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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Creating warm and deep church gatherings - with Toby Neal and Liv Chapman Leggett
How can we create gatherings that are both warm and deep? How can we avoid gatherings that are superficial or dry.
How do we embed gospel culture in our church gatherings.
How do we emphasize grace, forgiveness and a welcoming atmosphere?
And how to encourage authenticity and emotional intelligence in gathering leaders. Plus how do we evaluate.
A Pastor’s Heart episode to watch with your staff team.
Toby Neal is Senior pastor at Vine Church in Sydney. And Liv Chapman Leggett leads the gatherings aspect of the ministry at Vine Church.
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it is the pastor's heart and dominic steel. And how do we create gatherings that are both warm and deep? Toby neal and live chapman leggett are our guests. How do we embed gospel culture in our church gatherings? How do we emphasize grace, forgiveness and a welcoming atmosphere, and how can we avoid gatherings that are superficial and dry? What about encouraging authenticity and emotional intelligence in our service leaders and evaluation, making them relevant, personal and authentic? Look, today is a Pastors Heart episode that I think you could benefit by watching with your whole staff team and then having a discussion and sending around to those who play roles in leading the gatherings in your church. Toby Neal he's Senior Pastor at Vine Church in Sydney and Liv Chapman-Leggett she's on the team there leading the gathering aspects of the ministry and also works with EME Music. Toby, the Pastor's Heart and you're at Vine Church and there was just something. I mean, we're the doctrine people, but there was something about culture when Liv started on the team that you wanted to talk to her about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think our church gatherings, we want our church gatherings to have the aroma of God's welcome towards us. And you know, culture is probably not something we talk about in our tribe. We're gospel doctrine people, we love the doctrine of. We're sinners saved by God's grace. But culture is the aroma, it's the tone, it's the language, it's the atmosphere. And as we come to church on Sundays, what kind of atmosphere, aroma, tone, vibe do we want people to walk into? We want them to not just hear but experience God's grace for sinners.
Speaker 2:And I think sometimes in our love for truth doctrine, sometimes the warmth of the gospel doesn't shine forth in our gatherings. A friend of mine was going through a divorce a number of years ago and she was saying to me that as she was visiting churches, she felt like she'd walk into these churches and the big message was you're a sinner, you're a sinner, you're a sinner. And she said to me one day why is that the headline and God's love is not the headline. Why is that the headline and God's love is not the headline? I think, as we, you know, gather for church. Like what is the headline? Are people coming face to face with a God whose arms are open. It's not that we don't. I mean, if we want deep gatherings, we need to confront people with their sins.
Speaker 2:I mean, you still have a prayer of confession, we have a prayer of confession every week at the start, but it's like what's the headline? What are we majoring on? And, sinners, whether we're repentant or not, it's the kindness of God that leads to repentance, and our gatherings need to be the aroma, the feel, the tone, the atmosphere. God's glorious grace needs to be on display in everything we do, and I don't know whether we're always nailing that, even though we're gospel people, our culture's not always aligned to our doctrine there.
Speaker 1:Okay, liv, he sat down with you and gave you that speech when you started work, and what did you do?
Speaker 4:Well, I agreed wholeheartedly and it was really refreshing and exciting to be part of a team where that was on the agenda and it was really important to the gathering and to our training of people involved in the gathering. And so, when it came time to run our first service leader training, Toby asked me to put it together and, to be honest, I built the training based on things that I found frustrating in service leading, things that didn't embed that gospel doctrine and embody the gospel culture that we were looking for. So service leading that's, you know, has low EQ, tone, deaf to what's happening in the room. Who's there? I was thinking, well, we want services that are emotionally intelligent, services that are shallow, that miss opportunities to exhort or to encourage, that aren't soaked in scripture. I thought, well, we want services that are theologically deep and service leaders that are kind of.
Speaker 1:To make it concrete for me. I mean, I agree with what you've just said about. I want emotional intelligence with the service for the gathering leader. Tell us some of those things that we get wrong in the evangelical tribe.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think in our attempt to tribe, yeah, I think in our attempt to nail doctrine, we forget or we fail to let it affect us first and we fail to model the joy of Jesus and we don't enjoy Christ from up the front. And so I think that often leads to service leading that's a bit dry, a bit emotionless. Service leading that doesn't take opportunity to encourage, that doesn't model Toby has a lot to say about service leading that just teaches rather than models enjoyment of Christ. And I think I've seen lots of service leading in things like announcements, where we miss opportunities to share gospel values and to shape gospel values in our church families and instead we just give details. But we actually have an amazing opportunity at every point in the service to be embodying and embedding gospel culture.
Speaker 1:Now, toby, you came up somehow in these conversations with two words deep and warm. Take me into those words. We'll put them up on the screen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just. I mean I like Liv's. I mean Liv and I were talking about, was it emotional intelligence and theologically rich, or something like that. And I just, I'm a simple man, I need two words, not four, and I need words that I immediately can understand. So just started thinking about we want depth, we don't want there to be a shallowness, and you know depth has to do with God's word, that God's big, god-centered, but more than that, it's that we're serious, that we're wise, that we're discerning things like that. And then warmth has to do with love, joy, cheerfulness, freedom. That comes from the gospel and it's not just like the vertical and the horizontal.
Speaker 2:Sometimes people think that's all I'm saying, because I think there's a way we engage with God that can be abstract, impersonal and lacking warmth, and there's a way that we can relate to one another that can be merely shallow but peppy, and that's not what we're after. We're about our gatherings as we engage with each other in God to be both deep and warm and the way we treat one another. There's a depth of our love for one another. There's a wisdom, there's a discernment. As we engage with one another, there's a depth of our love for one another. There's a wisdom, there's a discernment as we engage with one another, but also in our relation to God. It's deep and it's warm, it's affectionate. We love Christ and we fear him. So both are going on at the same time and we've kind of used that. I mean it's a simplification of kind of what we're trying to achieve in church. But I've realized that most issues in our gatherings are down to. That was deep but it wasn't warm and I was experiencing.
Speaker 1:You know, we'd have guys, or warm and not deep, or warm and not deep. Actually, we've got this on the quadrilateral, we'll put that up. You start with a church gathering. That is no depth and no warmth.
Speaker 2:And no one wants that. It's just there's no life, no depth and no warmth, and no one wants that. It's just there's no life. But then you end up sometimes with deep people, and often it's the deep people that we ask to meeting. Lead, because they are deep. They're going to give us, you know, the right doctrine.
Speaker 1:So we're going to go for depth, but no warmth, depth but no warmth. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Well, it looks like saying a bunch of true stuff, but it's often abstract, it's not personal, it's said with a very cold expression. There's none of our response, in that it can look like an interview where we're going through all the right questions asking someone but we're not concentrating on what they're saying.
Speaker 2:And it's on the surface it's like, oh, what did you do this week On what they're saying? And it's on the surface it's like, oh, what did you do this week? Oh, you know, it's shallow stuff rather than you know how's God challenging you? You know things like that. So that's depth only what about warmth only.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, warmth only is. It's peppy, it's superficial, it's a cheerleader, it's just oh, isn't God great and oh, we love each other. But there's no depth there and often we think, oh, that's not our tribe, Like we're the deep tribe, we're not the shallow tribe. But my experience and I like the language of emotionally intelligent, because there are different emotional moments in a gathering, like one of our staff trainings, we tried to chart what's the emotional intensity of each moment in the gathering. And music is a really emotionally preaching is a very emotionally charged moment, singing possibly even more emotionally charged. To jump up after a very emotionally charged song and to say, all right, guys, grab a seat. We're going to morning tea. Now.
Speaker 2:You know, and you've actually we've been reflecting, beholding the greatness and glory of God, singing about his holiness, and yet we move so often we move very quickly into a very peppy experience of meeting, leading. No, you got to hold that moment. And what is the appropriate response after a song when you're singing about the holiness of God? It's either a prayer or it's a reflection, a personal reflection on how that's shaping you, challenging you, comforting you. And so there's, like you know, our tribe. Well, we're not warm, only people. But actually I think sometimes we are. We lack emotional intelligence on paying attention to what is the emotional mood in the room, kind of deep and warm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, sorry, you can do this.
Speaker 4:Well, I was going to say we found that often ending up warm only or deep only can be due to a lack of preparation, because we might tend to be warm only and lack EQ in the moment when we're so busy with our heads in the service sheet because we haven't looked at it until 10 minutes before the service that we've actually failed to engage and we've failed to kind of read the temperature in the room.
Speaker 4:So we get up and we miss the opportunity there to shepherd people well and to care for people well, and we might lose warmth as well when our lack of preparation means we're reading something scripted or we are failing to enjoy the moment as well because we're anxious or underprepared. So we find that preparation often helps us to be warm and deep where we can genuinely enjoy Christ, enjoy meeting with family, where we've done preparation to see how should I lead people out of this song. We've thought about scripture to admonish, to edify, and so preparation is often key to helping us be warm and deep.
Speaker 2:But the gospel shapes that, because the gospel liberates us from our need to impress people. And when you're needing to impress, you stay very focused on oh, I've got to get all of these things done, exactly right, otherwise you know what are people going to think of me? And I think that saps the authenticity out of church because it looks like, oh, this person's just trying to get through a whole bunch of tick boxes, whereas no, when we come together, we are responding. You know God is speaking to us and we're responding to him. And how do we respond? As the children of God, with freedom, not trying to impress one another, not trying to prove our worth to one another. And yeah, I agree with Liv that preparation. We need to be well prepared so that in the moment we're not anxious and we're able to respond freely, rightly, but without a. You know I'm trying to prove I'm okay in the moment.
Speaker 1:Where does Toby get it wrong? She tells me every Tuesday.
Speaker 2:We do review our services every Tuesday.
Speaker 4:It's good to have relationships on team where you can be honest, and one of the things that the language of deep and warm has helped us to do is to look back in a really helpful evaluating sense. Rather than Toby just saying, oh, I didn't like that or that didn't hit the spot, we've been able to say, oh, that lacked warmth or we missed the opportunity to go deep into the gospel moment there. So I think Toby tends to lose a bit of warmth when he's anxious or hasn't.
Speaker 1:It probably comes down to preparation.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, maybe a bit of both, but I think I.
Speaker 1:For me, I'm more anxious when I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's true. I don't think I ever underprepare Most, actually, I mean sometimes when I wing it.
Speaker 4:I'm least stressed right when you've overprepared, you lose a bit of warmth. But um, I think, as a congregation member and as a staff member, um something powerful in terms of shaping and forming gospel culture is when you see your lead pastor enjoying jesus as he preaches, as he sits in the front row singing um he's engaged he's enthusiastic. That's incredibly powerful for shaping gospel culture and it's something that I think liberates and models to the congregation the kind of engagement we expect from them as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the warmth and depth quadrant. We've found that it's often what's harder to make a warm person a warm only person deep, or a deep only person warm. We've found to make a deep only person warm is much harder than a warm only person deep, because if you're not warm, that's personality, if you're not deep, it's just you don't know God enough, you don't know the word enough. You can train that, you can teach that, but it's harder to turn a deep person warm. And so, meeting leading, something we stumbled on, do you want to share?
Speaker 4:that, yeah, we found that co-leading two people leading adds a bit of instant warmth and it also means that you can pair up someone who's very warm with someone who's very deep and in that way we have, you know, an opportunity for both warmth and depth in the service leading, and that's been really effective for our service leading.
Speaker 4:For our other lay involvement, like Bible reading and prayers, we found that actually, more often than not, those moments actually tend to lack depth. Um, interestingly, for our, for our Bible reading, you know, we'd say I'm gonna read the Bible now, I'm gonna read the Bible to you and I'm thinking, wait, what? The living God is about to speak to us through his word. And so, for our team, I just wrote it in the run sheet God's gonna speak to us through his word. And so, for our team, I just wrote it in the run sheet God's going to speak to us through his word. And we got our Bible readers to just say that Hi, my name is Liv. We're reading from James, chapter 1. We're going to hear God speak to us through his word now. And that really was amazing in transforming those lay moments in the service.
Speaker 1:It's really simple, just putting it into the template that then gets reproduced each week.
Speaker 2:It's often little things like that which, if you just keep it as abstract and just, we're going to read the Bible now, like the whole gathering loses its Godward-ness and it's like, oh yeah, we're just engaging with a book. Like no, no, no, no, no. We are gathering indwelt by the Spirit of God and he is speaking to us now through his word.
Speaker 1:This is going to be amazing. You've got a little video of a deep guy introducing the Bible reading. Set that up for us.
Speaker 4:Actually, I think he leads us in prayer he leads us in prayer. Go for that it was, yeah, a lovely man at our morning congregation called peter, who is a genius, a chemist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't remember like theoretical chemist or something like computational chemistry. Yeah, that's right computational chemistry. Brilliant, like world, top world, like amazing and so deep yeah so deep Theologically lovely.
Speaker 4:And we were really overjoyed and surprised. One Sunday, actually during one of our evangelistic series he took the opportunity before he led us in prayer to tell us a bit of his story, and it was an incredibly powerful moment, both for the believers in the room but also for the unbelievers, hearing Peter's very brief summary, as he shared about himself but also connected the dots in the service in a very beautiful way.
Speaker 1:Well, let's watch that video now.
Speaker 3:Morning everyone. My name is Peter Gill and I am a scientist and I used to be an atheist, but I've been coming here to Vine since 2019. I'm starting to feel like an old timer now, and I think that one of the best possible choices I could have for an epitaph on my gravestone are some of the words that we sang a few minutes ago. I once was lost, but now I'm found was blind, but now I see. I want to lead us now in prayer for people who are lost, people who don't know the Jesus that we've been hearing about, and I hope that you'll join me in this prayer.
Speaker 1:That is lovely, isn't it?
Speaker 4:Yeah, really wonderful moment for us to see our lay people taking opportunities.
Speaker 1:And you've set the culture of Deep and Warm and he's rolling with it, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and in terms of encouraging that in our lay people, we found that giving positive feedback, encouragement to our lay people who take those opportunities, has been really effective in kind of embedding that culture in those teams.
Speaker 1:Now what about church announcements? How has this culture of deep and warm impacted church announcements?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm passionate about church announcements, or church life news or notices although really they shouldn't be called notices, I think, because of what they can be in the gathering. I think they're an amazing opportunity to shape gospel culture and gospel values in our people and announcements that are just communication information, I think we've really missed an opportunity to show our people what we value and to show non-Christians who are in the building because they will be in the building what it is that Christians value.
Speaker 1:And so, yep, announcements, church life news they're all opportunities to convey you had a really good example of a men's breakfast announcement. Give us that.
Speaker 4:Sure, our men's breakfast was actually on Saturday and we had announcements the couple weeks leading up and I was service leading in the lead up to that and wanting to encourage people to go, and I had an option as a woman to say got a men's breakfast on Saturday at 7am, I won't be there, I'm a woman, but sign up the link on screen, which has done nothing to shape values Created a little cheap laugh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, didn't move the culture forward. Yeah, it's a cheap laugh, but didn't move the culture forward.
Speaker 4:Yeah, instead I said something like we care about the men in our church, that their faith and friendships flourish, and so we've got a men's breakfast on Saturday morning. It's early, it's 7am, which means I'll be having the morning at home alone with my baby, but that's going to be a joy for me because it frees Jonty up to enjoy time with other guys and time in the Word, and he would love to see you there so you can head to the link on the screen for more details and to sign up. And I said something like that because I saw it as an opportunity to show that I was brought in to helping the men in our church flourish in their faith and friendships. That it wasn't apart from me, but actually it was important to me because men flourishing is good for our church, it's good for our families, it's good for society and actually Good for me as a wife.
Speaker 4:Yeah, good for me as a wife.
Speaker 2:So that's warm because you're personally invested, but it's also deep because you're not just giving details, but it's like why is this so important? I think if you can't do church announcements like that, then you shouldn't be doing the event in church. But every event should have some kind of gospel vision, some kind of maturity or discipleship outcome that you're after. And as we talk about these things, we ought to be talking about that outcome we're after through the event and really every announcement could be pushed in that direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even like seeing this morning about our annual church health survey. You know, of all things, you could be quite bland on that. Oh, here we want you to do a survey. But it's just like we are on mission to connect more people to Jesus and we want to be more effective at that, and so we'd love to hear how you're going spiritually, how you're growing. What are the areas that we could, as a church, get better at so that we can reach more people? Every moment in church needs, and when you're doing it, that then every moment in church is making disciples and it's encouraging people. Oh, that's what we're on about reaching people, connecting people to Jesus, and if there's a moment in church where we're not actually paying, like, get rid of that moment from church, we shouldn't be doing it. It's all about what God's doing among us.
Speaker 4:And there are lots of ways that you can give details to your church family about dates and times and costs and sign up, and I don't think the gathering is the time to do that. The gathering is the time where we shape gospel value, where we communicate what we should be loving and longing for as a church family and so follow up an announcement like that with an email, with a call, with a text, with all the finer details. We don't need that in the gathering.
Speaker 1:You're really saying. I don't want to give the details, but I want to use this as a culture setting moment.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:What about transitions?
Speaker 4:But just between elements or songs.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm just thinking the person getting up after the song. Just the moment you smiled. I'm thinking you're thinking, yep, we've had lots of transitions go wrong, yeah.
Speaker 2:We are often talking about this. Yeah, I keep going on about it.
Speaker 1:Don't give us your rant.
Speaker 2:So just take us into the Vine Church staff meeting Down to the simplest things, like when you're doing an interview of someone and you invite that person up and they walk up to the stage and everyone's sitting in silence waiting for this person to talk. Like there is a moment where we're expressing our values of, okay, someone's getting up to talk and we don't really care, we're just waiting for them. We're pretty passive. But if the gospel really shapes our culture, what's our response to one another? We love, and we really love, people sharing what God's doing in their life. So we don't say, hey, give this person applause as they come up. We're not applauding any. We don't applaud people in church, we applaud Jesus. But we do want to honor them, welcome them. And what is our culturally acceptable way of honouring and welcoming people? I don't know another way apart from putting our hands together.
Speaker 3:And so we always do that.
Speaker 2:There's a transition which can either it's warm or it's very cold, but between song and meeting leading, I think you know blending that moment. Well, we pretty much always just do a prayer there, because that blends the Godwardness of the song with what's coming next. What are some other things we do?
Speaker 4:We yeah, I think coming out of songs.
Speaker 4:We recognise that music is a heightened emotional thing and praise God that it is, because often we need our hearts to be moved back towards love and thankfulness to him, and music helps us to do that kind of thaws out our frozen hearts, and so to help us stay warm and deep in that moment, often we'll ask the piano player or the guitar player just to help transition, rather than giving people whiplash by stopping the music.
Speaker 4:All right, take a seat. We want to recognise what God does through song, which is that he implants the word on our heart and transforms us, transforms our lives to one of thanksgiving, and that's a very powerful spiritual thing that happens every time we sing, and so transitioning out of songs is a key one where we recognise, yeah, god's at work here through his word, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Let's help people by praying, by having a gentler fade out for the music, and my key thing for both song leaders and for service leaders is that it's quite a tall ask to get them to be fully engaged in the moment, totally engaged, not thinking about the next thing. We actually do want them to be thinking about the next thing in order to lead us well into it. But sometimes and often, we see service leaders or song leaders get up and they have failed to engage with the congregation, and what's happened?
Speaker 2:They're on autopilot.
Speaker 4:Yeah and they yeah. So my encouragement to service leaders and to song leaders is do your homework in the week. Read through the lyrics of the song, sing it to yourself, listen to a recording and ask yourself at the end of that what has moved me here. How has this song helped me to love Christ more and to actually pre-prepare something to lead?
Speaker 1:out of that song.
Speaker 4:So I've done my personal reflection at home, at home because it sometimes can't happen on the Sunday, when we're busy thinking about logistics and what's next and thinking about is the guitar out of tune and all those kind of things. Yeah, what key is the next song in? So I think doing that preparation before actually helps us to lead out of that in a much more emotionally sensitive and deep way.
Speaker 1:What about unbelievers in the room and preaching to the unbeliever, that kind of thing, I mean? I guess there's two questions and I'll put it to both of you. I'll put to you the announcement, being alert about the unbeliever, and then I'll put to you, toby, the preaching, noticing the unbeliever. Is there, olivia first?
Speaker 4:yeah, Well, again, you know, we really feel that what is edifying and encouraging to the believer in that moment, as we communicate gospel values, is actually confronting the unbeliever in the room, that they are seeing the Christian life and they're seeing Christ be magnified. And we know in 1 Corinthians Paul says that when all the people come together to prophesy in an intelligible way, the unbeliever falls down to their knees and says God really is among you. So there is a very important point for mission in all that we do in the service. But even announcements and I think Toby's helpful line for that is we don't use nouns, we use verbs when we are making announcements particularly related to unbelievers. So instead of saying, if you're not a Christian here this morning, we've got a life course for you, instead we use a verb If you're exploring things of faith or you're interested in discovering more, we would love to invite you along to our life series.
Speaker 1:I wondered, when you said that the other day, why you didn't say if you're exploring what it means to have a relationship with God. You know in that I prefer the person rather than things of faith. Exploring the academic, you know, exploring the personal relationship. Do you want to just comment on that?
Speaker 4:I mean, I think that's a really yeah, yeah, really You've warmed it up for us, dominic, right, yeah, good Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was when I read Introducing God. I was thinking I don't want to explore Christianity or explain Christianity. I want to introduce someone to a relationship with the creator of the universe the most important person in my life, so I want to use that relational language always, rather than the faith framework language.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, let's playbook that. We have playbooks for everything Like we will capture that yeah, we will, and we will embed that. I think it's great Because you're after warmth there. Yeah, like, how are we talking about God? Are we talking about him in the faith you know, we're exploring things of faith, you know or are we actually talking about God himself?
Speaker 1:personally and knowing him, yeah, yeah. And so whenever I hear an announcement in our church that when we frame it in those, I think, oh no, we've just missed it there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now keep going on your preaching to the unbeliever in the warm and deep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean there's lots to say here.
Speaker 1:We'll get you back another day to do it properly?
Speaker 2:Well, two things is, you know the reason we're Christians, the reason we are following Jesus is because we love him. He's wonderful. So if you're a preacher, you've just got to get really good at preaching the glory, majesty, wisdom, patience, kindness, severity. You know severity of Jesus. There is no one like him. So keep lifting him up and keep showing that he is the solution to all of our problems, whether it's a sin problem, a suffering problem, whatever it is that he is the one we need. So I think that's the first thing. We just need to be elevating Christ. I mean that's 2 Corinthians 4,. You know, god has caused his light to shine in our hearts to give us the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ.
Speaker 1:And you said you don't want drive-by shots at non-Christian world views.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the negative one, which is that we need to as we dismantle the secular worldview and the worldview of unbelievers present. So we're dismantling their worldview, but we need to treat them with respect as we do that and I hear a lot of our tribe preaching and we're just disrespectful to people and we'll use drive-by statements about those rainbow alphabet people or cat ladies or toxic, toxic, mass mass. You know like there are a whole bunch of culture war statements where we will just show um contempt for people who identify with these things. And as we dismantle the worldview of the secular world, we just need to treat people with grace.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about your eight-minute rule.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because. I found that super helpful, yeah, I have a rule that if I'm hitting abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, anything that's sensitive.
Speaker 1:A cultural hotspot. Cultural hotspot A hotspot for the people of Surry Hills, yeah, but really for anybody around, doctrine of hell, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know anything like that that I'm going to give eight minutes to. If I'm going to speak on it, I have to give eight minutes to it, or?
Speaker 4:at least, or at least yeah.
Speaker 2:Eight minutes yeah, and the reason for that is, if I'm going to hit one of those hot spots, one, I need to do it justice theologically. I can't just assume everyone's on board. I need to show what the Bible is and then I need to communicate that pastorally, because I know people are going to have a. You know there's going to be a reaction to the topic of hell. So I need to persuade people and you can't do it with these offhanded, backhanded comments and we often do that with some of these cultural authors. We'll just do the backhanded comment and we won't actually persuade people of the scriptures. We will just embed all of our Christians in an in crowd that, yeah, yeah, yeah, we believe that which you know. That's fine, but how are we persuading non-Christians that here's the wisdom of God?
Speaker 1:We're just going to wrap by putting a couple of slides on the screen that you're using as your framework for evaluation, and so let's go to the first one on questions for evaluating gospel and missional culture. Speak to that for a moment for us, toby. Well, yeah, first question. I've put them up so people can screenshot them and then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is every moment embodying gospel, culture, deep, warm, and you know, when we meet together we're always reflecting on that. And then I guess two questions for mission is would we all invite a Christian to this? And if a non-Christian was there, will they come again Like was church such an experience? And I'm not saying that there wasn't anything confronting there and there wasn't anything about like, I'm not, we're not saying because 1 Corinthians 14 is, it's the normal church gathering when Christians are doing what Christians do, and so we do run a couple of evangelistic Sundays a year, but every Sunday is a great opportunity to bring a non-Christian friend.
Speaker 4:We never want someone to say wish I didn't bring someone this week. Because every Sunday we want people to say I wish I didn't bring someone this week. Because every Sunday we want people to say this is a great week to bring a non-Christian friend.
Speaker 1:You don't want people to be embarrassed by what's happened from the platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah every time I give a giving talk at church, I make that joke at the start of the sermon. I'm like, oh no, you brought a friend. And you're like, why have I brought a friend to church today? It's the giving talk, a friend. And you're like, why have I brought a friend to church today? It's the giving talk. And I make a joke about that. But then I end up saying, actually, if you're just checking the things of Jesus out here, this is probably one of the areas where you're like, what are those Christians on about? They just want my money. But I hope today you'll come to realize what it is that drives a Christian our love for Jesus and that impacts even how we treat our money. And I think it will be a great day for you. And so it's the way you talk about things like that. But every moment in church should be a moment where you're inviting the outsider in.
Speaker 1:Let's get you on reviewing depth. We'll go to the next one Penetrating, productive, fresh, appropriate and magnifying. They're good words to analyse our services.
Speaker 4:Magnifying- they're good words to analyse our services. We find that these questions on depth, we're not going through them kind of note by note, element by element. We're letting these questions infuse our service review so that we've always got our antennae up, We've always got a radar for depth in our gatherings and we're able to identify each week oh, it lacked freshness.
Speaker 1:There was no, there was like a lack of clarity, we said the same announcement as last week. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:So, instead of kind of going item by item, question by question, we're letting these words and these questions yeah, infuse our evaluation and also infuse our planning to make sure that, when we have something significant like an interview, that the right prep is being done, the right questions are being asked, the right people are being chosen and that it's gearing towards this kind of depth.
Speaker 2:It's interesting when we're writing these questions. The original questions we wrote were was it biblical, was it true to God's word, et cetera, et cetera. And then we realised I mean, yes, 100%, but it's our tribe, we will do that, but it's like we'll be biblical, but it'll just be the same way we've always said and we want there to be freshness or we'll be biblical but we won't speak the Bible in a direct, confronting, powerful way, or we'll be biblical but it'll just be abstract theology, it won't be magnifying Jesus.
Speaker 4:Or, as Alistair Begg says, we'll be charming people. We won't be changing people with Scripture.
Speaker 1:So yeah, what about warmth? We'll go to that, and you've got the words here relevant, personal, authentic and engaging.
Speaker 4:Yeah again. So letting these questions and these words infuse our review and our planning to make sure that we're not just hitting a peppy, excitable level in our services but actually we're getting this big, broad, warm element in service week by week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like relevance, an interesting one. I think our tribe doesn't like that word because we think it just means are we talking about Kanye West and iPads or I don't know something like that, right, but relevant? By relevant we mean like, are we offering something that are we actually cutting straight to their heart, you know, and it's not about necessarily being culturally relevant, but being personally relevant to them, you know. Authentic's another one. Jesus critiqued the Pharisees for their religion being surface level, their whitewashed tombs, whereas our religion must be authentic, real, deep heart, all the way to the heart, and we need to be paying attention to is every moment communicating that.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming in, liv Chapman-Leggett. She's on the team at Vine Church in Surrey Hills looking after the gatherings there and also works with EMU Music and Toby Neal as well. Senior Pastor at Vine Church in Surrey Hills. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
