1. Christian Theology
(Original Content Only) (3000 words) (Kate-Turabian style) (footnotes are a must)
Topic: The Doctrine of Predestination
Students will submit a 3000-word research paper, not including footnotes and bibliography, focusing on a one topic covered in this course. This paper should contain a cover page, introduction, body, conclusion, and bibliography. A minimum of 7 reputable academic sources beyond the course textbooks are required.
As the name suggests, the paper should be a piece of academic research. These 7+ resources are above-and-beyond course textbooks, the Bible, and rudimentary tools like Strong’s or Vine’s, etc. There are many popular-level books available you may want to use, but please keep in mind that this is intended to be a work of scholarship (not pop-level writing). Feel free to use Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, lexicons, commentaries, journal articles, and other academic resources. Your paper should have a clear, logical structure, and there should be a clear connection between the ideas you present.
2. Renewal and Transformation
(Original Content Only) (Discussion Board Post) (400 words) (Kate Turabian Style)
Nieuwhof used an analogy; he stated that he owned a gym membership, but his goal was not gym attendance but rather personal fitness (Lasting Impact, 43). With that in mind, answer Nieuwhof’s profound question, “What if you helped your attendees be the church, not just go to church?” (51).
What strategies might you employ to help your attendees be the church?
In light of Deut. 6:5; Luke 10:27, how important are relationships (a) with God and (b) with humanity?
How do relationships influence or drive church revitalization?
The Discussion Board experience for this class has been designed to foster the kinds of meaningful relationships that are essential to quality education. These relationships are built over the term of a class as individuals share time in learning with each other. As in a physical classroom, the quality of the relationships that is built and the depth of the learning experience depend on what effort you put into it.
Discussions are expected to contain substantial reflection on the weekly material that integrates lectures, reading, and supplemental sources into your creative writing. It also is expected that you will incorporate rich multimedia elements into your answers and comments such as photos, pictures, word photos, videos, web-links, digital files, and music. Be creative and be led by the Holy Spirit.
Initial Post: Create an Initial Post of at least 300 words based on the material covered in the module(s) that week. Here are some possible avenues that you can use:Summarize: Be sure to teach us what you have learned about the subject you have chosen to address from that week’s lecture, reading, or interaction. Spend time teaching through your answers in a concise and clear manner
Opine: What do you agree with or disagree with in this week’s lecture or reading as it relates to your chosen topic? What can you add to what has been presented from your wealth of experience and knowledge on this topic? How would you approach the topic differently?
Apply: Your studies are all about the application of knowledge to real-world contexts to solve problems in the context of ministry. How does the topic you have chosen to relate to the real world? How does it relate to your life or ministry? How might it be applied to problems in your context of ministry?
Innovate: What new ideas can you see that emerge from your consideration of the topic and the way it might be applied to you, your ministry, or other ministries?
3. Renewal and Transformation
(Original Content Only) (Discussion Board Reply) (300 words per reply) (Kate Turabian Style)
Russell Ewing
SundayJun 16 at 9:50pm
Manage Discussion Entry
In this week’s discussion board, three questions that need to be answered have been asked.
What strategies might you employ to help be the church?
I believe that there are multiple strategies that a pastor can use to help the church be the church. So many churches of various sizes are inward-focused instead of outwardly focused. One way that can be very effective is getting the people out of the building and getting them involved in the community. The people need to see that people are hurting and need compassion and personal or one-on-one ministry. Doing Christian service in the community shows that the church cares and loves its community.
In light of DT 6:5 and Luke 10:27, how important are relationships with God and humanity?
Undoubtedly, relationships are the cornerstone of our existence. From the very beginning, God created Adam and Eve with the intention of fostering a continuous relationship. Although sin disrupted this relationship, God’s love for His creation was so profound that He sent His son to restore humanity’s relationship with Him. Jesus, too, emphasized the importance of relationships by developing deep connections with His disciples. In fact, the second great commandment is a testament to the significance of relationships: love our neighbors as ourselves.
How do relationships influence or drive church revitalization?
I firmly believe that relationships can drive church revitalization. If a church is going to turn around and return to health, it must build relationships with the community. The church has to be outward-focused. The church needs to build relationships with community leaders and offer support to them. Congregation members need to develop relationships with their neighbors and show them the love of Jesus. These relationships will show that the church is relevant and can be depended on in times of need. Just the other day, in the community where I am planting the church, we had a family whose house burnt down. Thankfully, we have developed a relationship with the family before this happened. They know that we care for them and are there for them. We pray that we can minister to this family because of the relationships/friendships we have already built.
4. Renewal and Transformation
(Original Content Only) (Discussion Board Reply) (300 words per reply) (Kate Turabian Style)
Discussion Post Week 7
Good Evening Everyone!
The question that Carey Nieuwhof asked was, “What if you helped your attendees be the church, not just go to church?” By getting to know our attendees and their families, we can help to unlock their potential, by making disciples. This means truly connecting with our community. Through open ears and listening hearts, we can discover their unique gifts and aspirations. Then, together, we can equip them to use those gifts and serve the church and the community, making the church a vibrant force for good, not just within our walls, but everywhere.
The strategies we can employ to help attendees be the church would be first meeting people where they are. Learning not just about the demographics but learning about the psychographics. Learning about what the attendees enjoy. Once we learn about what they enjoy we can ask them to serve in those capacities within the church. For example, I have the majority of retirees at my church. By finding out what they did when they worked, they can share their knowledge with other attendees. One of the sisters at my church used to work at the office that helped with property taxes. Since I found that out, I have asked her to share her knowledge with others in the church who are having problems understanding their property taxes. She helped me understand as well. I was able to share with others. This can be a service to other attendees at church.
Those who have retired from working with children or young people, even if they no longer want to work with young people or children, can be a resource to help those who work with children.
This strategy reminds me of the “Surge Strategy “ that we discussed in class tonight. Not only being prepared for the Big Days in church but making sure that people are in place, using the gifts they have to serve others, as in the “Current serve team needs”.
In light of Deut. 6:5; Luke 10:27, how important are relationships (a) with God and (b) with humanity? We should not only teach the body to love God, but we should also live it and demonstrate it. We should love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and then love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus also said this in Matthew 22:37-39.
How do relationships influence or drive church revitalization? The attendees can bring in other attendees that they have relationships with. For example, leading to the big days, inviting family and friends. The church was formed on relationships. In Acts 2:44-47 we see that the church was together, they were in relationship and helped one another. God is calling us to the now as well.
Blessings!
Janis Barnes
5. (Original Content Only) (Zoom meeting Summary) (300 words)
All right, we should be recording now. Yep, we are. Excellent, fantastic.
So tonight, or this time that we have together, we’re going to do something just a little bit different. I need to go over the aspects of how to use attractional methods so that you can become a disciple-making church. So while we’re going to look at, while the main function is sort of attractional methods, I’m a both-and sort of person.
And anybody who knows me long enough knows I’m very missional minded. But I don’t think we need to throw out specific things when we talk about how we’re trying to reach lostness or even disciple-lostness. I think we can do both.
So it’s not like a seeker-sensitive model. It’s not anything like that. But it does, for a fact, I know this.
I know that I have personally seen churches, and I’ve utilized this right up until COVID, and then we kind of had to shut down some things. But this methodology works very well and multiplies churches rapidly, like as in growing, like you could use this as a multiplication model for growing and then planting and growing and planting, if you wanted to, or a church plant that’s small and then increases rapidly, or even a struggling revitalized church or church that needs to revitalize, they can use some of these methods. So we’re going to look at that.
That’s sort of our underpinning with our time. But I do want to first stress the paper that’s due next week, this practicum that, remember, everything in this course is like a practicum, right? And it’s designed that way specifically so that you can take the principles and concepts, and then you’re applying them to your specific ministry or your life or what you want to do as you gain your degree or whatever it is you do. But you should be able to take these with you, whether it’s immediately you’re doing it now, or you’re doing it down the road, or even working for like an organization, or a specific denomination.
Now, you know, people get a degree, and then they want to go to work for an organization, like a mission organization or denomination, and the denomination needs them to help them in doing specific things. These are models that you’re applying, right? You’re learning all of these things so that you can put them to practice. So the final assignment, you have a choice here, actually have several choices.
We’re going to talk about some of those. But the two choices that you have within what the assignment has to be is either one, a replant means you’re taking a church that, let’s say, like I had a church where almost everybody in the church was from an area that was like 30 miles away, and they had kept driving to the building. And so the building, like, let’s say an older congregation, and you had a generation that was missed, but maybe like, people started coming to grandma’s church, but they drove away, they moved away, grandma’s passed on.
Now they still come to the building and worship as a church in that building. But they realize that we’re farther away. So do you pick that up and replant it into an area where it’s going to be? Or are you really going to bless that community? And, you know, kind of bear down and serve that community.
You can, that’s one reason for a replant. There’s several others, but a replant can also take place for a dying congregation where you want to change the name, change the DNA, all that kind of stuff. And, or you’re going to merge into another church, like maybe there’s a small dying church nearby.
And I’ve been in conversations and helped several, I even, I think I even write one thing in my book about one of the church plants that wanted to come along and be a part or a dying church that wanted to come along and be a part of our church. And I had to deny them that ability, they would have, it would have been unhealthy, it would have been toxic for us to take on that many people and that much money, the resources they had, it wouldn’t have worked well. But the point is you’re going to come up with this strategy, either to replant a dying congregation or merge one.
That’s the first part. Or you come up with a revitalization strategy for church growth and multiplication, right? So you’re either a replant or a merger or number two, you’re just doing a revitalization strategy. You have a dying congregation and you want to help them revitalize right where they are.
So really there’s sort of three angles you can take with that. The first one doesn’t have to be a replant strategy with a dying congregation and merge. You can either have a merger.
So technically you can have three. I just wanted it to be that a church merger is a replant. So that’s why it’s there.
So you either have a replant or revitalization, right? And in either one of those projects that you’re going to do, make sure that you’re concentrating on on the aspect of of seeing conversion growth. We don’t want to just shuffle deck chairs, right? Taking other members from other churches and bringing them in and then growing because then technically the church isn’t growing at all. All we’re doing is just taking other people.
I was very firm with this as a pastor. When I would see new people, I would ask them if they were new, who invited them? How did they get there? Had they been there before? And then if they said they came from another church, I said, does the pastor know that you’re here? I was pretty like, yeah. I actually had one couple that I told them I think they needed to go back and talk to their pastor and and let them let the pastor know that they were leaving.
I just I believe in integrity. And so, you know, call it for what it is. I know people that wouldn’t do that.
That’s just my conviction with that. So we’re looking for conversion growth, transfer growth. That means we’re going to have to really focus somewhere in here with discipleship, which is it is part of there’s seven components, but you don’t necessarily have to look at these components, breaking them down as into each section that has to be there.
Now, on the bottom, I have what your paper should look like with title page, table of contents, have a demographic section and psychographics. We can kind of look at that for a moment. A section that has vision and mission.
You’ve already done your vision lens. So pretty simple. Now it’s plug and play, right? You get to just talk about what your vision is going to be, how you know you how the churches is unified together because you’ve taken gone through a vision lens practicum.
So now you know what it is. And then you explain the vision and mission in that. So that’s probably not even going to be a full page, right? Because you’re just going to really explain that sort of vision lens again and what the vision and mission is of this replan or of this revitalization.
But here you see, we go back up to the top, those seven elements, vision and mission, reaching the unreachable, which means there’s an evangelistic proponent here or component. And then number three, disciple making. This means that you’re going to have to explain how you are going to make disciples, right? You can’t just say, oh, we’re going to go out into the community and then we’re going to reach people.
What does that mean, right? What strategy are you going to employ to actually make a disciple? It doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but that section should probably be at least a page, page and a half, because you’re explaining how you’re making disciple makers in that. Number four, community impact. So I think, trying to think here, I think I’ve allowed certain, I’ve allowed certain students to combine community impact with disciple making, as long as they’re sustained in that you can see community impact and you can see, because you could technically say I’m making disciples by bringing, by mentoring the person, walking them into the community outreaches and serving with them, and they get to see how I serve and, you know, and within that we have small group within the community trying to make an impact when we’re serving for or when we’re doing vocational training.
So those two sort of could be combined if I, if you want to combine that, that’s fine, but I would label the section like community impact and disciple making just so that I see it and that it’s concise, but they go, they go together. Systems for growth, we’re going to look at that tonight. Demographic and psychographic research, and if you’re not familiar, there’s a link there to explain, there’s a little, a small article that I wrote on psychographics, but for the most part, demographics just tell you like how many white black, you know, Latino, you know, specific races are in an area and maybe age group, men and women, there’s some good ones that are out there.
And then psychographics though actually tell you more about the people, they tell you what they watch on television or what they’re streaming, you know, what they tend to like to eat. Those are big things because now we really get down to the nitty gritty and who the people are in that area, what they like, what they worship and stuff like that. So psychographics can be important.
And of course you can cite that article. And then the last thing we want to make sure that we’re Trinitarian. So somewhere woven into this paper, you know, if you’re going to make it a whole section, make it a section.
If you don’t, if you’re not making a section, then you can intertwine within the paper, you know, the leading of father, son, Holy spirit, and you can get biblical with that. Right. And, but that’s one of the elements here at Regent, like we are thoroughly Trinitarian.
So we want to, excuse me, we want to talk about how there’s guidance there with the spirit, how maybe the spirit is guiding us. We are relying on the presence of God and, you know, the blood of Christ to, to be with us, whatever it may be. There’s, you know, it’s intentional about the work that we do, right.
We’re saved by Christ, redeemed by him. And we are sanctified through the power of the spirit to be aligned back with the father. So, you know, those are things that we’re talking about.
How, how are you being led and guided? So those are the things that have to be woven into the paper and they have the options there. Option one, option two, this does require, as it says there, that you have to cite the sources that are the course of that means all the books that are in there. At least once these books are there for a reason, right? Like new off community impact, right? You’re going to write something in there about that.
And use a quote from there somewhere. And like the, like the flywheel, like when you’re talking about, you know, reaching the unreachable or community impact or systems for growth, either one of those, I know that the flywheel working. But the main thing is use those course resources and then find three additional.
Now, if you want to use the psychographic article, you can do that. That would be now you just need two more, right? But you can find out which ones you want as well as those options. So you have option one, option two, not to throw in more, but if you wanted to use and make this into PowerPoint, I allow you to turn in a PowerPoint instead of a paper.
But that means you have to do have at least like 20 slides because you’re going to have to have also notes like so you’re still required to have citations. So your citations have to be in the notes section. And it has to be appealing, you know, visually appealing.
It has to probably have some graphs or kind of charts in there and maybe even some voice recording, right? You have to really be innovative with that if you’re going to use a PowerPoint, like record your own voice in a section, making a vignette of this is what you’re going to do. And I’m fine with it that because I have some people that have said, I think I’ve only had one person in the last couple of years that actually did a PowerPoint and I’m fine with it, but I like to give the option. So those are the two options that you have writing, but I find when you write, you tend to really assimilate the material just a little bit better.
All right. Let’s see one. Awesome.
So yeah. Any questions you guys have on the paper? Because the other people are going to watch this, have to get a recording. So your question may be what they want to ask.
No question for you. All right. We’re going to move on then to the good stuff.
So I’ve expressed this before that there are what we call, I like to call them waves. There are specific waves in a regular calendar that the church can ride. And that’s why I like to call them waves because surfers ride waves, right? And you can’t create a wave, right? You ride away.
So if you’re a surfer, you don’t go out and try to create waves by smacking your board up and down. And I think a lot of times churches try to do that. What we can do is we can ride waves.
So we know that there are two natural waves. At least there’s even a little bit. I would say there’s three, if not four, or even maybe a little fifth, two foot wave that’s in there too.
But you’re going to see how to apply and use these natural waves that are in society. We’re not so far gone yet in Western society where Easter and Christmas are far gone. They’re still big days within the church, ecclesiastically.
These days are still held, even if people don’t know Jesus and don’t know God, they celebrate Christmas for the most part, right? And maybe they would go to a, if they’re invited, we know 86%, that’s just not some number thrown out. Those are the numbers. 86% of people say they would attend church if they were invited.
So the invitation is still the biggest evangelistic tool that the church has, right? Word of mouth, inviting people to come. So we have Easter and then Christmas. But in between there is just this long, long period where you’re like, what do you do with that? How do you grow? And how do you, everyone’s banging their heads against the wall.
Especially if you had a year like this year where you had Advent and after Advent, we had a really quick turnaround and all of a sudden Ash Wednesday was in February on Valentine’s Day. So we didn’t even get like a full two months before we have to start thinking about Easter. But how do you do that if you know that those are days? Now, sometimes churches will have maybe a cantata for Christmas.
That’s like the traditional stuff, right? Oh, we got a cantata that’s there. I’m not going to throw that out or bash that. But yeah, could that technically work sort of as an attractional method.
And then you have Easter, like maybe you have an Easter egg or a petting zoo. I’ve seen it all, those kinds of things. But I want to show you a little bit more in depth of really how to grow effectively.
And it is programmatic and there are systems in play here. But if you’re like that and you like systems, you’ll probably geek out about it and love this. So this is what I call the surge strategy.
And I sort of, you know, this is just from, you look at the same things from Birch, the flywheel, it’s just calling these big days. We know we have Easter. We know that there’s a big day that we squeeze in the Western world within autumn, that time period when people go back to school or whatever it may be.
There’s something around that time period, whether August or September, where people start coming back. They’re gone for the summer and they’re at least done with some busyness of life and they’re looking to get back into rhythms, if anything. And then we have Christmas.
So we’re going to say, we’re just going to take these three for a moment. And what I’m going to teach you is this attractional method. And then I’m going to break down how systems are applied within that.
So the first one you see is Easter. And then on the left hand side of Easter, you see these colored dots, red, yellow, green, and it’s like bluish. And then you kind of go over the hump and there’s purple.
What this graph is showing you is that it’s saying you can take a congregation of a hundred people. And one of the objectives, one of the main objectives is we want to double the size by an attendance day on Easter. We want to double our attendance.
Now the goal, I’m going to show you that the goal is not attendance. Matter of fact, I can push this real quick. This is the goal.
The overall goal is the side thing. We’re just going to use this, right? Getting people in, we’re going to get them engaged in first services and events. We’re going to get them connected to small groups or life groups, community engagement, whatever that is.
That’s the essential part. That’s what we really want to do. So the goal isn’t just have as many people as we can possibly get to.
Although if we can double in size, you’re going to see how this this works right along the side. So we’re going to look at that slide again, but let me show you how this works. About five weeks out, you’re going to start planning.
And this is why I said, once we get into the prior to the 40 days of length, you really have to be engaged in. We need to start thinking about our Easter service, because this is a service where I don’t care if you’re going to do it inside, outside, whatever, whatever it is that you have planned. This is going to be a big day for you, right? This is the big day.
So by the red, that day is basically five weeks out from Easter. You have to start having those meetings with a worship leader. Maybe you have someone that’s that’s leading worship.
Maybe you have someone that is working with youth. But. You’re definitely going to want to create a system where you have and we’re going to get into this a little bit where you have parking lot greeters and then some things that go along with that.
So I know that sounds ambiguous if you’re taking notes, but hold on, we’re going to come back to it. But I want to show you how this plays out before I get too in depth. About five weeks out, we start planning and every week we’re going to we’re going to really hone down this service.
We’re going to we’re going to make sure that this is the best like that our message is aligning with our worship, that we have the right greeters, that we have the right ushers, that perhaps we have someone in the parking lot greeting people in. Maybe we have a host tent outside that tells them where to go. We’re going to address all those things.
Easter comes and prior to that, within those probably around the yellow and green, we want to get everybody in the congregation involved. So I always like to do where you had cards and you would have at least like five or six cards on every seat. And you would ask people to write a name on one of those on those cards and give it to the person that they wrote.
And hopefully they’re thinking about you’re going to press. Maybe if you’re a pastor, you’re going to preach on, you know, reaching out, you know, and what it means for the gospel and how it transforms lives. And then you talk about, you know, we’ve given you these cards that you can hand to people.
So it already breaks the ice and you’re going to invite people to this Easter Sunday. Maybe when it gets to the green, you’re at you. Maybe the church buys some yard signs that they want to hand out on the green Sunday and say, hey, these are for anybody who wants them.
We don’t have ones for everyone, but if you want to put out yard signs, here’s some yard signs. By the blue, after that next week comes, you’re really going to start to press upon the people to, hey, on social media, tag the church that’s in there and say, hey, come for Easter. We’re going to ramp things up and we’re really going to start to use social media to work that as well.
So you can see that there’s an intentionality about each week and we’re building off of that so that we can get up to Easter. Now, the way that this works is if you can double the attendance, what we have found by empirical evidence is about 35% of those people stay. It’s not a huge number, but it’s pretty big because think about it.
If you had 100, start out with 100, 200 show or 100 more show up. Now you have 200, right? So at the end of this, you’re going to have at least 135. You’ve increased by 35 people.
Now it gets a whole lot more technical in the aspect of there’s a lot more involved where you’re going to have follow through. We’re going to talk about the follow through, but for our purposes of just finishing out this chart before we move on, so I can explain to you better, I’ll say this. You go from 100, 100 more people come, 35 stay.
You’re rolling into autumn with 135. Let’s say you’ve maintained that. You do the same thing again, weeks out, you’re planning for this big event.
Now remember, in between Easter and autumn is a big day too, which is Mother’s Day. I would say, man, that’s why I said you can ride a wave on Easter and hit this wave and then barely even come down and Mother’s Day is there. You’re back up into another wave on Mother’s Day.
And I put this in, if you read my discussion post last week, I talked about how you could do it with like children’s stuff. And so I don’t need to go back over it again, but you can almost use that other little wave. These are just the three big ones, but there are several other little ones that are in there you can utilize.
But for our understanding, let’s say you have 135, 135 more show up. Why? Because people are inviting. If every person there invites five people, they have five cards.
If everyone invites five people, at least if one out of five shows, that’s doubling your attendance. And some people are going to be able to, they’re going to have three people. Some people are going to have no people.
It’s going to average out though to about one person if people are active with this. And it goes up to 270. Well, 35% of 135 is 47.
That means you end up with 182. And then you take it into Christmas time, same thing. It’s invitation.
You’re working through Advent now and you’re really pushing. I’ll tell you what I think really crushes it on Christmas. For me, the biggest Sunday or the biggest, not Sunday, but the biggest attendance day we had all year in the revitalization that I did had 200 people.
That was the biggest service I ever had. And there was only like 20 people when I got there. Out of the seven years I was there, the biggest attended service was a candlelight service Christmas Eve.
We just promoted it and it was crushed. It was like 200, just a little over 200. And we were like, wow, like the first time we’d ever seen anything like that in that church.
And yeah, this stuff works. And then by the time you come back down, you’re adding once again, 64 now, because now it’s 182. What’s 35% of 182? It’s approximately 64.
So 64 and 182 is going to give you 246. That’s what that Mother’s Day or any others that you’re putting in there. But you can see this is intentionality about planning, which you’re going to in a moment, you’re going to see.
But this is taking a church in the beginning of the year that had about 100 to 246. Now, if your plan is to, hey, once, because you have all year, right? Once we hit like 150, we want to be sending out a church planner. That’s fine.
You can use this whole thing as multiplication. Maybe you have other leaders that you’re looking at sending out and you’re replacing them. This is a year.
You have 12 months to start or, you know, 10 months at least to start developing other leaders. So you can utilize this process for leadership development and disciple making. So I put here in the bottom paragraph, while attendance seems like the driver that’s driving, it’s really people, right? People invite others that they meet, and we’re going to talk about follow-up here and interaction, right? The pastor’s position is not—this is not about the pastor being the, you know, apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, teacher.
This is technically a model or a method for the pastor to really train the ministry for saints because you’re wanting them to engage that. Here’s a—this is what I used. I made this for our second church plan.
So we were reaching military. And by the way, you may be like, oh man, you got to have like a church hundred to do this. No, we did this with six.
So all that it is, is you just have longer time to hit your hit number, right? Now I will say that we wanted to use mailers. If you’ve ever utilized mailers, there are