Building the Church, pt4
Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 065
1. Are we purpose driven or need focused?
2. What is your worship theology?
3. Do you have a doctrinal plan?
4. What is your plan and strategy to connect to your community?
This last part in our series is important, though it can seem like a distraction and can be labor-intensive. But it’s important. It’s about long-term harvest, critical to reaching more people.
A plan and a strategy to connect to the community.
In every community, things happen that give us opportunities to be a helping hand, a voice, or where we can volunteer our facilities for use. There are many testimonies of churches that have become great examples of sharing their time and resources. Most churches do this well.
Because of the nature of ministry and how demanding it is, it is hard to develop strategies when we aren’t going to see some sort of immediate return. But we have to be long-term minded.
It takes time to connect with the community. You have to connect with something before you can really embrace it. When churches are sincere in loving their community, it means they’ve embraced it. If they’ve embraced it, they’ve connected to it.
Side note: When you embrace something, you don’t have to embrace everythingwith it. As a pastor, there were times when I would address political people in a way that was clear that I didn’t embrace what they were doing. I did, however, embrace the overall good of our community and was willing to do whatever I could that would help. Don’t let that tension stop you from being invested to the degree that you can be.
When I was pastoring, we had 3-5 people who would attend the city council meeting. They weren’t there to protest anything, but were there to get to know who the people were. They became somewhat of a curiosity to the council members. They would express that they were there to know how to pray for our community and its leaders. As a result, we were able to do some things in town and had a lot of a favor.
Build connections. Connect with your community. It is a time investment. It is going to meetings. If in total you spent one day a month in community meetings, touching people, shaking hands, helping them know who you are, I can tell you that it will bear fruit. You will develop great relationships, and doors will open. I was invited in our city’s council meetings many times to lead prayer before the meetings—and I always took that opportunity to push the envelope slightly and sneak in a little gospel message in that prayer.
Begin building relationships with the people in your community. Pray for your community and its leaders. Prayer is a gateway to evangelism. Prayer is a gateway to relationships. Very rarely will people turn down a sincere offer from you to pray for them.
While we are focused in-house, winning souls and making disciples, doing all the things we need to do to have a healthy church, it’s important to keep fertilizing the soil around us and finding ways to connect. Being at city council meetings, for example, gives us a strategic initiative rather than just graciously responding to needs or opportunities as they pop up.
Develop that strategy to connect to your community. Who can you connection with, bless, influence? As you connect with your community, God will use you to preach the gospel to a greater number of people. Don’t treat this like a project; let it be part of your DNA.
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
