Goals & Hurdles: A Simple Way to Face Ministry Challenges as a Team

Communicating the gospel is difficult work, but when you break it down into “goal and hurdles,” the work can be shared. This post comes from Matt Stevens, who is leading our free workshop, Creativity & Communication for Discipleship, on Thursday, March 10.

The good news of Jesus Christ revolves around Holy Week, culminating in Easter Sunday. The empty tomb sheds light on his corrupt trial and death on the cross, and also means his promises and claims hold up. Most importantly, the promises dealing with forgiveness of sins, restoration with the Father, the renewal of all things, and eternal life in the Kingdom. The occupied cross and empty tomb mean everything has changed.

And yet, this most epic story can begin to feel overly familiar. Christians find ourselves doing our best to truly feel and experience the weight and beauty of this essential faith tradition. Over time the words and stories are taken for granted, which means we don’t see how ourr faith, vocation, purpose, and existence are all shaped by this new reality of the risen, reigning Jesus.

Add in the fact that we live in a society that oversimplifies words. We consume and spout thousands of meaningless phrases every day and it can become way too easy to skim over Scripture and miss the weight and depth of what Jesus spoke.

With this in mind, the question isn’t simply, “What scripture will we preach for Easter this year?”

“The question isn’t simply, ‘What scripture will we preach for Easter this year?’”

The question is, “How will we prepare the hearts and minds of our congregation for this important celebration when they’ve not only grown overly familiar with the stories, but when their everyday lives consist of non-stop information which makes slowing down almost impossible?”

The latter isn’t more complex, it’s being more aware of the people and the context. By asking this question you’re defining two facets:

• The goal

• The hurdles

If you’re the preaching pastor, you can come up with new ways to make these overly familiar stories fresh, but how do you help people slow down to consider the weight of Jesus’s words? Preach slower? They’ll probably just fall asleep. The good news is, when you break it down into goal and hurdles, the work can be shared.

Facing this problem in our 2017 Easter series, the team at Vintage Church approached the two hurdles from different angles. While the preaching pastors and community group leaders were tasked with sharing the good news in insightful ways, the creative team helped with slowing people down and considering the weight of Jesus’s words.

What it looked like:

1. Extend Easter series to seven weeks with only seven phrases

This means we spent almost two months specifically focused on Holy Week. Not only that, we decided to spend each week in just one of Jesus’s seven phrases spoken from the cross. Spending so much time on so few words allowed us to dig deep, hopefully bringing depth to what we thought we knew so well.

2. Jar people awake from what has become overly familiar

These weren’t simply phrases Jesus dropped offhand, they were spoken as he was being murdered. Words are not wasted when death is only a few hours away. Highlighting this hopefully helped people realize the radical nature of the words, and thereby the heart, of Jesus Christ.

How we went about it:

Seven artists from the church body were commissioned to create pieces which include the seven phrases Jesus spoke from the cross. We filmed the creation of each process, which resulted in a slow-moving video where the congregation watched the words being formed while a voiceover set the perspective of the weight of the words of a dying man.

A new video each week helped set up the sermon. Before the preacher even stepped onstage, the congregation had considered just how heavy, deep, and important Jesus’s dying words were. With the people hopefully leaning in to listen, the preacher could then share an eloquent sermon on ready hearts.

Next, when talking about how words are consumed and spit out at a rate of thousands per day, it naturally led to asking how we address the social media generation. In order to wake teenagers and college students up to the depth of Jesus’s few words from the cross, we created these videos, which also doubled as online promotional videos for the series:

These are examples of how we equipped creatives to help address the hurdles that keep people from truly hearing the good news of the Bible. But consider the impact when every ministry leader and volunteer is asking this question:

“How will we prepare the hearts and minds of a congregation for this important celebration when they’ve not only grown overly familiar with the stories but when their everyday lives consist of non-stop information which makes slowing down almost impossible?”

You’ll see amazing creativity and specificity by leaders of small groups, kids ministries, youth ministries, and more. The result is that your whole church body will be working towards the same goal and addressing the same hurdles that stand in the way.

Join Matt for “Creativity & Communication for Discipleship”, a free workshop on Thursday, March 8 at 2:00p ET/ 11:00a PT, which will introduce a creative strategy to help church/org leaders focus your discipleship and give language to your ministry efforts.