Well, welcome back to leadership training. Our topic today is member service in the church, but we're going to look at this in a little broad way. We're going to look at member service in the church, and then we're going to look at how do we decide as leadership what to do. So how do members serve and then how do we decide what we and they do. So let me open in prayer and we will get started. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have given us your church, that you have oriented us toward you. You've given us the means of the preaching of the word and prayer and the sacraments as a means that you use to fortify us, to fortify our faith, and the means you use to draw your people near. And I pray that you would help us as we look at these things and other things that are done in the church that are meant to undergird and support these things, that you would give us wisdom, clarity for how we are structured and understanding, and how as leaders in the church we are to cast vision and set up systems to that end. So we pray that you would bless our time this morning and help us to glorify you in everything that we do and say. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Okay, so we've written a lot about various topics and I have some material and so that's what I've put before you today. We're going to largely look at these things and I'm going to do a little bit of reading from sections of these papers so that we can just have some understanding and then talk about it as we go. And we're going to start with the paper on the roles of women in the church. So pull that one out first and I'll give you them in order. So we're going to do women, ministries and structure, and then some other things. So let's start there. So oftentimes In churches that have a biblical understanding of the roles of men and women in the home and in the church, the culture, the outside world can view that as overly patriarchal or not valuing women as people made in the image of God with gifts and jobs ordained by God to glorify Him can be viewed at times to diminish other people, especially women. And so we wrote this paper back in 2014. Actually, Bill Marsh, our prior pastor, wrote most of this. And I think it's some important things to shape how we, the statement that we make, especially in the current culture, and distinguishing ourselves as a church that have a biblical understanding of the roles of men and women. So oftentimes, you'll see things that are a complementarian view and an egalitarian view. And sometimes that gets framed as, the egalitarian position sometimes can get framed as, we believe that men and women are equal. Now, does the complementarian position, that there's different roles, believe that men and women are not equal? No, of course not, right? But oftentimes that's how the discussion gets framed, that we believe that men and women are equal from the egalitarian side. The Complementarian says that both men and women are made in the image of God and have important jobs. They're just different. And the Bible tells us that. It's clear if we understand how things operate, that that's the way things are. And things get sideways really quick in families and in churches if those things get confused. We wrote this paper to make that clear, but also to speak directly to situations that can be assumed based on our position. So that first paragraph there is a great summary. of God's plan in creating men and women. And he points to Ephesians 5. I'm going to read this here. The roles of men and women, halfway through the first paragraph, the roles of men and women are beautifully complementary in the family and in the church. In both of these God-ordained spheres, men are commanded to follow Christ in laying down their lives to serve their wives and the family. Straight out of Ephesians 5, love your wife as Christ loved the church. In the same way, elders and deacons are to lay down their lives in service to the body of Christ, referencing Acts chapter 20. Wives are called to lovingly submit to their husbands in the same way that all members of a congregation should submit to the Lord, to their leaders, for those that would have to give an account, Hebrews 13. So, right off the bat, the session is clear in Christ's covenant, this is the second little paragraph there, that the offices, the Bible to be clear in its teaching that the offices of rule of teaching in the office are to be filled by men. And this is 1 Timothy 2, 12, referencing there that no man is to, or no woman is to teach or have authority over a man. These are the offices of minister, elder, and deacon. So we mentioned before in our discussion of the diaconate that we have to make that statement, and this paper was meant to clarify that decision, that the office of deacon at Christ's covenant would be male only. As in the ARP, they give us that choice to be able to decide as a session. As we talked about last week, some make that argument. We don't hold to that, but we recognize that it can be made. So, yeah. No, no, yeah, go. As we go through this, ask any questions you want. I don't disagree with that by any stretch, but I'm just wondering what is the logic to connect 1 Timothy 2 to the deacon role? You wouldn't connect 1 Timothy 2 to the deacon role necessarily, but the 1 Timothy 2 is just to highlight elder and then also other teaching responsibilities, and we define that a little bit later about At the point where a young boy is, it can be confusing as to whether a boy or a man, we make it, we try to make it clear that we, so anybody above 8th grade, arbitrary choice, we want male teachers. But that's not specifically tying. It would be 1 Timothy 3 and Titus chapter 3 that kind of ties, that seems to tie, we talked about this last week, that seems to tie the qualifications for elder and deacon together. Not to say that women can't serve in roles that are maybe appointed by the deacons for service and care, but the ordained office is male only. Okay, so second paragraph there, this position should not be misconstrued as depreciating the wonderful giftedness of the women of our congregation. Indeed, we believe that they will most flourish when they are joyfully filling the countless roles biblically open to them in the life of the church. Further, the session encourages our thinking on specific decisions to be shaped by scripture. Neither pre-modern culture nor current culture should be normative. That's just a caveat statement, which I think is helpful to understand that we value women. Now, the next paragraph here, this highlights the need for all to serve. So, roles in the life of the congregation that do not involve teaching or direct ecclesiastical authority should be filled by the most qualified and available people regardless of gender. So this is an important, an important thing. If we have, we recognize that there are women and men that are gifted in areas that churches need wisdom and help in. And we want the most qualified people. If there's something to do at the church, a good example would be finance teams. We've had, Eric is serving as our treasurer right now. Val has done that in the past. May Andrews did it before that for years and years. We've got a facility team. My wife is on that committee because of her building experience over the many years. Whatever people are gifted, where God has gifted people, we want to use people in that area. And so hopefully that's clear. Now, the fourth paragraph here is also important, can be misunderstood in our culture. We believe the Bible clearly teaches that wives are to submit to their husbands. Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, et cetera. It is a gross misunderstanding of Scripture when this principle is extended to the distorted notion that every woman must submit to every man. Is that clear? Okay, good. It's not so clear. In fact, it's not so clear to the watching world. Many in our culture would view our church, our denomination, the Bible as Men are superior to women and women are to be under the thumb of every man and especially in the current moment where all of the Stirrings around I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about politics and all that stuff, but you can certainly see that the quick view is that if you believe that a man should be a a God-ordained role of a leadership position, and God precludes, for His reasons, women from that role, and that means that all kinds of conclusions can be drawn from that that are incorrect. Women are inferior, etc., which is clearly not true. Okay, so then what do you do with that? So the session says, okay, we have to make decisions. Women teach multiple Sunday school classes, but in some level you have to make a decision about teaching men. We don't have women teaching our men's or our adult Sunday school classes. However, it would be, we don't have women teaching teaching from the scriptures or teaching in the Lord. However, it would be appropriate. We've done it in the past where, for example, Cary gave us some instruction in singing, how to sing. We did that earlier. In the past, we've done a similar thing with music where our previous pianist, Tina, talked about how to read notes out of the hymnal. Those things are teaching, explaining, but it's not exhorting from the scriptures, nor exercising ecclesiastical authority. It's sharing an expertise in a certain area that's useful for us as we worship. But the arbitrary decision is Sunday school classes, eighth grade, which basically means our middle school and high school classes are taught by males, which would be the preference. So, I wanted to set that up up front because the rest of this is assuming those kind of quick points. Any questions on this one? The rest of it is the Danvers Statement, which is helpful, and we just, Pastor Marsh at the time wanted to recognize that we affirm that. Yeah, so we wrote it, at the time we had, at the time that was our division point. Now we have a middle school class and a high school class and so we, because it overlaps, I mean we, technically we should revisit and make that clear as we, when we have divisions in age. But at the time that this was written, we had one class that was kind of older kids and then younger kids were through the eighth grade. That's the reason, but right now we would apply it as that out of the elementary curriculum is how we'd apply it now. So, okay. Turn with me in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter four, please. The next paper we're going to look at is on the ministries and structure of the church. So the first thing we're going to talk about is how we do things in the church, and the second thing we're going to talk about is how do we decide what to do. and how we structure. So we all recognize that the church does more than just hold a worship service, right? So how do we understand how to, and there's also things that have to be done to support a worship service, like a nursery, and when people are in need, how do you care for people when people are hurting? And so how do we structure the congregation, structure our church to be able to operate? So if you've looked at our website, you'll see a mission statement. And the mission statement is, we exist to proclaim the word of God, model the grace of God, and extol the glory of God from here to the ends of the earth. So everything that the church does should fall under one of those three things, either proclaiming the word, modeling the grace, or extolling the glory of God. pretty broad things. You can fit a lot of things in that category, those three categories. And then furthermore, there's six areas of ministry on our website that break that down a little bit more. So there's worship, discipleship, evangelism, mercy, hospitality, and stewardship. Six areas of ministry. So everything further breaks down and you can, if you're an org chart kind of guy, I'm going to show you. In fact, go ahead and break it out because I think it'll be helpful. This little colorful picture is helpful. So everything in the church, everything that's done in the church is under the session. And as we talked last week, the diaconate is a board under the authority of the session, but there's certain areas of ministry that the diaconate focuses on more. So if you see this little org chart, You've got the session and the elders, which are over the ministries of the church. And then the six areas of ministry, worship, discipleship, evangelism, mercy, hospitality, and stewardship. These are things that fall under the oversight of the elders. And then under each of those things, there's maybe specific things that have focus groups or teams that work to carry out the work of the ministry. So help us to understand this a little bit. There's an important aspect as leaders in the church, we need to understand this philosophy of ministry that we have at Christ's Covenant so that you can understand how to serve in it. So there's two different strategies in churches. One is anything that has to be done, You hire a person and call them a director of or a pastor of various things like children's ministry, nursery, youth ministry, middle school, you know, all these different things, pastor of care, blah, blah, blah. You could grow the staff to take care of all these things, which is fine. That's a strategy. The other strategy which we deploy here is one that Jim would say is counter-predictable, and Neil would too. I guess we all would. Counter-predictable. The made-up Christ covenant word that we all love so much. But we think of it as member service. And this is everybody recognizing that if you're a member of a church, you have gifts, and recognizing that if you're rolling up your sleeves and getting to work, then you are taking ownership in what's going on. You're taking collective ownership in the vision and ministry of the church. And therefore, you're going to be, number one, engaged, and number two, we think, more following God's plan in the scriptures. So if you look at Ephesians 4, I'm going to read that real quick. And this is talking about teachers in our role. And starting in verse 11, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry. for building up the body of Christ, to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ. So that doesn't say that the elders and the shepherds and the teachers and the apostles are to do the work of the ministry, although there's a lot of work that has to be done and does. But our job is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. So it is very, and that's hard, right? It's easy, it's an easy call to anything that needs to be done, we do, or we hire somebody to do it. And the difference between hiring somebody and equipping the saints for the work of the ministry is financially very different, but effort-wise it's a lot different too. To equip the saints for the work of the ministry, we have to educate, train, and do work behind the scenes to help people flourish in those roles. If you hire somebody that's already trained and gifted at keeping the nursery, then you can accomplish that task really quickly with just money. But it's not engaging a saint and growing somebody in Christ as a result. And that's very different. That's very different than, I mean, the reason that's counter-predictable is because a typical church in Greensboro would not, not all, many do, but not stress that as much as we do here. So, member service, any questions on that? Now, we have staff, and we're getting ready to grow a staff position, and staff's not bad, but we never wanna grow staff We never want staff to take away things that people who have other jobs, we acknowledge that, can reasonably do. We don't want to take that away from people. But we also, everything that we do, we want to do with excellence. So there's this balance. Any questions on member service? I'm going to go through this paper here real quick in a second. delegating but delegation carries so far becomes abdication and there's a balance between an autocratic rule and the other extreme being you've delegated to the point where it's abdication and that middle ground is delegation and that's hard work and I think that's to your collective credit. Thank you and that is this paper and that's what's so important because Giving people a framework, that's the equipping part, giving people a framework to work within, to use their gifts within the framework, and the framework is at the oversight of the session and the deacons in some areas, is how the church can grow and flourish. If you say, go, untrained person, go design our worship service, and say, just, we won't have any input into it, then naturally it's gonna be a mess, right? So what's going on here? Let's look at this paper. Purpose of the ministries, we said that. Oversight of ministries. So straight out of our form of government, we reference these things sometimes in the paper so that people don't get the idea that we're making this stuff up. The session's job to plan, organize, and administer programs, right? So to enable the congregation to carry on the mission of God in Christ's church, by word and deed in the community, et cetera. That's the form of government 6.7. 6.7b, in order to institute and supervise the general work of the congregation, the session has the power to appoint boards, commissions, and committees of the congregation. So the session's job is to put the congregation to work. Okay, good enough. How do we do that? Now it's in the Christ Covenant. The way we do it is we define a new role. So you've got elders and deacons. And we've defined a new role called a ministry leader. Now, if you read that there, a member of the congregation appointed under the authority of the session to facilitate and oversee a specific area of the church's ministry. So the ministry leader will organize volunteers if needed, report directly to the elder or session appointed deacon overseeing that ministry and what they're doing. But effectively, the ministry leader is the point person. So the ministry leader is For example, let's just pick one. Let's see, I want to use Heather because she's, okay. Under discipleship, you've got, if you look at the little pretty picture paper, under the area of ministry that's discipleship, there's an elder that is over discipleship, and that is, for the most part, me. And specifically over children's education, the elder over that ministry is me. and the ministry leader is Heather Essary. So what do I do? What does the session do? The session says, we want a children's Sunday school class, and we want a curriculum that's easy enough that we can plug many teachers into, because it's a volunteer basis. And we want people to be able to come in and be able to follow a curriculum that we think is good, and be able to teach the children. We want it to be organized, well-communicated, and welcoming, and inclusive of everybody that wants to come to the church. So I say, Heather, go analyze this and give us a proposal. So she is in charge of making that happen, right? So we found a curriculum, and we said, we think this works. Go study it. Tell us how you think it breaks out in terms of the age groups we have with this coming year. So she, at the beginning of the year in the summer, goes and analyzes all the members of the congregation, all the age groups, and says, this year, we need four children's classes, and this is the roster for each. But I think we want to talk to this parent and maybe drop this child down and this one up because it's unbalanced and this guy's going to be the youngest guy in the whole class. So I think for the whole good of the ministry, we should do that. And we say, hmm, OK, great. Go for it. And what do we not have to do? Spend the two hours of walking through all that, organizing, thinking about the parents and how things are going to work, and just seeing that this makes good sense. But if we would have said, wait a minute, I know Sally Ann's mom and she is just very, it's very important to her that Sally Ann is with Martha Jane, whoever. It's funny how I'm coming up with random names. And so we say, you might want to do this because there's a sensitivity here or whatever. Okay, makes sense. That's good. and it all happens. So the logistics, the groundwork, the tactics of that ministry are carried out by Heather. And then the communication week to week, all the stuff that has to happen to make that work, she runs. She's on point. If there's a problem, she's on point and she doesn't come to me unless there's a situation like I just can't find a teacher, for example. And then we have a way to go into our volunteer database. In Breeze, our church management software, we've got people who self-identify as desiring to teach Sunday school. We've got a list of people like that. And we say, hey, you mentioned this is an opportunity you might like to take. How about filling this role? And then it's quick and efficient. So, ministry leader is a point person in charge of a ministry. Now, the second thing is development team. We've got ministries in the church right now. This is the current snapshot, what you see. What happens if the session says, we need a college and career age group, like early 20s, people that are still, they're out of high school, so they're not in our children's, our kind of adult, sorry, high school our youth program or our Sunday school class for high schoolers and but but they're kind of in this middle ground where they're in college we need to kind of collect these folks and and have some different opportunities for them to connect and discuss things that are relevant to them. We appoint a development team so development team is a group of congregation members the session appoints to go off and develop under a strategy given by the session. We want this to be accomplished. How would you do that and how does it make sense? And that development team goes off. does something to, we prefer, write a proposal for what's actually going to happen. We believe this group should be this size, we think they should meet this time, they should incorporate this, that, and the other thing. And then we say, great. We, with gratitude, dismiss that development team and take that strategy or that tactical document, how they're going to carry out the ministry and hand it off to a ministry leader to go. Appoint a ministry leader and then hand it off to go. So establishment of new ministries. We often say to the congregation, if there is something that you think needs to happen in the church, you think the church needs to do this and we're not doing it, then That's great. However, it's the session's job to see the big picture and what's being done and how different things can fit in. So people can make suggestions all day long and sometimes those things are taken and move forward and sometimes they're not. The first thing is if there's somebody that has a passion to do something and it's good, and it's for the benefit of God's people and we think consistent with the strategy of the church and not overburdening, then we're going to do our very best to empower, to not crush the spirit of that and empower it and let it go. What we're not going to do is we're not going to start something that's half-baked, not do it well. We're also not going to really even respond to someone who comes to us and says, the church really should do this, but I have no interest in taking any part. So we're not a service organization that we are, but we're not here to fulfill everybody's needs. We're here to equip. the saints. So if somebody is desiring to be equipped to do something good, then it's something we're going to talk about. Okay, so then new member engagement. I talked about this. When we have a new members class, when somebody comes in and interviews for membership of the church, they have a personality profile, they have volunteer, they have a spiritual giftedness, and they self-acknowledge different areas that they would like to serve. And we keep all that and then try to plug people in where they're gifted. when needs arise. So, okay, so that's ministry, or that's, oops, that is If I just didn't break that, should I have it on my belt? Okay, good. That's member service, ministries and structure of the church, and ministry leaders and how we develop new ones. And this is our current snapshot of elders over certain things and ministry leaders. These people are also on the website. That's new as of a few months ago. So you can click on the website and see ministry leaders and their picture and things like that. So people can understand who people are. Any questions on this one? Okay, all right, moving right along. So now, member service, how people serve in the church. The next question is, what do we do? So pull out this paper on discipleship in the church. So we wrote this paper fairly recently, 2018. Neil had a big part in the writing of this paper. And I think it's very helpful in understanding what we're doing. So this purpose, I'm going to read this purpose because I think it's well written and helpful. A disciple is a learner or student devoted to learning a way of life. A Christian disciple is devoted to learning Christ himself. Thus, Christian discipleship is a process of transformative learning wherein the knowledge of Christ through the power of the Spirit actually transforms our outward lives to be more like our Savior as we journey home to Him. This transformation begins as believers learn who Christ is and what He has commanded. Then, as we grow deeper in our knowledge of Him, we strive to live purposefully in His way. Learning to stand firm in the face of culture and our own nature, as God's truth radiates from inward to outward, our lives begin to look more like the pattern of Christ. The working out of God's truth in our lives is helped by walking along fellow believers who can challenge us, help us, and extend gracious accountability where needed. As we grow together as faithful disciples of Christ, goodness and truth will naturally overflow in each of us in the church, in every area of our ministry, and we will be salt and light in the world. So make disciples, Christ tells us. a disciple is someone who is growing, who is a believer through the process of sanctification is growing more and more Christ-like through their lives. And how does that happen in the normal context of the church? It happens shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters in Christ, in the congregation, in a church, encouraging one another, holding each other accountable at times, if needed, it's always needed, holding each other accountable and striving to, as Neil says so well and always reminds us, press on to the upward call, right, moving forward and onward. So, how does the church come alongside this process and encourage it? So, some principles. First, number one, God empowers His Word. God grows us, and the normal means that He grows us is through His Word. How does that play out? We'll talk about it in a second. Obviously, we know the answer. Through the preaching of the Word and through the worship services primarily. Second, God uses people. God is the power, but he uses us as a means, as fellow workers, to make more disciples. And we, each of us, have a role in discipleship, whether it can be many ways. Some of us will be called to teach. Some of us will be called to lead a Bible study. Some of us will be called to hear, listen, be present when someone comes to you and has a question or is in need, needs encouragement, needs a mature Christian to point an immature Christian to the principles of God's Word in a conflict or a situation in their life that may be challenging or a struggle. It may be one-on-one. It may be more public. It may just be participation and attendance. That's a tough one, right? We often think about coming to worship, coming to prayer services, and we all fully recognize that time is strapped for all of us. But encouraging others by your presence is something that we often don't value. We just think, well, we think about if I'm there, that means I'm getting fed, which is true, and you don't want to miss. But in many ways, the corporate experience of worship brothers and sisters standing shoulder to shoulder singing praises to God. It's encouraging for elders to see the sanctuary full. It's encouraging as a member to be sitting in a full pew and experience praise together. So you're encouraging others by just being present, not even talking to anybody or not even taking on a one-on-one mentoring or discipleship role. You are participating in discipleship by just simply being present. So God uses people. Second, or third, God grows us together. So we grow together as a church, a great covenant family of families. Now we know that's a sentence from Jim, which I love the word, though, because we often joke with Jim because he says great covenant. He says family of families a lot and also the epic flow of the covenant. But he says those things because there's powerful meaning by that. The church is a family made up of smaller families and God's covenant is flowing through this place. That is a beautiful thing to think about in terms of how God brings people and grows them generation to generation to himself. This is an important thing. In every way we try, so there in point three, God has intentionally designed his people to live as a body, intermingling male and female, sharing the energy of youth and the wisdom of age and blessing one another with the gifts he has given to each. Because it is God's design that we grow together in this way, we are free to forgo the modern church's trend of segregating his people according to age, gender, etc. and instead grow deeper by knowing one another and living life together. Rejoicing in God's pattern for His covenant family, we seek to be a unified body, operating wherever possible with the full strength of male, female, young, old, people of every background, all working together in every ministry and effort. So this is to say that if at all possible, it's not to say that there's never a case for women together. There's never a case for men together. Obviously we're here, right? This is a men's leadership training thing. We have women's Bible study. We have men's Bible study. We have youth gatherings. These are good things, but wherever possible, the core ministries of the church, the things that are non-negotiable, and we'll talk about what that is in a second, we want to be inclusive. The ability for the wisdom of Daryl and May Andrews sitting beside Luke Rowan and Hannah Van Erden and talking about what it is to be married and submit to God and to one another for 60-plus years now and go through the trials of a wife who becomes basically not able to care for herself and Daryl the Rock standing there holding her always steady is powerful. And where else are you going to get, I mean, how you go to your, you go to college, you're in every other situation other than the church, you're surrounded by people, um, pretty close to, you know, similar stages of life, right? You're in school, you're around certain folks, you're in your work, you're around people that are in their career stage. Um, but in the church, uh, you're mixed in with a whole bunch of people. and also people that aren't the same, right? If you go sit in there and you look around the church, where else would you be mingling and called to love your neighbor as yourself and the neighbors God's given you are so widely different, right? And that's God's plan, growing us together. So we don't want to, for example, have a worship service where We have a specific tailored style for five or six different preferences, and it has Neil to preach five or six different sermons, one wearing the suit and tie, and the other, you know, kind of more casual. And we sing the Trinity Hymnal songs, and then we sing, we hold hands and sing Kumbaya with the guitar, you know, all the different things. All the guitar is great, but the point is, is we are together, and our goal is to be together no matter what. And then finally, God calls us for perseverance and prayer. Yes. older people Absolutely. And to see Mrs. Lynham dancing around a circle where not too many months ago we didn't think that she was walking. And just the smiles, everything we do in church, those events are specifically designed to just have fun together, right? And that was such a, you know, Becca is the one that said, hey guys, the Fellowship Hall is under construction. We need some opportunity for people to connect. People are kind of not connecting. And we're like, wow, you're right. I'll volunteer to, Becca said, I'll volunteer to figure it out. And I think she pulled Brittany and Joy, and they got together, and Michael and Ann jumped in, and next thing you know, it's two and a half hours of just absolute If you weren't there, it was cold and messy, but it was a blast. I encourage you to take advantage of those opportunities. Thanks for pointing that out. Flip the page. Neil had this idea of layers of discipleship. We think about the core priorities and then the things that are less central are on the periphery. I think that's the view of the layers of discipleship. I think of it a similar way, but priorities, right? So what are the core things? So if you've got one hour, I'm sorry, well, maybe two and a half hours of time in your week. That depends on how long Neil preaches. If you've got two and a half hours in your week, and that's all, because you work 24 times seven minus two and a half hours a week, and you have two and a half hours, then what we want you to do is we want you to be in worship. If you've got three and a half hours, be in both worship services. That's the priority. worship is primary and that's what it says here under layers of discipleship. Our first layer, our first core priority is corporate discipleship. The church is first and foremost discipled corporately as a whole body in our worship. The preaching of the word by the pastor, God has gifted Neil and called him to a special job, and not just Neil, the other men that fill our pulpit, to be the mouthpiece of God, delivering God's word to us, and that's how we grow. Through that and the administration of the sacraments, these things happen in our worship services. So, if you only have that much time, don't choose to do dead theologians. Be in worship. Don't choose to do a women's Bible study only. Be in worship, primary, number one. Number two, the second priority would be education and shepherding. So, the elders. You don't have to teach Sunday school publicly. You don't have to be a public teacher. Elders should be able to teach, that's straight from the scriptures, but teaching one-on-one and teaching publicly, are two different things and some men are gifted in one and not the other. So you don't have to teach Sunday school in front of the whole congregation to be an elder, but only elders teach adult Sunday school. And so the elders of the church prioritize this work for the purpose of discipling the congregation. So education and shepherding, the work of the men, the priority of the men that are ordained to the office of caring for these things is the worship service and then education and shepherding. And education has the form of Sunday school, Elder shepherding, there's an elder over every family, we've talked about this before, and this is a more one-on-one family on elder type of discussion. The Covenanter devotional, Neil, for the time he's been here, has written that Covenanter exclusively, which he does a great job, and it's a little Friday morning devotional for us all. Take advantage of that, read it, engage with it. Elders have written that in the past and different trade-offs. Even when Neil's here, Marshall especially has done a great job of giving Neil a break in that area. And then clap in circles. The point of clap in circles is to gather, gather in people's homes and engage around Collectively, all of us engage around a set of questions given by the elders for the congregation to consider. And these are largely about how Christians, this is engagement of the world kind of stuff, how Christians are to think and engage in the world and culture around a certain topic and discuss it among fellow Christians. Now, after that, so corporate discipleship, education, and shepherding, after that, there's opportunities, focused discipleship groups. But there is a priority. So many churches that have small groups, it can be that my small group is my church. A lot of good churches, a lot of PCA churches. I was a member in Texas and in Colorado, small groups were very emphasized. wonderful, strong, lifelong, godly relationships with other Christians that happened as a result of being in a small group with a brother and a sister and praying over a number of years for their needs and getting to know people. And that's excellent, but it is third tier in terms of priority. Now we don't have, we've got Clapham Circles, which is a little bit different. We don't have focused small groups right now because in the sessions kind of wisdom at the moment. We've got a lot of things and we don't want to overburden people at this stage. So we do have, you know, men's, a couple men's gatherings a week, as you know, most of you come. Women's gatherings. Youth and children's discipleship is mostly centered around Sunday school, but there's one or two gatherings a year. That's a great opportunity for them to kind of gather and have some fun. So I highlighted there the bottom of this page. We encourage involvement in these events insofar as they are beneficial to you, but these focused events should not supersede corporate discipleship or education in shepherding. Likewise, focused discipleship groups will not supervise other areas of the church's ministry in areas of worship, evangelism, hospitality, and worship stewardship. So we're not going to, for example, create a men's Bible study that then takes on oversight of the worship service, for example, which would be crazy, but you can apply that to various things. Little discipleship groups aren't created as special independent governing bodies, which can also happen. Any question on discipleship and priorities? Or thoughts? Okay, well, I want to talk about briefly, and then we'll have a few minutes, I think, when we're done. We talked about Number one priority is worship service and attendance and worship service. Second we said is education and shepherding. So if you pull out the last paper I gave you, this is our structure and strategy for adult education. Now we spent quite a while looking at this and Our goal is to develop a similar structure for our youth starting at the age where it's kind of post-elementary and I would say from that point of middle school-ish to like 7th grade, 6th, 7th grade through graduating high school. We want to develop a similar structure for in those years as a church. What do we think is important that our children that are members of the church, our covenant children, when they leave the home, we expect the families, fathers and mothers as they teach, to equip these children But if the child is engaging in the education ministry of the church, what is important for the church to teach these children before they go into the world? Coming alongside the families always being the assumption. So that's where we're going, but where we started with the adults. So I want you to pull this up and I want to I want you to just look at this. We're not obviously currently doing this because of space. It's been about a at least it's been this is the end of a year that we haven't been able to teach on this track, but we're excited definitely to start back in the fall of 2020 with the goal being teaching three parallel classes in all three of these tracks if the Lord blesses us with the teachers to do it. But what the idea of this is, is that a person can come in the church and over a period of six years can get a very strong overview, foundational education on what it means to be a Christian, how do you define that, how do you live it out, an overview of the Bible and church history, and then thinking about certain topics about how as a Christian to engage in the world. So just talking through this a little bit. Track one is theology. So 1.1 is systematic theology, 1.2 is practical theology. So systematic theology, this is looking at reformed confessions, catechism, Westminster Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechism, and then also others like the Canons of Dort and various reformed writings to understand what we believe as a Reformed Christian and why. And so it's largely broken up. The fall is doctrine of God and man. The winter is doctrine of Christ and salvation. And in the spring, the doctrine of the church and the last things. And that's a full year class, but we break it up into three things so that people have the, you know, if they want to go engage on, you can engage with this track, one whole track for a whole year, or you can take a fall in this area, a winter in a different area, and a spring in something else if you desire. So we kind of try to align them. Theology two is practical, so a study of how to live in light of our theology to God's glory. So we understand what we believe, the summary of the Bible's teachings on these things. Now, with that knowledge, how are we to live in the world? And so this one can be a little more dynamic based on where the congregation is and, you know, what's needed. So it has in the past looked like biblical manhood and womanhood and marriage. It's looked like parenting. It's looked like we had two parenting, parenting one, parenting two, family heritage, and then early, we had an older parenting and a younger parenting when we did this last time. It can also look like how to live in the midst of a trial, how to grow as a Christian, how to read your Bible. There's things that we could go with practical theology, but and how to grow old gracefully, right? How to finish strong, right? There's multiple ways that we could go with that. In the first year we taught this, it was largely around parenting, and we had done prior, we had done a big class on marriage, and that's important too. So practical theology, systematic theology. Track number two is survey and history. There's two strategies with Sunday school. Sometimes you can have a Sunday school class where you're walking through a book of the Bible in great detail. But that's what Neil is doing in the preaching. He preaches continuously through books of the Bible. And so if you hang around long enough, and over a long period of time, Neil is going to preach large sections of complete books of the Bible. And so walking through the Bible in our services. So what do we do in Sunday school? We do these two tracks, Survey and History. So we're looking at the Old Testament in two trimesters and the New Testament in two trimesters. and on an overview look. So we're going to look at sections of scripture so that in a reasonably short period of time you can see a big picture of what the Bible is teaching and the different areas of the Bible and what it teaches. So the first book is old, the first track there is Old Testament 1, New Testament 1 in church history. So church history one is you get the Bible overview and then you have church history. What happened from basically Acts to the fall of Rome? That's church history one. How did the church that we have today come to be, right? And two is the second half of Old Testament, the second half of New Testament, and kind of fast-forwarding through the medieval period and looking at the Reformation and the events that really shaped the ARP and the Reformed Church as it is today. So the goal being to, in that church history class, to understand from Christ to now, how do we get there? So that's serving history. Then the last track, and this one can be changing a little bit too, is engaging the world. How are we to take the truths of God's word and how we're to live it out, and how are we to then engage the world? How are we to be salt and light? How are we to go into the world and engage with somebody that doesn't share our same beliefs? And so things we've done in the past in this track, evangelism, We've done world religions and worldviews, how to engage, how to evangelize a Mormon, et cetera, and other religions and worldviews. And then we also had this topic, cultural conversations navigating issues of the day. Now that one, I had a list of about 20 things that I thought would be interesting to talk about in a Sunday school class context about things that are going on if you you know, watch the news and you look at it and you say, how are we as a Christian to think about that? Because that's the kind of stuff you're going to be talking with your co-workers about on a trip, on a business trip over dinner. And how are we as a Christian, as Christians to think about engagement? We can either not engage or we can engage. And how do we engage biblically and think about these things? And then two, this is engaging the world too, and it can take different forms, but it's taken in the past a look at the Christian worldview and the Christian message and how how this shows itself in historical and current literature. And then Jim actually taught a class on cultural apologetics in art and film, which was a really, I didn't get to take it because I was teaching another class, but I heard it was a really interesting look at thinking about how the Christian message is present. Incompletely without God's Word, but there, the story is present in all these other stories. So, quick overview, we got a few minutes. Neil, did you have any comments or anything? Questions, comments, thoughts? Yeah, so we have taught, we've taught every one of these once over the past six years, three years, I think. And so, but we are going, the idea is that we're going to teach all, we're going to teach a class from track one, track two, and track three starting in the fall of 2020 when we have the space to do it and make that a regular rotation. So if we get to a place where the congregation isn't growing and it's been six years and everybody's had these classes, then we'll do something else. But hopefully that won't be the case. And the beauty of it is, you know, you teach this class on this topic doesn't get old, right? But the way it's taught the first time is going to change as the teacher, the teacher may be different and also the teacher's experience, wisdom and knowledge hopefully will be growing and there'll be different perspectives as we go. That's what I do. It's like you read the book a year later and it's like, that's the greatest book I've ever read, again. of a six classroom, ultimately a six classroom. Three. Three. Three. So we'll do track one, track two, and track three in three different rooms. You pick which one you want to do. And this is on the website. We just haven't pushed it a whole lot because we can't do it right this moment. But we would do, in that room, we would do track 1.1 for a year. And the next year, we'd do track 1.2. heard people into tracks that you think would be beneficial to them? No, people do what they want. We had a class where Eric was teaching, and he's the best teacher in all of the Sunday school in that 95% of churches in that one. I'm just wondering how you handle stuff like that. Well, first off, that's not true. So you don't have to worry about that. I have to, like, beg people to come to my class. No, I would, no, no. Typically what we do is, you know, this is what we're teaching and, you know, there's been, there's times when, hey, I think this would be, you know, helpful for you, but, you know, largely people, you know, self-select. And, well, the room size will be, well, the room sizes are whatever they'll be. I don't know what they'll be, so. So. High school boys, we'll go back to, with the space, we'll go back to a class, and we're trying to, by that time, have this kind of structure for middle school and high school, and have teachers, either elders or potentially our new director of ministries, he should also be able to teach if we hire the right guy. Or there's three types of people that can teach an adult class, an elder, a pastor, which obviously is an elder as well, or someone that the session is wanting to test their gifts in that direction. So like you men, if you feel like you're called to be an elder, we want to be able to give you opportunities to teach. in that rotation to test your gifts and and you know do the work. So we will have a separate class for middle school and high school and at times I think that we still have to formulate this but at times we think there could be some overlap like world religions and worldviews that's a good class for high school Folks as well as adults and so we might have a situation where this semester the high school track is going to be Overlap the adult track and with the high school track is going to go in here because we that's what's right But it's going to be organized and structured in a way that you know, there's a plan so that's the goal anyway, so Time to go to worship. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your church. We thank you for order and structure and men who have a mind for a plan to teach, disciple, trusting your guidance as we all press on to the upward call to live our lives to your glory. And I pray that you would help these men as we think about what it means to be a leader in the church and what it means to order and structure the church, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, that you would see that you would help us to see how we can serve in that context and do your will. I pray that you would be with us now as we go into worship, help us to glorify you, to give us hearts filled with worship this next hour. In Jesus' name, amen.