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BestPractices
 March 10, 2010
Three opportunities for Best Practices readers
Simple Church
#1. Best Practices is sponsoring a webinar on house churches, taught by Milton Adams of SimpleChurch. Sunday, March 21, 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time. Go here to register and get reading.

#2. The iFollow Discipleship curriculum is being finished, and will soon be available to you on a Pastor's DVD. See Dan Day's article, below, for more information.

#3. Don't forget the Andrews University Worship Conference, coming up March 25-27.

We're trying our best to give you the resources you need to be great pastors!

Loren Seibold, Editor, Best Practices for Adventist Ministry
IN THIS ISSUE
I'm the pastor - so I'm the center of attention
Reading: Who decides a child's faith?
Media: Jesse Wilson, Ed Wilmington
Quote: "Often our plans fail that God's plans for us may succeed."
iFollow Discipleship Curriculum
News & ideas: Adventist Fresh Expressions
Events: AU Worship Conference
Ministry
Loren's picture 3The Center of Attention
By Loren Seibold

A few years ago our city celebrated its bicentennial with a year of events. A member of the bicentennial committee, an active laywoman in a local church, was assigned to organize local pastors, over the preceding year, for a couple of community religious celebrations.

Fortunately, she was a strong person. Because organizing us was like herding cats. Just getting everyone together for a meeting was a challenge. "You ministers are prima donnas," she told me once. "In your churches you're always the center of attention. If you're not in charge, you don't know how to act."

At the moment, I was a little stung, but on reflection I had to concede there was at least a little truth in what she said. The buck has stopped with me for so long that I'm not quite used to fading into the team.

Here's a diagnostic: Your board invites a guest speaker. When he or she steps into your pulpit, are you a little uncomfortable? Especially if the guest is a better preacher than you are? Do you resent the praise lavished on him or her? Do you find yourself over-analyzing the presentations, and either being quietly critical, or damning with faint praise?

Of course, we may not say anything aloud. But we know what's in our hearts. It doesn't help that most of us are male, and self-selected to enjoy attention. We are, after all, in one of our most important roles, performers.

It affects how we work with church volunteers, too. It takes a fine balance to be a leader, but not to need to be at the center or get the credit. A quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: "A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say '"We did it ourselves.'"

I suspect even our church growth efforts are not always purely about soul-winning, but sometimes just about winning. Note how often our clergy heroes are megachurch pastors or successful evangelists.

It's not bad to want to be the leader. But it seems to me there is a spiritual issue to be alert to here, and to keep in our prayers. I say from personal experience that an insightful and honest spouse can be very helpful, even if slightly annoying, in pointing out such attitudes to you if you're unconscious of them!

Go to our Best Practices Facebook page to discuss this article.
Reading For Pastors

"We're All Theologians" - or are we? The younger generation of evangelicals isn't nearly as confident about Christian doctrine. Quote: "Pluralism in particular has ravaged young evangelicals' confidence in Jesus Christ's claims that he alone shows the way to the Father in heaven. Asked whether many religions can lead to eternal life, 52 percent of evangelicals from the so-called millennial generation agreed."

Which parent gets to decide a child's religion? In a landmark case, a father is placed under a restraining order for taking his daughter to church.

Cohabiting, common enough even among Christian young people, doesn't prepare people for a good marriage, as some claim. Quote: "[The study found that] the likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first."

Christian education: Does this sound familiar? Quote: " Facing rising costs and falling enrollments, the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore will close 13 of its 64 schools at the end of the academic year..."

Five teachings of Jesus that Christians ignore. Quote: "We pay back what is given to us. Someone mistreats us, we mistreat them. They steal something from us, we sue them. They gossip about us, we gossip about them. We are a culture that pays back what is owed. We not only don't forgive, we retaliate. Jesus is counter cultural. He tells us, to not only love neighbors, but to love enemies."
Featured Media
March 25-27 of 2010 will mark the seventh annual Andrews University Music and Worship Conference. Hosted on the University campus, this conference is a training event for pastors, worship leaders, church musicians, and lay leaders involved in worship ministry. As a participant, you will have access to a variety of seminars, workshops and worship experiences. Important issues relating to creativity, diversity, and excellence will be discussed, outlining a biblical framework for understanding worship and worship music. Presenters will also share techniques and strategies that can be used to improve the music and worship in your local church. Watch Ed Wilmington's Worship Wars from a previous Vervent Worship Conference.Milton Adams YouTube Video

Milton Adams is a pastor in the Florida Conference and is founder/director of Simple Church, a network of lay-led Adventist house churches dedicated to touching the lives of unchurched people. Register for the Best Practices for Adventist Ministry Webinar to be broadcast live Sunday March 21, 2010 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm EDT. This webinar will introduce the Simple Church Network - a lay-led Adventist house church network - and will give you the practical steps to start a house church. Watch Marti Schneider interview Milton Adams about Simple Church.

Innovative Impact 2010 will be held in Atlanta June 20-23 just before the General Conference World Session. Jesse Wilson, director of Innovative Impact, promises the best conference yet. Register now to hear speakers including Barry Black, Hyveth Williams, Derek Morris, Earl Knight, Sung Kwon, Bill McClendon, Clifton Davis, Frederick Russell, Mansfield Edwards,  Emil Peeler, Carlton Byrd, Roger Hernandez, and Jesse Wilson. Plan on bringing your lay leaders to this powerful leadership conference. Watch Jesse Wilson's presentation, Impact Your Community,  at a previous Innovative Impact.
To the Point
Not by painful struggles or wearisome toil, not by gift or sacrifice, is righteousness obtained; but it is freely given to every soul who hungers and thirsts to receive it.
 - Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing

Often our plans fail that God's plans for us may succeed.
 - Help in Daily Living

Know and believe the love that God has to us, and you are secure; that love is a fortress impregnable to all the delusions and assaults of Satan.
- Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing

God takes men as they are... They are not chosen because they are perfect, but notwithstanding their imperfections, that through the knowledge and practice of the truth, through the grace of Christ, they may become transformed into His image.
 - Desire of Ages

The last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world, is a revelation of His character of love. The children of God are to manifest His glory. In their own life and character they are to reveal what the grace of God has done for them.
- Christ's Object Lessons

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.
  - Alfred E. Wiggam

I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.
  - Groucho Marx

Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
  - Kin Hubbard
Resources
Dan DayifollowThe iFollow Discipleship Resource
Dan Day, Director, NAD Church Resource Center

People have been asking for more details about the iFollow discipleship resource we've been discussing here in the pages of Best Practices. When will it be available? What will it contain? How will we use it? Let me begin to open the door a bit more widely, so you can begin to think about how the new resource could impact your ministry.

The first elements of the new iFollow resource will be introduced at the NAD Pavillion of the General Conference Session in Atlanta, which will take place during the end of June and the beginning of July this year. It will be fully rolled out by the time of the NAD Ministries Convention, in January.

Over five years in development, the new iFollow discipleship resource is a product of the Adventist church in North America, developed in response to research findings with Adventist pastors who said it was the most important resource they could be provided. It was developed by teams of Adventist writers and editors, under the direction of the NAD Church Resource Center, who contracted with the Center for Creative Ministry for the early work. It is a content-rich tool that will enable pastors and congregational leaders to access a broad set of discipleship resources, and is being engineered to serve the local congregation in discipleship training in several different ways.

How will it all work?

First, each church in North America will be provided with a special edition of the Pastor's DVD that will contain a complete library of discipleship content. That means it is free to you and your congregation. This content will be searchable, so it can be assessed to set up training sessions and mined for sermon content. It's going to be so cool.

Second, there will be a website associated with iFollow that will mirror the DVD. What that means is that the content can be accessed there, too, providing a wide assortment of ways it can be used. The website will also contain additional elements as they become available.

Third, a series of books is going to be offered (with the first ones available at AdventSource during the GC Session), drawn from the discipleship content and written to address specific discipleship themes. These books, written by experienced Adventist authors and editors, will be unlike anything you've seen before. They will be specifically organized for use in small group settings. Not only will the discipleship themes be addressed in powerful ways, but additional content will in each book, providing things like: a Bible study for each chapter, specific discipleship comments from Ellen White and various contemporary writers, and activities for the group to use in making the content more accessible. There will even be a section in each chapter that shows how the theme of that chapter intersects with one or more of the Fundamental Beliefs of the church.

In short, the iFollow discipleship resource will be a powerful new tool for strengthening the vitality of the local congregation and deepening the spiritual life of the individual Christian. It will be specifically developed with the end-users in mind, and it will continue to grow as more titles are added and additional content is made available. That means if you want to begin discipleship training in your church, you will be able to continue the process over however long you wish-with content you can trust, organized to make the process easy and effective.
News, Ideas & Reminders

  • Standing ovations greeted the first weekend of special screenings of The ADVENTISTS, the new one-hour documentary that profiles Seventh-day Adventists and their unique approach to health and healing. The screenings took place at two locations around Orlando, FL, including The Gathering Place, an interfaith center. More than 1,200 attended the combined screenings.
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.