Thoughts About Christmas
Dr. Ron Johnston
This is a special Sunday at the church that I attend. What makes it special? It is the third Sunday of Advent and if you love Christmas as much as I do that always makes it special but there is more to it than that. There are four things that, Lord willing, will happen that can only happen in a small church. It would be next to impossible for a large church to duplicate these things.
A few years ago during Covid my wife wanted to do something unique to let the people in our church know that she was thinking about them. She decided that she would bake a small cherry pie for everyone in the church. She didn’t just do it for every family. She did it for every person young and old who called our church home. We then put them in our car and delivered them to every home. She will spend Saturday this week baking cherry pies. It is fun in that every counter and table in our kitchen will be covered with pies. We don’t deliver them any longer but every person will receive their own personal pie when they arrive at church. I should say that my wife is an amazing baker and so these really are a treat.
Instead of our regular Sunday morning service, this week we will have a carol sing. We will gather around the piano and spend the first half of our time singing whatever carols people call out as their favourites. For this one Sunday we resort to using the hymn books which means that people can even sing parts if they wish.
Every Sunday we have a prayer time in our service during which people can share blessings and requests. My wife, who is the pastor, then comes up and prays for those things that have been shared. This gives a different touch to the traditional pastoral prayer.
Finally we finish off the morning off with our traditional dessert Sunday. People are encouraged to bring Christmas goodies and after the service we go downstairs and enjoy these sumptuous delights. We don’t have a meal, just desserts and fellowship.
All of these things work better in a small church. In fact most of them would be impossible to do in a large one. In a church of five hundred if only half the people shared a prayer item and only took fifteen seconds to share it, it would take a full hour for them to share and the pastor would have two hundred and fifty items to pray for.
All of this to say that we need to find those things that work in our small churches and there is an endless list rather than wishing that we could do the things that large churches do and that we could never do well.
Quotes That Changed My Life
Dr. Ron Johnston
There are few things that I like more than to come across a good quote when I am reading. It may be how the quote is written. It may be that it provides me with a new way of looking at something. It may just be a thought that I needed at that particular moment in my life. Whatever the reason, it is an exciting event that I try to savour.
There is something, however, that is even more exciting and that is when I come across a quote that changes my life. Usually I read it, ponder what it says and then allow it to shape my whole outlook on life. I have a list of about twenty of these and I am thankful for each one. I want to share just three of them with you in this article. We are all different so they probably won’t impact you in quite the same way as they did me but I hope that you find them both interesting and challenging.
The first comes from a book called Integrity written by Dr. Henry Cloud.
“No matter how difficult it is to hear, reality is always your friend. The reason is almost a truism: everything else is a fantasy.” p. 106
Too many small churches live in a fantasy world of what used to be or what they wished was. We all need to live in the reality of what is now.
The second quote comes from Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-first Century by Carl S. Dudley.
“Members of the small church want from their pastor what they find most satisfying in belonging to the small church. . .The small church wants a lover. p. 80
I hesitated to use this quote because of the physical connotations of the word “lover” but it is too good to leave out. As a young pastor I wanted to be a good preacher. I read everything that I could get my hands on that dealt with growth in the church. I did my best to cast a vision for the future. When I read this quote, I realized that while all of these things might be important, they are all secondary to loving my people.
The third quote comes from a small book entitled Your Mind Matters by John Stott. It is an important book but one that some would see as somewhat out of date today. I believe that it still carries a message today. I read it first as a young student in Bible College and it has impacted my life ever since.
“I am not pleading for a dry, humourless, academic Christianity, but for a warm devotion set on fire by truth.” p. 11
There is nothing more important for a pastor than a heart set on fire by the truth about Jesus Christ.
If you have a quote that has changed your life, I would love for you to share it with me. I still need more life-changing quotes to become all that God wants me to be.
The Importance of a Trust Account
Dr. Ron Johnston
Every once in a while I read an author who says something that I have been saying for years. Whenever this happens I jokingly comment on the author’s intelligence. Actually it makes me feel good that someone thinks the same way that I do. It happened again a few weeks ago in a book entitled The Speed of Trust written by Stephen R.M. Covey. If his name sounds familiar it is probably because his father, Stephen R. Covey, wrote a very successful book entitled The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
At the heart of leadership in any church, whatever its size, must be trust. If there is trust between a pastor and the church or between the leadership team and the church that church is in a positive place to move ahead. If that trust is lacking, it is difficult for leadership to do anything.
I often talk about the importance of what I have called a trust account that exists within every church. Every time that leaders do something positive they make a deposit into that account. It may be walking through a time of loss with someone in the church. It may be recognizing the contribution of people at a Sunday morning service. It may be the time of quiet prayer when someone is going through difficulties. It can take many different forms but each one makes a deposit in that trust account.
On the other hand every change that is made is a withdrawal from the account even if the change is positive. Every idea that doesn’t work results in a withdrawal. Every disagreement over direction for the church constitutes another withdrawal. If the trust account is full to overflowing, leadership can make almost any change that they wish to make and the church will go with them. If the account is almost empty, they may have trouble making even the simplest of changes. It all comes down to trust. With this in mind there is no such thing as an insignificant action on the part of leadership. Even the simplest thing will either make a deposit into the account or a withdrawal from the account. When the withdrawals outnumber the deposits, the result is that there are insufficient funds to make a change.
What does all of this have to do with Stephen M.R. Covey’s book. Here is the quote that got me excited and made me think that the author was a pretty sharp person. As you work on behaving in ways that build trust, one helpful way to visualize and quantify your efforts is by thinking in terms of “Trust Accounts.” These are similar to the “emotional Bank Accounts” my father introduced in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. By behaving in ways that build trust, you make deposits. By behaving in ways that destroy trust, you make withdrawals. The “balance” in the account reflects the amount of trust in the relationship at any given time. p. 130
Relationships are Everything in the Small Church
Dr. Ron Johnston
I sat across from a young law student who was contemplating suicide. He came from a very dysfunctional family and with the pressures of school added to his already existing family pressures, it seemed to be more than he could handle.
He told me his story. His father was an alcoholic who emotionally abused his mother. He felt the need to protect his mother but wasn’t always sure just how he should do that. He talked about his father coming home late from a night of drinking with his buddies, waking his mother and arguing with her for hours at a time. He told me how he would almost fall asleep in class the next day because he had spent the night trying to intercede for and protect his mother.
As I listened to him, I had flashbacks to my own life. I have never heard a story that was so much like my own. I was able to identify with this young man at a deeper level than I have with anyone else that I have ever known. His story was my story and to a great degree his pain was my pain. Over the next year or so I spent a great deal of time with him and my prayer is that my investment in his life made a difference. He didn’t attempt suicide. He graduated from law school and moved to Northern Ontario and over time I lost contact with him.
In a small church relationships are everything. The time spent listening to people may just be the most important thing that you do on any given day. People don’t become part of a small church because of powerful preaching or excellent programs or dynamic studies. They become part of a small church because they want to belong to a group of people who truly care.
My favourite book on the topic of Leadership is entitled Integrity and was written by Dr. Henry Cloud. This quote from that book changed my whole outlook on working with people.
“True listening and understanding occurs only when the other person understands that you understand.”
I would love to post that in every small church in Canada. If relationships are the heart of every small church than this challenge would be a worthwhile goal for every person who attends one of those small churches.
Impact of the Small Church
Dr. Ron Johnston
God uses a lot of different influences to shape us into the person that we are. For me some of those strongest influences have been the small churches with which I have been connected over the years.
My public school years were spent in a small independent mission church in the town of Sundridge Ontario. I was part of a boys Sunday class taught by a man who had very limited teaching skills but he had something else that made all of the difference. He had the ability to love us boys and through him I learned the importance of relationships in a small-church setting.
My high school years were spent at the Burks Falls Baptist Church, another small
church in a small town but in that church I learned how to serve. My sister and I started a youth group that soon incorporated teenagers from all over town. I preached my first sermon there and as bad as it was the people encouraged and supported me in it. I organized my first area-wide event while I was there and experienced the fun of seeing something that I had done work. I even served for a time as part of the leadership team while I was still a teenager.
I moved to Toronto to go to Bible College and for the three years that I was there I attended a Brethren church called Doncaster Bible Chapel. When we had only been there for a few weeks, the leaders asked me to work with the youth and offered to pay for our rent for the time that I was there. From that church I learned what it meant to take a chance on a young person, giving him responsibility that he hadn’t really earned.
A few years later I was part of a church plant, Thornhill Community Church, made up largely of young Bible college and seminary students. What we lacked in experience, we made up for in enthusiasm. From that group I learned a lot about what it meant to be part of a Christian community.
I could on talking about several other small churches but I am running out of space in this article. Those churches shaped my life. I will take credit for the failures but those churches contributed to all of the successes that I have ever experienced.
If you are a small church, you have probably had a far greater impact than you imagine. That young person teaching Sunday school as a teenager, that musician who is part of your worship team, that potential leader helping with the youth group, all of those people serving throughout the church, you are impacting in a way that they probably would not be impacted in a large-church setting. Your church matters to God. It matters to me. It matters to the future of the church in Canada.
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