Continuing with our Easter theme, below is a video that teaches how to make Resurrection Eggs and teach an Easter lesson from them. This is a good Sunday School or Children’s program craft or even something you can do at home.
To encourage spiritual growth during our current SHINE series, we are posting daily study guides Monday through Friday of each week. You can see all of the previous DP posts by clicking here.
Click the link below to download today’s study guide.
From Effective Church Communications: (click here to read the full post)
In most churches their biggest turnout of the year is for Easter Sunday. This doesn’t happen by accident-churches pour time, money, and resources into their church communications prior to Easter and it pays off with a full-sanctuary for multiple services. However, few churches have a continuing increase in attendance after Easter.
Easter week may have been fantastic, but without intentionally working on developing a continuing relationship with the people who only come at this time of year, we aren’t communicating the total message of Easter. Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the grave to enable us to have an eternal relationship with him, not just a yearly visit to his church.
For the Easter activities of your church to build relationships, you may need to expand your goals in the communications you create for this time of year.
Author Yvon Prehn goes on to say that we must make Easter a connecting point and not an end result by focusing on two types of communications. First, we need communications that introduce people to Jesus and second, we need communications that introduce people to our church and the ministries of our church.
She gives lots of helpful tips and strategies on how to do this and I encourage you to read the whole article by clicking the link above. Hopefully, we can incorporate some of these ideas into our Easter services this year.
To encourage spiritual growth during our current SHINE series, we are posting daily study guides Monday through Friday of each week. You can see all of the previous DP posts by clicking here.
Click the link below to download today’s study guide.
To go along with our experiment of moving SHINE to the mornings, we decided to do something special for Sunday School on 5th Sundays. “SPARK” is a Sunday School program where kids meet together for music and crafts instead of splitting up into age groups and different classes. Here is what “guest blogger” Jeana had to say about today’s SPARK debut.
We had our first Spark program today and it went really well. Spark is a program for children ages 3 – 8th grade that incorporates worship, drama, activities and crafts. We had two new little girls from the neighborhood visit us today. Denise helped them get familiar with the Nursery while I got set up for Spark. We started off by singing VBS songs. Then I read the “Jellybean Prayer.” Little did I know that our craft leader Ginger had made the craft about this prayer. The prayer was on printed on a cross and the kids glued paper jellybeans to it. God worked all this out so it would go together well. We sang a great version of “Were You There” one of the little girls was sitting on Amy’s lap while Amy did the motions for her. It was so sweet. Brooke, Amy, Christina and Jordan also helped the little ones with the movements and crafts. At the end, all the kids got their own jellybeans to take home with their jellybean cross. I heard the girls run up to their father saying “Daddy, daddy, look what I made.” What a great way to reach someone for Christ!
SHINE Message for March 29, 2009 presented by Brian Beasley.
Feel free to right-click and select Save Target As… to download to your computer, or simply hit the small button to the left of the title to play!
MESSAGE OUTLINE:
1. Sin brings God’s ______________ (Rom. 1:18a)
A. Origin of Sin
B. Extent of Sin
C. Intent of Sin
1. Sin will _______________ you. (Gen. 4:7)
2. Sin will _______________ you. (Heb. 11:25)
3. Sin will _____________ you up. (Heb. 12:1)
4. Sin will _______________ you. (Rom. 6:16)
5. Sin will ______________ you. (Num. 32:23)
2. Sin is __________________ (Rom. 1:18-20)
A. I ___________ from the truth (Rom. 1:18b)
I am responsible.
B. My _________ convicts me (Rom. 1:19).
I cannot plead ignorance.
C. My _________ convicts me (Rom. 1:20).
I have no excuse.
RESPONDING TO THE MESSAGE:
1. Which of the following definitions of sin helps you best understand the concept?
a. Sin is any failure to conform to God’s law in action, in failure to act, or in attitude.
b. Sin: to miss the mark.
c. Sin: choosing what God forbids or refusing what God demands.
d. Sin: leaving the good undone.
2. Which Scripture about sin’s extent and/or intent was the most sobering?
3. Pray that God will help you see sin in the mirror so that you may deal with it in repentance.
Feel free to post comments to this lesson and these questions in particular. Check back each day this week for additional study materials.
See you next Sunday at SHINE!
Many of you heard about this story some time ago, but it gets me every time. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Jason McElway and his basketball story, get ready to be inspired.
Selected quotes from “Renew Your Congregation” by William T. McConnell:
Looking out for Mr. Cranky. Hasn’t every church had something proposed and found that a vast majority of the people, if not excited about the proposal, are at least willing to give it a try? Then someone begins to complain. They complain and gather a couple more complainers into their corner. Suddenly, a perfectly good ministry is stopped in tis tracks because a vocal minority is against it. The i rules because we don’t want to make anyone angry (20).
These guardians have several methods of controlling the direction of the church. As must as we hate to face it, many of these methods are unhealthy. Acceptance of such behavior by others in the church is why many church systems are dysfunctional. These behaviors are unhealthy: temper tantrums, threats to withhold financial support, leaving the church and trying to influence as many as possible to come with them, gathering allies and attacking (usually just verbally) those who disagree with them, and demanding that the pastor resign. Such behavior must not be tolerated. It must be confronted and named. In fact, willingness to confront negative, unhealthy behavior in the church is a sign of leadership (21).
Sometimes some people need to leave. If you plan to have everyone in the church get excited about the idea of the church being revitalized and transformed, but you don’t plan to really do anything until everyone gets on board with the plan, forget it (23-24).
Conflict is mentioned often in this book because it always accompanies transformation. Some conflict surround every change…and I’m not convinced that’s all bad (24-25).
Jay Dozier, another DOC pastor, says, “Any change will cause conflict with humans. Given 100 people, any change will make some of ‘em stinkin’ mad. And when they get mad, they will attack their leadership. And at that point, the response is not to ameliorate, but to stand even firmer. If anything, the leaders of the church must understand themselves as conflict initiators. If we’re looking for church transformation, then I presume that something needs to be changed (27).
If we are really paying attention, we start to realize that the church exists, not to meet my needs and the needs of my family, but to reach out to those who don’t know God and to help connect them to God. It begins to dawn on us that church is not primarily for us (31).
As difficult as it is for some, we must decide that church is not all about taking care of me and mine, but is about reaching others with the message of Christ. A sure sign that a church is dying is the presence of conflict over the personal preferences of the members. And a sure sign a church is healthy is the presence of large numbers of members excited about doing ministry and missions (50).
Thoughts?
To encourage spiritual growth during our current SHINE series, we are posting daily study guides Monday through Friday of each week. You can see all of the previous DP posts by clicking here.
Click the link below to download today’s study guide.
In an attempt to clear out a backlog of clippings I have “saved” for later posting on the SHINE Blog, I’m going to try to post some of them in the next few weeks. These are just things that I have run across in my surfing or reading and wanted to share.
Today we have two related questions from different sites: What are parents wanting in a church and what unchurched young people want from a church.
From churchrelevance.com: (click to read the full post)
I believe a greater percentage of parents are looking to find a church that meets both their needs and their kids needs.
Each parent has their own mix of “wants,” but here is a list of things that every parent seems to like:
A children’s ministry that makes their kids feel loved.
A children’s ministry and church with good security.
A children’s ministry that effectively teaches their kids valuable lessons.
A children’s ministry that is fun and “wows” their kids.
A friendly church.
A church with good preaching.
A church with good worship.
A church that makes it easy to make friends.
A church that offers opportunities to get involved.
I encourage you to read the whole post by clicking the link above and make sure you read the comments after the post as well. Pretty interesting discussion about what the focus ought to be.
Then, from their recent book, Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them, Ed Stetzer and co-authors Richie Stanley and Jason Hayes found that
63% of young adults said they would attend a church if that church “presented truth to me in an understandable way that relates to my life now.”
15% of the younger unchurched attended church weekly as a child and have no current
animosity toward the church, yet 37% are hostile toward the church and Christians.Four out of 5 unchurched adults aged 20 to 29 in the U.S. believe a supreme being exists. Though they are not attending church, 3 out of 4 claim the existence of God does or would impact their lives, but this does not seem to translate into involvement in a church.
Nearly three-quarters express some level of agreement that the Christian church is generally helpful to society. Young unchurched African-Americans agree more than others (25% to 7%) that the church is the only place to learn what it means to be Christian. (Lost and Found, Stetzer, Stanley and Hayes, B&H Publishing Group 2009)
