Using Worship Services to Encourage MTWABP
Here’s an interesting article by Todd Hiestand, pastor of The Well in Pennsylvania.
Cultivating a Missional Congregation Through Worship
In it Todd describes how his church uses their worship services to encourage people to MTWABP (make the world a better place).
Todd writes about how his church does these three things in particular:
- [We end our service with a song which] serves as a fantastic reminder that we are to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the places we live, work, play, shop, etc
- Our announcements and our bulletin intentionally emphasize opportunities for service outside our community.
- Each month we highlight a partner ministry. This is usually, but not always, an example of someone in our community who is involved with kingdom work.
Church attenders:
- Does your church do these things?
- Would you like your church to?
Anyone:
- Do you think churches in general underemphasize or overemphasize MTWABP?
Comment by: NCxian
1 06/9/06 12:21 PM | Comment Link |I just began hearing about “missional church” in the last 3 to 5 years. It is one of the things that makes me hopeful that the pendulum swing toward conservative dogmatism in the church is reversing course.
In my congregation, we went from a more “proclational” attitude (telling people the “Good News”) to a period of about 10 years focused on “spiritual formation” (which was a more inwardly turned look at ourselves). From that base, we have moved toward the more outwardly focused “missional church” identity. Missional churches are “incarnational”–showing people the “Good News”. So they are by their very nature in the business of(have a mission to) MTWABP.
A lot of established churches are making this same transition (or, IMO, dying).
Comment by: NCxian
2 06/9/06 12:25 PM | Comment Link |That strange word should be “proclamational”–(from the word “proclaim”.
Comment by: Marty
3 06/9/06 12:33 PM | Comment Link |I will comment later on the question - but I REALLY liked the introduction on the “The Well” website and have cut and pasted it here.
Welcome…
The Well is a community of people who work hard to …
Be more concerned about others than ourselves.
Bring justice and peace to our world.
Accept and love people. All people.
Allow for hard questions about life, God and faith.
Do our best to faithfully follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Invite others (like yourself) to come along and share in this journey.
Do all of this together as a community, rather than individuals.
We invite you to join us for our worship gatherings at 10:30 am on Sunday mornings at our warehouse in Feasterville.
Our prayer is that, if you join us, you will find us to be a community that seeks to…
Follow Jesus and bless the world.
Comment by: Helen (Ir)
4 06/9/06 12:47 PM | Comment Link |Marty, I figured you’d like it! :)
Comment by: Mike C
5 06/10/06 7:25 AM | Comment Link |This is great stuff. Our church is also very missional. Since we’re so new we’re just starting to figure out how to do and be that. The church we came from before this one was not missional at all, and almost actively discouraged it. And it was a dying church.
For me being missional is simply what it means to be the church. That’s the whole point. If we’re not MTWABP then why bother? I remember sitting in the services at my old church singing the songs and listening to another irrelevant sermon and thinking “Is this really what Jesus had in mind? Is this why he died? Just so we could get together once a week and sing songs? And is mission nothing more than trying to get a few more people to join us to help us sing songs and pay for the building?”
It just seemed so pointless… so we left (were forced out actually for rocking the boat too much) to start a new church that was more intentional about MTWABP, like Jesus told us to do.
Comment by: Todd Hiestand
6 06/12/06 7:21 AM | Comment Link |hey guys, thanks for the encouragement! as the guy helen was writing about its nice to hear some more poeple who are passionate bout MTWABP… (never heard it in that acronym before)
read isaiah 58 and see that i think God considers sitting in church one day a week as your whole expression of christianity kind of pointless too..