June S.A.L.T. Meeting

You're here for SALT, can I ask you to come forward real quickly? And I can make this fairly short, like 15 minutes, so we can get out and have some fellowship time. Just a couple of things I'd like to share with you. Thank you for coming. How about holding on to this for just a moment, I'll come back to it. I know you all want to read through it and so, but I will come back to this in just a moment. If you'll hang on to this, maybe put it on your lap. I'll tell you what, you can turn it over and read the back page. Let me first of all, and again I want to say thank you for fitting this into your day. I know you all like to be out and we will be shortly. One reason we opted to try this little slot of time together is because we have found that Saturdays are so difficult for so many of you and frankly folks, it's becoming increasingly hard to communicate with our leaders. And I understand that. We're trying to adapt and if you have a suggestion as to another time you think might be wide open, make sure you put that in the little survey that you're going to get there in a moment. Here's just the three things I'd like to say. Number one, as we move into the summer Wednesday nights, the pastoral team is going to invest time Wednesdays, kind of concurrent with the service for leadership development. And they felt that that would be a time when you would probably have open in your schedule and be coming anyhow. So if you can plan, and I think it's basically one Wednesday night a month is all you have to be there. So it would be next Wednesday or the following. The pastoral team will be leading that. I'll give a little input in terms of the vision of things. But it's a time of helping us all to get on the exact same page about our visionary leadership, particularly for small group leaders. Is that correct? And apprentices. So it's for everybody that's in leadership then. If you're a ministry leader or a small group leader of any kind or an apprentice, you need to be there. It's on that yellow sheet. It's spelled out there. It's in your notes. But that's this Wednesday, 7 to 8.30. Also, we are excited about the response to Wednesday nights and the subject of Israel and the prophetic future. And so we're going to build on that. We have some great folks that will be giving input. And rather than us just kind of scrape along on Wednesday nights, we believe that we can literally grow. And part of that will be the fact that the kids, our children, have a little more flexibility. They don't have to be home to bed right at 8.30 or 9. And our youth ministry is going to be doing some things too. And I wish that we were doing more, but Paul is just getting started. So that's the best that we can do in this interim time. But I trust you'll make Wednesday nights a bit of a priority and that you'll invite people to come with you. I think it's important for us to keep that. All right. The second thing before we get to that little survey is this. It still seems to us that the great challenge that we face as a church is the process of inviting and including people. And this is a big one. I need you to recognize the challenge that's before us. What happens as people come, because of the size of the building and so on, people get lost here. And if they don't connect with another human being, a warm person, they really don't feel they fit. I've thought a lot about this. One of the reasons is, folks, there aren't many large churches in the area. Do you know that? So most of the people have never been in a large church, and they walk in and they're just intimidated. And if they sit in the back for a little bit and don't talk to anybody except to say hello and go out, or they go out to the coffee hour and you're talking to the same two or three faces, what we find is they basically just don't feel really connected. And this is a proactive issue. And as a leader, I know that your heart is to do this. I just want to encourage you to literally extend yourself beyond your comfort zone and reach out to people, first of all, when you see them here, but also, secondly, in your own interchanges and exchanges out in the marketplace. People want to be invited. They need you to be that agent. But once they're here, we've got to work at connecting. We know that's a weakness. And there's not a ministry that makes it work. We've tried every kind of ministry to connect. Really, it has to be a spontaneous thing. It has to be Gary seeing Tom, and Michael sees Ron, and Bill sees Jack, and they just get together and sing with the ladies and stuff. Very important. I think if we don't do that, that door out there, we might as well just change the front door to make it revolving. Are you hearing what I'm saying? That's what's going to happen. It's going to be in and out, in and out. And that's not the way the Lord wants us to build this little part of the kingdom. All right. Now, help us, number three, with this survey. And you don't have to do it all now. In fact, I'll just get you going, and then you can decide if you want to stay and do it. But what we want to do is we want to receive your feedback about what you're seeing. Very honestly, we need a lot of input. There's about seven or so areas there. If you don't have input on all of them, don't fill them all out. If you have one that you really feel strongly about, spend a half hour and fill it out. But this is your time to say, as a leader and a servant, gee, this is what I see that I like, and this is what I see that I wish we would talk about changing. Not just for the immediate, but for the fall. Because the summer is when we like to do our planning, and I'm hoping to be part of that process to some degree, even if I'm not here for those weeks. So that's very important. And if you walk out of here and you know you're going to put it on your table at home and not do it, that'd be disappointing. So if you know you can do it at home and then drop it off or mail it in, that'd be fine. But we need to get a lot of these. Now, also, how many of you are home group leaders? Let me see your hands. Great. Well, thank you for coming. A lot of home group leaders. We made enough copies of this to take it home to your home group. So where are they, Scott? In the back, you can pick up a stack of five or six for your home group and let your home group fill them out. We want to hear from as many people. We just didn't want to go to the expense of sending out a mailing and then having only 10% or 15% respond. This way, if you take it home and say to your group, hey, we're going to spend 10 minutes doing this, we know it'll get done, and then you can bring them back in. So our goal, I'd like to get 300 of these back. So if the 150 or so of you that are here plus the 150 that you touched would fill one out, that would be marvelous. That would be great cross-sectional feedback of where we are. Okay, I'm done. Any questions about anything that I can answer right now before we break and head out to the refreshment time? Wednesday nights, the priority of connecting, and then the feedback. Jim? Well, I'd like them, if at all possible, by the 29th. Okay, that's a week from Thursday. If you can do it before that, great. Pardon? Just send them to the office, or the information center, just the office, and you can put Arlene's name on there, and we'll get them. Other questions from anybody about anything in particular? Or in general? On July the 2nd, when I'm back, I'm going to be gone next weekend for a pre-planned thing, but on the 2nd, we'll have some time of prayer together for future issues and the thing I shared at the end of the message there, and we'll have some time of ministry together. So that's coming, but I specifically wanted you, and actually, the way I would have done this, I would have told you assault leaders before today, but we postponed our meeting. That's why the sequence didn't quite work. Plus, I didn't know until this weekend, so I didn't really decide until this weekend, Friday, whether I was going to press ahead. Okay, any other questions? I don't want to delay anybody. I don't want to cut anyone off. Any questions? Susie, you have a question? Yeah, thank you. Of the Wednesdays that we have, about 11 left in the summer, four of them are going to be particularly geared toward having fun together on a sort of fellowship, connection, social basis. We're going to have an outdoor concert. We're going to have a sports night in the gym that's around that theme. I'm not going to do aerobics or anything. We're going to do, what else? On the 4th of July, in lieu of Wednesday night the 5th. So there's going to be several opportunities just to be hanging out together and interfacing. Four of the 11 Wednesdays. The other seven will be a little more traditional here, but with a lot of interaction. I'm asking every one of the leaders to have a good 15 minutes of thought and prayer and interfacing together every Wednesday night because that's an important part of it. All right. We have a few wonderful speakers coming while I'm gone. I know for sure Keith Kraft and the Marriage Seminar Weekend, Keith will be here, and Sandy Calkins coming, and Joseph Ellington has agreed to come. So that will be great. I'm working on a couple other ones too. All right. Well, let's pray, and I'll get you guys out in that sunshine. Father, I thank you for these great leaders. Lord, they're great because they're faithful and consistent and giving. I love those qualities in them, Lord. Bless us, Lord, as we commit to those priorities of community for our small groups, Lord. Bless the pastoral team's efforts to develop leaders on Wednesday nights and cause each leader to be faithful to those short times together. Bless, Lord, our connections. Help us to reach out, Lord God, because that's how you open your arms to us. And finally, Lord, just let us enjoy the fruit of what you're doing here among us in Jesus' name. Okay, thank you so much for the time. Go ahead out on the patio if you can. Have some refreshments. God bless you. Fill out the survey now if you know you're not going to do it later.