TEN WAYS LEADERS CAN HELP CREATE A SPIRITUAL GROWTH CLIMATE IN THE CONGREGATION
1. Give priority to developing your spiritual life.
Prayerfully examine your spiritual discipline. What would help you go deeper in your relationship with God?
Prayerfully examine your total stewardship: time, talent, money. How might God be leading you into deeper commitment and freedom?
Set some personal spiritual growth goals for the next six months.
2. Provide leadership in seeing that the church offers spiritual growth programming.
Offer Bible studies, retreats, prayer groups, etc.
3. Work from the conviction that every Christian is gifted by God and has a ministry.
Become aware of your own spiritual gifts and use them in ministry, either within or beyond the church.
Help others become aware of their spiritual gifts and match gifts with ministries. Encourage the exploration of new ministries as people express passion for a need they see.
Help others in the church make a conceptual shift from "slots to be filled" to "ministry opportunities for those with needed gifts." When a group is looking for persons to perform tasks, raise the question of spiritual gifts.
4. Pray for the church daily.
Intercede for the needs of members and needs of the church as a whole. Undergird other leaders with your prayers.
5. Participate in corporate worship with a sense of joy and expectation.
Help others make an attitudinal adjustment from being spectators and consumers to being active participants in worship.
6. Ask God to deepen your love for others in the church body.
Model the fact that Christian love is not primarily a feeling, but a commitment to do everything you can to help others fully develop as the persons God wants them to become.
7. Share your witness concerning what God has done and is doing in your life with others.
Sharing witness with other church members helps increase their faith and yours. Witness helps create a faith climate, with the assumption that God is alive, real, and vitally active in our lives!
8. Help the church continually focus on their mission.
State creatively, persuasively, and often that the primary purpose of the church is to continue the reconciling mission of Jesus.
Encourage the congregation to discern its mission focus, what God is specifically calling the congregation to be and do.
Continually raise the right questions when programs are planned and budgets are considered. The right question is not "What do we want for our church?" but rather, "What does God want for God's church?" Another right question is, "Does this help us fulfill our mission?"
9. Help the congregation work constructively through change and conflict.
Help members realize that if there is spiritual growth in the congregation, change will naturally follow. Change inevitably brings conflict.
Provide a steady, unafraid presence in conflict situations. Practice good listening skills.
Model and encourage skills that help congregation members work through conflict, such as direct, honest communication and working through appropriate channels.
Express trust that the benefits of faithfulness to Christ's mission will be worth the trauma of change.
10. Express trust that God will provide for our needs as we venture into mission.
Help members examine the scriptures and see that God has always called God's people to venture in faith.
Encourage good stewardship and planning, but also encourage moving ahead into new ministries (If we wait until we have enough people and money, we may wait forever!)
This article was first prepared by Judy Turner when she was on staff of Homeland Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Because such articles are still being requested, we are making them available on our Website. You are free to use any resources on our site, but please donate to the work of Christview Ministries Center so that we can continue to produce such materials and make them available.