CloudofSteam

PTC Ministry Conference 2012
Session 7

Moderator:
Peter Hastie

Panelists:
Bill Medley (Frankston)
Gerard vanderwert (Donvale)
Neil Chambers (Bundoora)
Don Elliot (Eltham)

Questions:

Peter Hastie to BM: What role has dependence on Prayer had in your ministry in what has been a difficult place to work?

BM: If God is sovereign, we should stir up our people to pray. I spent a lot of time praying for my personal holiness. A bad tree cant produce good fruit. I seek to be transformed as well as stirring up the people of God because God alone can give the increase.

PH to GV: How significant is it to Donvale’s work that it is in team ministry?
I was at Donvale for ten years before atony Bird joined me in 1998, out of necessity. Truth is enforced by being preached by the whole team. It prevents burnout. Family can get neglected when you work on your own. Having a team gives you people to discuss the issues with and provides continuity when someone leaves.

PH to NC: (Was at Ashfield for 10 years) What should be the absolute burden of a pastor?
I was convinced that the core of ministry is preaching and prayer. Nothing that has happened since has changed that conviction. God ony nurtures his peep through the preaching and teaching of the word of God. We need to supplement the Sunday preaching and reinforce it with small groups and one on one ministry. 

PH to NC: Do you coordinate the growth groups with the preaching?
It’s a lot of work to produce Bible studies for people to use, but normally they keep connected with the preaching. Some groups diversify. It helps them to apply the message.

PH to DE: How has your overseas training in counselling (at RTS) effected your preaching and pastoral work?
(I graduated in 1985 and the PCV is very different)
I have a better grasp of people and how unpredictable people’s reactions can be. This bears on my sermon preparation. It has helped me to look at the Bible’s human focus, when I was more focused on getting theology out of it. I’ve learned that people resist personal application. I try to think about the less mature person at church and how to preach to them. I’ve become more interested in the process of communication. We should get rid of the cursive “we” and put in “you” and “I”. I change the structure and length of my sermons so people don’t get into listening ruts. When I came back from RTS, I preached at Arrarat and they said, “If that’s what your counselling did for your preaching, it was well worth the expense.” A man at Eltham Said he found it hard to get up in the morning to hear me preach. We covenanted to meet every few weeks to discuss past sermons. I couldn’t have done that before.

PH to NC: Would you like to share some thoughts on application in preaching?
Look at John Chapman’s Setting Hearts on Fire and Haddon Robinson’s Bibkical Preaching. Unless you apply, you haven’t preached. You can never be too direct. It is possible to be over-specific and not leave room for God.

Adam Humphries to BM or GV: Exiting into a parish, what would you do different or try.
BM: I’m the new guy. Because I’m new, I haven’t been effectively discipling.
GV: There were big problems in the parish. John Ellis had had a hard time there. They didn’t want an exit student and were happy to have a home missionary. They finally decided to accept me. My training was very inadequate. There were a couple of wise people in the congregation who at went for advice. Sme people left because of the preaching. Other new people came. It was very different, but it was in the process of growing myself. The first thing I did was to start a fortnightly prayer meeting. It was prayer where God intervened in that situation.

PH to NC and DE: What must a new minister do?
NC: You must do what God has called you to do: labour to present everyone perfect to Christ. It is only his word that will bring his people to himself and enable them to live fruitful lives which will bring glory to him. You’ll want to get to know people, so you’ll visit them and get to know the area.
DE: In my first year, with 3 centres and 200km round trip, I was lead to concentrate my efforts in the spiritually dead area. I should have been encouraged by the living part of the work.

Peter Stanton: With all your responsibilities, how do you manage your time to do proactive ministries to evangelise people?
GV: I use mornings to prepare and afternoons for visitation, unless I have to. Get into a pattern. Let your people know what it is.
BM: Dunno. It’s impossible. The exit guys, you’re in for a shock. Just pray and seek the Lord. It’s a major problem for me. I still don’t compromise on the amount of time I pray.
NC: I like talking through ideas. We tak about our strategic area. It depends on how you run your session. I see my session as coworkers. Most of our substantial discussion is about direction. We’ll devote mornings to that. I find it hard to access people. If I were to visit in the afternoon, I’d only see one of my men. I visit people in the mornings before they go to work. As I lose stamina, I don’t visit so much on Saturdays and Sundays. I find that more than than 4 evenings out a week puts stress on what is going on at home.
DE: We want another worker at Eltham so that we can have more ministry evenings. The other things I’ve been doing outside the church have slowed Eltham down. It has cost the local congregation. W do have to be involved in the wider work of the church. Helpfully we’ll recover from that.

Andrew Satchell: How do you set your day off?
DE: I take Monday off, but I’m thinking of taking another day when I’m fresher.
NC: I’m struggling. I aspire to Mnday, mostly because that’s the day my wife has off. Now my children are grown, I need time on Saturday or Sunday to see them. I basically take time off when I can. It confuses the congregation and the wife. I’m trying to stay in touch with those important members of my family.
GV: I take Monday off, as does my wife. Seem guys have Saturday off because they have kids. I spend most of Saturday in the study, with some in the garden but with my mind still in the study. Having time off is crucial. It’s not unusual for us to have coffee with church people on our day off.
BM: My day off is determined by my family, so it’s Saturday. I don’t panic at the end of the week, I panic at the start.

PH to NC: As someone who has worked in the medical field, what are the long term effects of not taking a break?
You’ll grow old and die. It depends if you enjoy your work. On my day off, I like to read my Bible and commentaries. We should all exercise. It depends on the quality of your relationships too. There’s a difference between working hard and dealing with conflict. It’s the things you can’t solve that wear you down.

Steve Woods: Have any of you gone to a congregation where the predominate culture is elderly and how did you attract younger families?
GV: There were a few younger people, but not many. If everyone has the attitude that there must be something already there, we’d get nowhere. It took a while, I believe in long term ministry. Nothing is achieved in 3 years unless God really pours out his blessing.
BM: there was one family at Frankston when I started there. I wanted not get them on board with a mission that not one of his sheep will be lost. They’d been praying before I got there. I spoke to them abou that they were going to do if a whole bunch of new people turned up there. I told them to was going to preach as if the place was filled with unsaved people. Pray. God is sovereign.

Ian Hutton to GV: How do you overcome favouritism?
GV: I don’t think it’s perceived as favouritism.
NC: Have real relationships with people in your congregation. Paul says, we shared with you our selves. You will relate more with some people than others.
DE: Do not take the advice that you should not have friends in your congregation. Paul’s role was to be mother and father to them. These people are the only family my kids have ever known.

Ian Hutton: How do you manage doing two sermons a week?
BM: Because of my abilities, I can’t do the same quality of sermon morning dan evening. I believe that the Lord has given us this day to serve him. I will at latest have God’s people worshipping rather than not. It’s worth it to do something lesser just to keep the doors open at night.
NC: For some years now, we’ve repeated the morning service. Our people are busy. We want people to invite people to lunch and spend time relating to their non-Christian friends. Often it’s the only days they have now.
DE: We a format where we did the extra stuff in the evening with interaction. It was always just the hardcore regulars. Now we do discipleship training courses scattered throughout the evenings.

Toby McIntosh : What do you do about poor attendance and lack of committment?
NC: To help with pastoral care, we take a roll every Sunday. There’s not social or economic benefit of belonging to Bundoora. We get 65-75%. It’s not very good. We’re grappling with what to do with those results. What’s driving us was having a person associated with us found dead in his bed 7 days after he died.
GV: The team can keep tabs. We don’t usually follow up unless they haven’t shown for 3-5 weeks.
BM: It’s a major problem for us. It can have 50 people away, last week it was 35. We don’t want to give up on a week person. I meet with the group and ministry leaders every m onto and am trying to get stronger Christians to take one person to follow up on and seriously connecting with them. We’ve made a start.

Brad Georges: Could you share with us how you’ve cultivated small group prayer life?
DE: We set up growth groups and at one stage had 75% in them, though this has dropped as we have grown. Once a term, we meet for prayer. People come with a verse about God, which we pray about, then ministries. We don’t pray so much for people.
NC: We also use growth groups. We have a monthly prayer meeting which needs to be rejuvenated. People find Saturday morning hard. W encourage people to pray through the directory. We’ve used prayer triplets. We’re about to being encouraging people to not only read the Bible one to one, but also to pray.
GV: We get 4 or 5, maybe a dozen, at 7am on Saturday morning. Every connect group has a prayer time. We tried praying before the service on Sunday morning, but that’s come and gone. We out out a church directory with people assigned to a day of the week so that people pray for each other.
BM: We have a prayer meeting before the morning serivce, and I pray with the elders before the evening service. Our focus in our groups is kingdom-focused.

PH thank you for your wisdom.

PTC Ministry Conference 2012
Session 6
John Wilson

[Download John's notes, including graphs, at cenc.org.au]

This is part of a raft of 5 talks based on the 5 chapters of John’s doctoral thesis: Introduction to Presbyterianism, the 1970s exodus, a review of 35 years, the NCLS story and lessons from ABS census.

Over the time of the book of Acts, the church grew from 120, Acts 1:15, to 5,000 in Acts 4:4, and many thousands in Acts 21:20. Rodney Stark’s Cities of God looks at the growth of the church (without believing in the new birth). He plots a huge growth over the time to 350 A.D. Where the church was more than 30,000,000 strong. He expects a normal growth rate of 3.5% per annum. By the time of Constantine, the church is 50% of the population.

As a church, we are committed to recognising God’s past mercies. The number of parishes in the PCV has grown from 67 to 92 (counting assistants as being two parishes). There has been a trend of growth in parishes over 35 years, including growth of 39% in the last 7 years. There have been 49 congregations planted and 27 have survived.

The number of ministers has increased from 47 to 99. The increase is about 74%. Several are not working in the parish ministry.

People in the PCV since 1982 has declined. We now have more people attending than are communicants members, crossing over in 1992. We’ve lost 4,000 members since the early days when the membership was just shy of 10,000 to under 6,000. Membership was no sign of belief. The college and ministers were Reformed, but the membership was not homogenous. There was a fallout. Post-Union, membership was much more highly regard. Previously, being a Freemason, Rotarian or good-living citizen was enough to get you on the roll. Now, very little value is placed on formal membership of anything (see Hugh McKay on the Trend Generations). We lost 42% of our membership, yet attendance has increased by 25%. The number of preaching places has increased by 39%. The radio of membership to attendance was 9:5, now it is 6:10. Less people in Australia are calling themselves Christians (86/87% in 1971 down to 63% in 2006).

We are top heavy in terms of age. Teenagers are under-represented. W have more than the national spread of all age groups over 20, but under 20 are under-represented by almost half.

For a little while in 1989-1992, the rural church was larger than the urban. Now all of the growth is in urban areas by miles, with the rural church declining steadily.

The trend of professions of faith is up by 33% in recent years. He number of children baptised has dropped immensely to 25%, but is on the upswing. Adult baptisms are up. The ratio of children to adult baptism is now 3:2.

Children attending Sunday School is down from 3000 to 1350ish. This doesn’t reflect our overall ministry to children in all forms, like after school clubs.

There is a slight increase in youth since the 1970s, spiking in 1995 at the start of PYV.

Small groups have grown 2.5 times.

Elders have dropped from 820 to 475. One of the first things Revived in 1977 was no require elders to subscribe to a doctrinal confession of faith, not just “Jesus as he is revealed to us”. In 1998, we decided no remove the words “and female” from the qualifications for eldership, prompting resignations. In 1997, PCV declared Freemasonry incompatible with Christian profession. In the 2000s, training was made mandatory.

Of 120 ministers trained in Victoria, 50 are still ministering here. 9 are in other spheres of ministry, 12 overseas, 28 ill, 4 moral failure and 10 retired or deceased. 25% drop out rate (about average). Peter Caldor and Rowland Crowcher says this is normal across Australia.

Application:
We are not yet a growing church. We are not in good health.

Are there ways to reinvigorate and reverse this decline?

We must reapply ourselves to these areas:

1. We must teach the inerrant Scriptures as if our life depended on it. We may soon be the only church left who believes this!
2. We need to pray to God relentlessly as dependently as we draw air in to breathe. It’s not conferences or books and strategies that connect us to God. More churches believe in prayer than actually meet to pray.
3. We must never surrender our grasp on the gospel of free and sovereign grace. We speak of Jesus and the power of his gospel to save, not just God and church. W must champion a grace-centred Gospel. Revealing the righteousness of heaven for lost sinner is our core business.
4. We must reassured the community of believers and delight in each other’s company. We need to be better at relationships. We need to work harder at loving one another.
5. We must obey Christ by becoming intentional fishers of men. People are being brought into the church. There are people here who are skilled at teaching people to fish for men. We need to obey the command to fish! We need to learn how evangelical action and reformed theology have traction on the street.
6. We should build havens of mercy. The downcast and doubter should find a home with us, the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked and the prisoner. We don’t share meals together, even as families. We should be generous with material goods, as we have shown ourselves to be.

Finally, listen to those who have made a difference: Gerald Vanderwert at Donvale, Bill Medley  at Frankston, Neil Chambers at Bundoora and Don Elliot at Eltham (and David Jones). Perhaps put them on a panel at a ministry conference so you can ask them questions.

Don’t be preoccupied with growth. In the end, glorifying God is the pre-eminent goal. As John Piper says, worship is ultimate. Mission only exists because worship doesn’t.

Is there hope? Don’t look at me. [By implication, look to God].

PTC Ministry Conference 2012
Session 5
David Jones

Jude 11-19

It is said, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss personalities,” yet, the Bible does it a lot. The Bible often fleshes out thoughts with concrete examples.

Jude is concerned with apostasy.

1. He Names Names (v11)
The three named here are religious figures. Jude gives three ways to lose your ministry. These are three trends and tendencies which trouble the church up to today. Cain was a religious man, offering sacrifices to God. Balaam was heard by God. Korah was a Levite, a cousin of Moses, who wanted to work as a priest.

A. Cain
We shouldn’t go the way of Cain. Why did he murder his brother? He was spiritually jealous of his brother.

F.B. Meyer was in London with Spurgeon and Campbell Morgan, all within a mile or two of each other. He said, it was easy to preach for the success of Morgan when he was in America, but when he came to England and a church near mine, it was different. The old Adam in me was moved to jealousy, but I put my foot on his head.”

When God came looking for Abel, Cain said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This is what jealousy does. We don’t look out for each other. There are many ways to kill your brother: running down his reputation, false praise, etc.

B. Balaam
Balaam was a brilliant young man with a great reputation. What he blessed was blessed, what he cursed was cursed. If Cain was a murderer, Balaam was a mass-murderor. 24,000 people were killed by his mistake. Revelation 2:14, he is still troubling the church in the first century, a thousand years later! He had the right message, but the wrong motivation, v11. We can be greedy for money, for recognition, for power over other people, wanting to build a following around ourselves. Balaam wanted to die the death of the righteous, but he wasn’t prepared to live the life of the righteous. Being recognised as a great man and getting the praise of men means getting your own reward here, not in heaven.

C. Korah
Korah was a frustrated minister. He said Moses had too much power. 250 leaders joined in his rebellion. His problem was pride.

In Tasmania, 100 new churches spring up and 100 close. People are hiving off on their own. The cult of personality is blossoming in Evangelicalism today. C.J. Mahaney stepped down in 2011, admitting to pride, sinful judgement and hypocrisy, and has since even restored. John Piper took a similar break the year before. He apologised for the sins of his soul, ongoing character flaws. These aren’t the great it sins which shock us. These are the little foxes which get in and spoil the vine. Piper said, the precious garden of my home needs tending.

When we minister without the help of the holy spirit, we want the ground to open up and swallow us. Pride does that.

This happened to real people.

2. He Paints Pictures (v12-13)
These pictures are windows into the church Jude writes too, yet we might catch a look at ourself in the glass.

A. A hidden reef
There is a shadow in the water, a reef hiding just below sea level. There are jagged rocks. A disaster waiting to happen. They can rip the bottom out of an oceangoing liner. The self-serving shepherd are the love feasts (The first century church made a meal out of it and we make a meeting out of it).

At the Last Supper, the Disciples didn’t just turn to Judas, but questioned themselves whether they were the traitor.

Here, as the people of God remember the great shepherd of the sheep, these self-serving shepherd are eating without a quarm. They did not discern the body of Christ. There were their brothers and sisters in Christ with them, but they looked out for their faction.

B. Empty clouds
When we see a cloud, we expect rain. This person talks big, but never delivers. We promise, but are we delivering on our promises. Bonar: the same words which uttered from warm lips would proclaim life and draw men to the cross, given by cold lips can drive them away. Why are we not seeing times of refreshing? We have to examine ourselves, not just blame the times.

C. Fruitless trees
Fruitiness trees and all foliage but dead inside. These men follow mere instincts and not the Spirit. Jesus talks about people who prophecies and drove out demons in his name (using his gifts), yet he tells them to depart from him because he didn’t know who they were, also Hebrews 6. By their fruits you will know them, not by their gifts.

D. Raging seas
Along the Irish Sea at Aberystwth, the residences are shuttered during the winter to stop stones tossed up by the sea from breaking the windows. Some ministries are destructive. Don’t be restless. When you take a call, it is for life or until God calls you somewhere else.

E. Wandering stars
A star was a means of navigation. Don’t be an uncertain point. Philippians , be a shining stars in the universe holding forth the glory of God.

Spurgeon: a house must have windows, but if it is all windows, it will collapse.

Where do these people come from? The devil doesn’t conger them up from no where. They come from a room like this. The leader of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons were evangelicals, and the founder of the Moonies was a Presbyterian minister in Korea.

3. He Quotes Prophecy

1. Antediluvian (v14-16)
Jude quotes Enoch. Why does he go all the way back there? Why not quote Jesus, who spoke about aged coming in judgement with his holy angels? Why go to the seventh from Adam? Enoch walked with the Lord, and he was not. Jude wants us to know that God is slow to judgement. It is a long time coming. He waits, to be gracious. For thousands of year, aged has been patiently warning us, giving us space for repentance. Jesus has died, and he is waiting. Return to him and he will return to you. He is slow to anger and swift to show mercy. We are too proud. God needs to break us.

2. Apostolic (v17-19)
Either Peter is quoting Jude or Jude is quoting Peter. Peter says they are coming, Jude says they are here! But you, brothers, build yourself up in your most holy faith. There is an alternative. There is another course to follow. The best way to detect counterfeit is not to study the varieties of counterfeit, but to know the genuine article so well you can spot the fake immediately.

We need to look for the telltale signs of spiritual de cline, but we need to know those things which accompany salvation, making sure we are the genuine article.