8
Applying Your Purposes
We trust the Lord that you are putting into practice the things we taught you.
2 Thessalonians 3:4 (LB)
Now we come to the most difficult part of becoming a purpose-driven church. Many churches have done all I’ve talked about in the previous chapters: They have defined their purposes and developed a purpose statement; they regularly communicate their purposes to their membership; some have even reorganized their structure around their purposes. However, a purpose-driven church must go one step further and rigorously apply its purposes to every part of the church: programming, scheduling, budgeting, staffing, preaching, and so forth.
Integrating your purposes into every area and aspect of your church’s life is the most difficult phase of becoming a purpose-driven church. Making the leap from a purpose statement to purpose-driven actions requires leadership that is totally committed to the process. The application of your
purposes will require months, maybe even years, of praying, planning, preparing, and experimenting. Take it slow. Focus on progress, not perfection. The end result in your church will look different from Saddleback and every other purpose-driven church.
There are ten areas you must consider as you begin to reshape your church into a purpose-driven church.
Ten Ways to Be Purpose Driven
1. Assimilate new members on purpose
Use the Circles of Commitment as your strategy for assimilating people into the life of your church. Begin by moving the unchurched fromthe community to your crowd (for worship). Then move them from the crowd into the congregation (for fellowship). Next, move them from your congregation into the committed (for discipleship), and from the committed into the core (for ministry). Finally, move the core back out into the community (for evangelism). This process fulfills all five purposes of the church.
Notice that I suggest you grow the church from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Start with your community, not your core! This is opposite the advice given by most books on church planting. The traditional approach to beginning a new church is to build a committed core of mature believers first, and then start reaching out to the community.
The problem I have found with an “inside-out” approach is
that by the time the church planter has “discipled” his core, they have often lost contact with the community and are actually afraid of interacting with the unchurched. It’s easy to get what Peter Wagner calls “koinonitis”—developing such a close-knit fellowship that newcomers are afraid or unable to break into it. Too often, a core group planning a new church spends so long in the small group stage that they become comfortable with it and lose their sense of mission. The fire of evangelismdies out.
The problem with most small churches is that they are all core and nothing else. The same fifty people come to everything the church does. They’ve all been Christians for so long they have few, if any, unbelieving friends to witness to. A church with this problem needs to learn how to develop the other four circles.
When I began Saddleback, I started by totally focusing on the community, specifically the unchurched in my community. I personally met hundreds of unchurched people by spending twelve weeks going door-to-door listening to people who didn’t go to church and surveying their needs. I developed relationships and built bridges of friendship with as many unbelievers as I could.
I then gathered a crowd out of the community by writing a letter announcing the beginning of our church and mailing it to 15,000 homes. I wrote the letter based on what I learned about the community from my survey. We also used a lot of advertising that first year because we didn’t have enough
relationships to rely only on word of mouth to build a crowd. This is true of most small churches. Today, with thousands of members inviting friends to our church, advertising is unnecessary.
For that first year, about all we tried to do was build a crowd and introduce them to Christ. Just as it takes an enormous amount of energy to move a rocket off a launch pad, it requires an incredible amount of effort to gather a crowd out of nothing. Our focus was very narrow. I preached very simple, straightforward evangelistic series such as “Good News About Common Problems” and “God’s Plan for Your Life.” At the end of the year we had about 200 in average attendance, and most of themwere brand-new believers.
In our second year, I began working on turning the believers in our crowd into a congregation. We continued reaching out to the community and increasing the size of the crowd, but we added a strong emphasis on building relationships within our fellowship. We focused on converting attenders into members. I began to talk more about the value of church membership, the benefits of belonging to a church family, and the responsibilities included in membership. I preached messages with titles like “We’re in This Together,” “All in God’s Family,” and “Why Do We Have Church Anyway?” I still remember the excitement of watching how God began transforming a crowd of self-absorbed attenders into a loving congregation of members.
The third year, I instituted a plan to raise the commitment level of our members. I repeatedly challenged those in the congregation to deepen their dedication to Christ. I taught them how to establish the spiritual disciplines and habits that build spiritual maturity. I preached a series on commitment called “Together We Grow” and a basic doctrine series called “Questions I’ve Wanted to Ask God.” Of course, I taught these things to new believers in the first and second years, but the third year was when it became a major emphasis.
As people became solidly established in the faith, I began to give greater emphasis to involvement in ministry through messages like “Every Member Is a Minister” and a series called “Making the Most of What God Gave You.” I stressed that a non-ministering Christian was a contradiction in terms and exploded the myth that spiritual maturity is an end in itself. I stressed that maturity is for ministry.
Although we had lay ministries existing in our church from the start, we now began to organize them better into a recognizable core. I added staff to assist me in leading regular meetings for training, encouraging, and supervising the leaders of our lay ministries.
Do you see the natural progression? You build a multidimensional ministry by assimilating new members in a purposeful way, focusing on one level of commitment at a time. Don’t feel that you have to do everything all at once. Even Jesus didn’t do everything at once! Build from the outside in. And once you’ve got all five groups up and running, you then
continue by giving equal emphasis to each one.
Some may criticize the slow speed at which we moved people to deeper levels of commitment at first. But you need to remember that we began with the hard-core unchurched and were designing an entire philosophy of ministry fromscratch at the same time.
I’ve always viewed the building of Saddleback Church as a lifetime task. My desire has been, like Paul, to “[lay] a foundation as an expert builder” (1 Cor. 3:10). It takes time to build commitment, to develop quality, and to move people through the Circles of Commitment. I can tell you how to build a balanced, healthy church, but I can’t tell you how to do it quickly.
Solid, stable churches are not built in a day. When God wants to make a mushroom he takes six hours. When God wants to build an oak tree he takes sixty years. Do you want your church to be a mushroomor an oak tree?
2. Program around your purposes
You need to choose or design a program to fulfill each of your purposes. Remember, each Circle of Commitment also corresponds to a purpose of the church. If you use the five circles as a strategy for programming, you’ll identify both your targets (community, crowd, congregation, committed, and core) and your objective with each target (evangelism, worship,
fellowship, discipleship, and ministry).
Always clarify the purpose for every program in your church. Kill any program that doesn’t fulfill a purpose. Replace a program when you find one that does a better job than the one you’re using. Programs must always be the servants of your purposes.
Bridge events. At Saddleback, the primary program we use to impact the community is an annualseries of community-wide events. We call these our “bridge events” because they are designed to build a bridge between our church and our community. They are usually quite large, in order to capture the attention of the entire community. These events include: a Harvest party as a safe alternative for children at Halloween, community-wide Christmas Eve services, community-wide Easter services, and Western Day near the Fourth of July, as well as other seasonal emphases, concerts, and productions. Some of our bridge events are overtly evangelistic while others we consider “pre-evangelism”—they simply make the unchurched in our community aware of our church.
Seeker services. The main program for the crowd is our weekend seeker services. These are designed as services to which our members can bring any unsaved friends to whom they are witnessing. The purpose of the seeker service is to assist personal evangelism, not replace it. Studies have shown that people make a decision for Christ sooner when there is group support.
The main program for the congregation is our small group network. Fellowship, personal care, and a sense of belonging are all benefits of being in a small group. We tell people, “You won’t really feel a part of this church family until you join a small group.”
Life Development Institute. The main program for the committed is our Life Development Institute. The Life Development Institute offers a wide variety of opportunities for spiritual growth: Bible studies, seminars, workshops, mentoring opportunities, and independent study programs. A person may earn credits for the classes they take and eventually receive a diploma. Our midweek worship service is a vital part of the Life Development Institute.
SALT. The main program for the core is our monthly SALT meeting, which stands for Saddleback Advanced Leadership Training. This two-hour rally, held on the first Sunday evening of each month, includes reports and testimonies fromall the lay ministries, vision-casting by the pastor, skill-building, leadership training, prayer, and the commissioning of new lay ministers. As a pastor, I consider my monthly meeting with the core of lay ministers to be the most important meeting I prepare for and lead. It is an invaluable opportunity to instruct, inspire, and express appreciation to the people who make Saddleback happen.
The thing to remember about programming is that no single program, no matter how great it is or how well it has worked in the past, can adequately fulfill all the purposes of your church.
Likewise, no single program can minister to all the people who compose each circle in your church. It takes a variety of programs to minister to the five levels of commitment and fulfill the five different purposes of the church.
3. Educate your people on purpose
Saddleback’s Christian education program is purposedriven. Our goal is to help people develop a lifestyle of evangelism, worship, fellowship, discipleship, and ministry. We want to produce doers of the Word, not hearers only—to transform, not merely inform. One of our slogans is “You only believe the part of the Bible that you DO.”
Transformation will not happen by chance. We must establish a disciplemaking, or educational, process that encourages people to act on what they learn and rewards them when they do. At Saddleback we call this the “Life Development Process.”
The Life Development Process
An Overviewof The Life Development Institute
100 Level Classes
To lead people to Christ and church membership.
200 Level Classes
To grow people to spiritual maturity.
300 Level Classes
To equip people with the skills they need for ministry.
400 Level Classes
To enlist people in the worldwide mission of sharing Christ.
We use the simple diagram of a baseball diamond to visually explain our education and assimilation process to our members. Each base represents a completed class and a deeper level of commitment.
You get to first base by completing Class 101 and committing to Saddleback’s membership covenant. You arrive at second base after completing Class 201 and committing to a spiritual growth covenant. You make it to third base by completing Class 301 and committing to serve in a ministry of the church. And you finally get back to home plate by completing Class 401 and committing to sharing your faith both at home and on mission trips. These steps will be explained in
detail later.
As in baseball, no credit is given for runners left on base. We tell new members that our goal for them is to become “Grand Slam Disciples.” We want them to complete all sixteen hours of basic training and to commit to the covenants explained at each base. There is a written covenant at each base that we expect people to sign and commit to before moving ahead. No member may proceed to the next base until he has committed to the requirements of each covenant.
Most churches do a fairly good job getting people to first base or maybe even second base. People will receive Christ, be baptized, and join the church (that’s getting them to first base). Some churches also do an excellent job of helping believers develop the habits that lead to spiritual maturity (that’s getting to second base). But few churches have a plan to insure that every believer finds an appropriate ministry (third base), and even fewer equip members to win others to Christ and fulfill their life mission (home plate).
Our ultimate goal at Saddleback is to turn an audience into an army. You don’t judge the strength of an army by how many soldiers sit and eat in the mess hall but by how they performon the front line. Likewise a church’s strength is not seen in how many show up for services (the crowd) but how many serve in the core.
In the early 1980s I used to joke that my objective was to turn “Yuppies” (Young Urban Professionals) into “Yummies,”
(Young Urban Missionaries)! As I’ve said before, I believe the church is to be a missionary-sending station. Only as we move members completely around the bases to home plate can we fulfill the Great Commission.
4. Start small groups on purpose
We don’t expect each small group to do the same things; we allow themto specialize.
Seeker groups. Our seeker groups are formed exclusively for evangelism. They provide a nonthreatening environment for nonbelievers to ask questions, express doubts, and investigate the claims of Christ.
Support groups. We have support groups for the purpose of congregational care, fellowship, and worship. Many of our support groups are related to providing support and fellowship during a specific stage of life, such as new parents, college students, or empty nesters. Others deal with healing specific hurts encountered by those who have lost a mate by death or divorce. We also have a full menu of recovery groups.
Service groups. These groups are formed around a specific ministry such as our orphanage in Mexico, our prison ministry, or our divorce recovery ministry. Groups such as these naturally find fellowship together through a common task, project, or ministry.
Growth groups. Our growth groups are dedicated to nurturing, discipleship training, and in-depth Bible study. We offer about fifty different curriculum choices, and some of these groups do a more in-depth study of the previous week’s sermon subject.
Rather than force everyone to conform to a “one size fits all” mentality, we allow people to choose the type of small group that best fits their needs, their interests, their stage of life, or their spiritual maturity. We do not expect each small group to fulfill every purpose of the church, but we do require that each one must be organized around at least one purpose of the church.
5. Add staff on purpose
Each person we hire onto our church staff is given a purpose-based job description. While interviewing, we use some standard questions in order to discover which of the church’s purposes an applicant feels most passionate about, and then we place them accordingly. We don’t look just for character and competence when interviewing staff; we look for a passion about one of the purposes of the church. People who are passionate about something they are doing are selfmotivated.
If I were starting a new church today I would begin by recruiting five volunteers for five unpaid staff positions: a music/magnification director to help prepare the worship
services for the crowd; a membership director to teach Class 101 and oversee the care of members in the congregation; a maturity director to teach Class 201 and oversee the Bible study programs for the committed; a ministry director to teach Class 301, interview people for ministry placement, and supervise the lay ministries of the core; and a mission director to teach Class 401 and oversee our evangelism and missions programs in the community. As the church grew I would move these people to part-time paid staff and eventually full-time. With this plan, you can be purpose driven regardless of the size of your church.
6. Structure on purpose
Rather than organizing by traditional departments, organize around purpose-based teams. At Saddleback every lay ministry and every staff member is assigned to one of our five purposebased teams. In turn, each team is led by a team pastor, assisted by a team coordinator, and composed of a combination of paid staff ministers and volunteer lay ministers. Together they lead the programs, ministries, and events that fulfill the particular purpose assigned to that team.
The Missions Team. The missions team is assigned the purpose of evangelism. Their target is the community. Their job is to plan, promote, and oversee all of the church’s bridge events, seeker groups, evangelism training (including Class 401), evangelistic activities and programs, and mission
projects. They are to organize whatever it takes to reach our community and our world for Christ.
The church is in the sending business. It is our goal that eventually 25 percent of our membership will do some kind of mission project each year. I’d love to see our attendance go down every summer, not because people are on vacation but because they are out on the mission field serving. Another goal is to send out 200 career missionaries from Saddleback in the next twenty years. This past year we sent adult members on mission projects to five continents, and our youth did mission projects at our orphanage in Mexico and at a rescue mission in inner-city Los Angeles.
The Magnification/Music Team. This team is assigned the purpose of worship. Their target is the crowd. Their job is to plan and oversee our weekend seeker services, special worship emphases and events, and to provide music and worship resources to the rest of the church.
The Membership Team. This teamis assigned the purpose of fellowship. Their target is the congregation. It is their business to care for the flock. They run our monthly class for prospective members (Class 101). They oversee all support groups, weddings, funerals, pastoral care, hospital visitation, and benevolence within the congregation, and they operate the counseling center. Finally, this team is responsible for all major fellowship events within our church family.
The Maturity Team. The maturity team is assigned the
purpose of discipleship. Their target is the committed. Their goal is to lead our members to deeper spiritual commitment and help them develop to spiritual maturity. This team operates the monthly Class 201 and is responsible for the Life Development Institute, the midweek worship service, all Bible studies, growth groups in homes, and special church-wide spiritual growth campaigns. They also produce family devotional guides, Bible study curriculums, and other resources to help believers grow.
The Ministry Team. This team is assigned the purpose of ministry. Their target is the core. Their job is to turn members into ministers by helping members discover their SHAPE for ministry and guiding them to find either an existing place for ministry or a new ministry. This team operates the Ministry Development Center, and is responsible for all service groups as well as for the monthly Class 301 and SALT meetings. They also assist, train, and supervise the lay ministers of the church. The goal of this team is to help every member of the church find a meaningful place of service that best expresses his or her gifts and abilities.
7. Preach on purpose
To produce balanced, healthy believers, you need to plan a preaching schedule that includes a series on each of the five purposes over the course of a year. A four-week series related to each of the five purposes would require only twenty weeks.
There would still be more than half a year left to preach on other themes.
Planning your preaching around the five purposes of the church does not mean you must always be teaching about the church itself. Personalize the purposes! Talk about them in terms of God’s five purposes for every Christian. For example, here are some titles of series I’ve preached in which I applied the purposes in a personalized way: “You Are Shaped for Significance” was a series to mobilize people for ministry; “The Six Stages of Faith” was a series on the circumstances God takes believers through to mature them; “Learning to Hear God’s Voice” was a series on worship; “Answering Life’s Toughest Questions” was a series based on Ecclesiastes to prepare people for evangelism; “Building Great Relationships” was a series based on 1 Corinthians 13, designed to deepen the fellowship of our church. When you use the five purposes of the church as a guide for planning your preaching schedule, you are preaching with a purpose.
8. Budget on purpose
We categorize every line item in our church budget by the purpose of the church that it supports or to which it relates. The quickest way to discover a church’s priorities is to look at its budget and calendar. The way we spend our time and the way we spend our money show what is really important to us, regardless of what we claim to believe. If your church claims
that evangelism is a priority, you need to be able to back up that claim with dollars allocated in your budget. Otherwise you’re just blowing smoke.
9. Calendar on purpose
Designate two months of each year to give special emphasis to each purpose. Then give each purpose team (composed of staff or volunteers) the assignment of emphasizing that purpose church-wide during those months.
For example, January and June might each be Maturity months. During a month-long emphasis on spiritual maturity you might read through the New Testament as a congregation, memorize a Bible verse together each week, or hold a Bible conference or a church-wide Bible study.
February and July could each be Ministry months. During these months you could hold a ministry fair to recruit people for ministry. The pastor could preach a series on ministry. People could be encouraged to join a service group.
March and August might be Missions months, with activities like personal evangelism training, a missions conference, and special hands-on mission projects.
April and September could be Membership months. These months would be good months to put a special emphasis on recruiting attenders to become new members. You could plan a
number of church-wide fellowship events like picnics, concerts, and festivals.
May and October could be Magnification months—two months that emphasize personal and corporate worship. By committing two months a year to each of the five purposes you will be left with two free months—in this example November and December, which are already busy with Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Don’t fool yourself. If you don’t schedule your purposes on your calendar, they won’t get emphasized.
10. Evaluate on purpose
To remain effective as a church in an ever-changing world you need to continually evaluate what you do. Build review and revision into your process. Evaluate for excellence. In a purpose-driven church, your purposes are the standard by which you evaluate effectiveness.
Having a purpose without any practical way to review results would be like NASA planning a moon shot without a tracking system: You’ll be unable to make midcourse corrections and will probably never hit your target. At Saddleback we’ve developed a tracking tool we call the “Saddleback Snapshot.” Our pastoral staff reviews it each month. The Snapshot is a six-page overview of our discipledevelopment process. It identifies who is at each base of our Life Development Process (baseball diamond). Like the old
Abbott and Costello routine, we want to know “Who’s on first?” The Snapshot also shows how many people are currently in each Circle of Commitment, and measures a number of other key indicators of church health.
The Snapshot forces us to take an honest look each month at how well our church is fulfilling its purposes. Bottlenecks in the system become easy to spot. For instance, if worship attendance increases 35 percent in a year but membership and small group attendance only increases 20 percent, we know we’ve got to rectify some gap in the process. Statistics like this help us evaluate our assimilation process and determine where emphasis is needed. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, we must be constantly asking, “What is our business?” and “How’s business?”
Growing Stronger
As you seek to apply your purposes to every area of your church you will notice the church growing stronger and stronger. Instead of constantly looking for new programs each year to keep people excited and motivated, you will be able to focus on the essentials. You will be able to learn from each mistake and build on every success. If unchanging purposes guide your church, you will be able to work on fulfilling those purposes better each passing year. Momentum works in your favor. The more your members understand and commit to your purposes, the stronger your church will become.