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BestPractices
 December 9, 2009
Loren6This and that:

A question from Monte Sahlin: "Are you, or someone you know, using Twitter in ministry, outreach or pastoral care?" Contact Monte directly.

A compliment (I think) from Richard Latane: "Your newsletter is a roborant for the intrepid myrmidons of Christ." Richard adds, "I just couldn't resist using my word(s) for the day."

An announcement of a new resource we're developing at Vervent: the iFollow discipleship curriculum, Spring of 2010.

A new hymn - I thought it very good - for the 2010 GC session. Download both sheet music and a recording of it, and try it with your church.
IN THIS ISSUE
Reviving a Dead District
Reading: How to lose an argument on line
Media: Krystalynn Martin
Quotes: "Never have children, only grandchildren."
Dan Day on discipleship
News & ideas: Getting a clean copy of Best Practices
Events: NAD health summit
Practicing Pastor
Care Center Brings New Life to an Old Church
by Ken Ferguson

Since most of our NAD churches are small, I'm always looking for pastors who've had the ability to bring a small town small church to life. A while back I told you about Ken Ferguson's  Community Care Center in the barely-there Appalachian river town of Manchester, Ohio. For a church to have a community services center isn't all that unusual. What is unusual is that Ken had been in the district for eight years, pastoring several elderly churches in small towns - essentially maintenance ministry - when he decided to start the CCC. That's when everything changed. Here's an update. LGS

The church members told me right up front they weren't hopeful. "Pastor," they said, "we have no money and we're all too old." But they were willing to pray while I went to meet with the mayor and the town council, and before long we were stacking cans of food and piles of clothes in the prison cells of the old city hall!

A lot has changed. The old building was condemned, and we've moved to main street. We have free use of two buildings. We get financial and volunteer support from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian church, as well as the area's grocers, a whole slate of non-profit partnerships, plus miscellaneous donations and garnered grants. We're now wondering what other ministries we could use to fill the spaces. The mayor declared a Community Care Center day, with a street fair and events. In short, our little elderly church has started something that has become a major part of the life of this village.

When the Center opened its doors in August, 2002, it served approximately 40 families a month with 2000 items of food and 3500 items of clothing.  What we formerly served in a month, we now serve in a day.  Just a few weeks ago, the Center broke an all time record serving 86 families in a four hour period.

The church has been revived. Some of those "too old" people of the church are now managing the programs, and have a sense of purpose. After years of largely fruitless seminars and meetings, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is now on the map in Manchester. One client came into CCC one day and picked up a copy of The Great Controversy. She read it and then began to ask questions. With much excitement, she went back to her church and pastor and asked them to do a study of the book. Out of that study, she, her pastor, and her church are all keeping the Sabbath!

Contact Ken at ferg76@roadrunner.com.
Reading For Pastors

More from Seth Godin's blog: How to Lose an Argument On Line.

Churches in financial distress? Apparently many are: Quote: "There's that faith, you know, that often we think that the Lord is directing us to go do something. Well, how do you refute that when I deal with a pastor that says that the Lord is calling me to buy this building? And I have many situations where it will not pencil. We run our analysis and we get real involved and detailed. But then the pastors continue to say, well, I believe God is directing me for this. Goodness. So what do you do? What do you do? We give the best counsel we can. We give it to them pragmatically, you know, documented in writing that this is where you are going to be, and often time the pastor will look me in the face and say, well, you know what? I understand what you are saying. I understand by earthly standards this will not work, but God has called me to do it. And that's the trump card. What do you do? You're just kind of like, okay."

Time to catch up on one of the best Adventist blogs, Faith in Context:
Can you believe in Jesus and astrology? Apparently a significant number of Americans mix new age and other beliefs in with their Christian faith. Here's the original Pew Research report.

Santa Claus had a real life model: remembering St. Nicholas. Quote: "The problem with Santa Claus as it stands now is that it's a substitute for Christmas - Santa Claus instead of the creche, instead of the manger, instead of the nativity scene. This man we would find kneeling at the nativity scene saying, 'This is what I'm here to celebrate as well.'"
Featured Media
In the last edition of Best Practices Dave Gemmell forgot to unlock the privileges on the Stained Glass Church Documentary. It's been fixed and you can watch as Oakland Ave wrestles with how to minister in an environment where one out of a hundred residents are homeless.

Instead of trying to get people to church Pastor Krytalynn Martin of Rio Lindo Academy Church is bringing church to the people. Listen as she shares how she takes her Academy church into the city of Santa Rosa and offers a worship service and food for the homeless. This video is a sneak peak of good things to come in Pastor's DVD 17 with emphasize on getting the salt out of the saltshaker.
To the Point

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
  - Bertrand Russell

Health food makes me sick.
  - Calvin Trillin

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
  - Rita Rudner

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
  - Fran Lebowitz

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
  - Laurence J. Peter

The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
 - Albert Einstein

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.
  - Charles Luckman

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
  - Thomas H. Huxley

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
  - Bertrand Russell

Davy my boy, annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
 - Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.
- Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
  - Douglas Adams

Never have children, only grandchildren.
  - Gore Vidal
Discipleship
Dan DayDiscipleship: What Is It, and Why Should We Care?

Dan Day, Director, NAD Church Resource Center

ifollowAdventists don't have a lengthy history with "discipleship." So, I was not surprised when I discussed with a pastor friend of mine our new iFollow discipleship resource (coming out in the Spring of 2010) and he returned: "What do you mean by discipleship?"

I don't mean in saying that we don't have much history with discipleship that we're unfamiliar with the elements involved with following Jesus. In discussing discipleship, we're exploring how we can become more successful in our spiritual journey. But journey language typically involves a rather specific, linear perspective. We start in one place and then continue on an upward path. We're "growing in Christ." We're learning how to be "more disciplined, spiritually," "more useful to God," and "more kind and loving." Right?

Some in today's modern culture, though, have trouble with this linear language. "What evidence do you have that you're getting better?" they ask. They point at an elderly Christian who is crotchety and seems to be increasingly rigid in his or her views and say: "Is that what you mean?" They point at someone with years of Christian service, but who has "fallen from grace" in some public humiliation, and say: "Is that what you mean?" And even more pointedly, they look at a church filled with "pew-sitters," who are not in any way involved with ministry in their communities, and they say: "Is that what you mean?"

If discipleship really means: "getting better and better, day-by-day," then we need to provide some pretty solid metrics, don't we? We need to be able to show that growth is happening in measurable ways and that it is happening to most of us.

Or do we? How would you define discipleship? How would you characterize the Christian's spiritual journey? The rest is yet to come...
News, Ideas & Reminders

  • To those of you who aren't getting a clean, formatted HTML copy of Best Practices, two suggestions:
    • "I had the messy text problem and finally figured out that on the subscribe page I had checked the box to receive the newsletter in plain text." Bruce Blum
    • "Perhaps it's a simple problem of changing the format that their mail is viewed in? Open Outlook, click Tools, then Options, then Mail Format. At the top in Message Format, click the drop down box and select HTML. Hopefully that will do it!" Kasey McFarland
  • From Bruce Nicola, about the pamphlet Motion Pictures and Television: Principles and Standards Governing Their Selection. "The reaction to this set of guidelines will be like to trying to define what appropriate music is for a worship services - very subjective in interpretation. I found the guidelines to be overall very Biblical in attempting to reflect a Christian set of values - and to have a Seventh-day Adventist application. If we applied Philippians 4:8 to all the movies produced today easily 98%+ would be excluded for any number of reasons. But, most Christians/Adventists/(pastors?) who watch movies do so simply because they like to watch whatever they want. Challenging ourselves to levels of holiness that honestly deal with what passes through our eyes, ears, and minds is not something far too many of us have chosen to do. Maybe the reason the church in North America is not growing is for some very simple reasons - reasons this 70 year old pamphlet unwittingly defines in making holy choices."
Got a tool, resource, site, article, idea or seminar that you like a lot? Share it with us at BestPractices@ameritech.net.
Upcoming NAD Events

Do you have an event you'd like to invite NAD pastors to? Send details to BestPractices@Ameritech.net.
Best Practices is a Vervent publication of NAD CHURCH RESOURCE CENTER. Editor: Loren Seibold, Senior Pastor, Worthington Ohio Seventh-day Adventist Church. E-mail: Best Practices. You are free to republish pieces from Best Practices in your own newsletter or blog, with attribution to the Best Practices newsletter and the author of the piece.