The last session was at Stovall UMC, and I can't thank them enough for their wonderful hospitality. In fact, I can't thank any of the host churches enough for letting all of us hopefuls crowd into their sanctuaries and fellowship halls and use their heat, food, and, perhaps most importantly, their coffee. Thank you for everything!
For our last session, a lady who worked with the United Methodist Church on the national level spoke to us about organizing ourselves in teams.
She challenged us to rethink the idea of a committee. Instead of being a group of people who get together---usually in a bad mood---to do business, an effective committee should be a group of people who take an interest in each other and enjoy solving problems together. Each member of the team should get an equal say and equal time to speak up, and the team should take time to talk and pray with each other before beginning a meeting. Team members should be friends, first and foremost.
A team that can get along outside of the meeting table is a team that can function together as a unit, and a cohesive group will be more productive than a group that doesn't want to be there.
I've mentioned this before, but I felt like our guest speaker was saying this again: If you don't want to be there, don't be there. Let someone who has a willing heart and the desire to do it take over. Find something you enjoy doing. If you do want to be there, take an active role. Participate. Communicate with your team members.
Communication is key to a healthy church. Building relationships with the team members and the other members of the congregation is the way to get the church to stick together. After all, as we said after the fire, a church is not a building. The church is the people.
Another issue our guest speaker addressed is that often, we reject ideas that committees come up with for one reason or another, but especially for this reason: "We've never done it that way before."
Teams who are thinking of new ideas for their church should always try to balance new ideas with the traditions we know and love, and other church members should keep an open mind in finding new ways to grow the church. We all have to work together to make progress.
Probably the most important area in which we must make progress is the growth of the church.
Growing the church, however, is also one of the most difficult things to do. How can we help our church and its ministry grow?
One of the suggestions given to us by our guest speakers was essentially the same idea being promoted by the United Methodist Church right now: to rethink the way we look at church. The church is not a building. The church is the people. The church, therefore, needs to be a cohesive team of friends and not a "committee." In order to make the ministry of our church grow, we have to take an active role in serving the community and its needs. It will be a process of trial and error; some ideas will make a difference, and some won't work. Some ideas will be more difficult to put into practice at first. The results will probably not be immediate. It will take a lot of time to see the impact the church's ministry has.
But the impact will be there, and that will make everything worth it.
After our guest speaker discussed building teams and relationships within and outside of the church, we again broke off into our small groups. For the last session, we each gave a practice sermon.
It was amazing to listen and see what my fellow group members came up with. We had a sermon on death and the afterlife, and a sermon on forgiveness. Several of us shared their conversion experiences. Equally amazing as hearing my group's sermons was seeing the support that everyone shared for the person speaking. Our group's "classroom" was a very safe place to try out public speaking; there were cheers instead of catcalls and plenty of applause. I finished my sermon feeling good about myself and my life and my friends in faith.
The most poignant moment for me that day---perhaps for the entire course of training---was when I mentioned in my sermon that I had never had a "conversion experience" the way most people think of them, since I was brought up in a Christian home and can't remember not having faith. One of my group members said to me:
"Good. Because life before faith is nothing but pain."
That got me thinking about how thankful I am for my life, my family, and my faith, as well as my church. And how thankful I am to have met all the wonderful people who attended lay speaker training with me, all the discussions we got to have, and everything I learned.
It was a beautiful and memorable experience for me and I will never forget it.
I hope that my little journey can someday make a difference to someone else, and I hope that I cross paths with more people and have more experiences like this in the future.
Thank you for everything!
Love,
Rachel
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