can easily see every pastor’s and every church’s dilemma. There is no way to do everything that will bless the heart of God and be a blessing to others, so how do we make those choices?

There is an old quote attributed to Oswald Chambers who supposedly said. “Good and better are enemies of the best.” My personal belief is many of our churches, including churches for which I have been responsible, have neglected the best in favor of the good and better. The primary purpose of the church is to win people to a life saving relationship with God that is made possible through Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit. That is the best, and we have neglected making that happen by focusing on the good and better.

Now this is where God’s leading me “back to the basics” comes into play. God drew my attention to Acts 2:42 in a new way.

Acts 2:42 (NIV) ⁴² They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

I began to realize that these four processes (becoming biblically literate, developing committed relationships with other believers, worshipping God, praying) were the core processes or activities of the church. As I read past verse 42 I saw acts of God’s power and love, including evangelism, manifesting in that first gathering of the church. My conclusion was that their relationship with God was nurtured in such powerful ways that their lives overflowed with his love and power. Another way of understanding this is to see it as God replacing our hearts with his heart, and then nurturing his heart within us so that our lives overflow with expressions of his love and power. (Ezekiel 36:25-27) That is true ministry.

So long before I ever heard of, let alone read, “Simple Church,” God had put it in my heart to streamline the ministry of the church to impact people from the inside out. I was already trying to articulate how these things fit together. So when I finally came in contact with the book, “Simple Church,” it only confirmed for me what God had already put in my heart.

The order that happened in is important. It means that as I pursue the establishment of a process-based ministry, I am not trying to implement a good idea I read about somewhere and thought I would try. I’ve been there and done that. It never works. Rather I am being true to what God is leading me to do. I am pursuing a ministry model God has first put within my heart.

I am grateful to the authors for their research and clear articulation about how God is moving in other churches. Their book has helped me understand and articulate some things about what God was already putting in my heart. However, I am not committed to a Simple Church model. I am committed to a process-based model. The best writing I have found to date on that is found in “Simple Church.”

That may seem like an insignificant distinction to some, but I don’t think so. What it means for me is that my conviction for how we do ministry is based on the revelation of God and not the research of a couple of authors. Now I ask you, which is the more sure foundation, what God is doing in other places, or the personal revelation of God for your ministry. When it is the research of others, your foundation and approach to ministry only lasts until it does not seem to work or the next good book. When it is the revelation of God, you can go forward with a much greater conviction and confidence in ministry.