Ministry Teams And Serving Series

[SIMPSONS VIDEO]

-it’s been a few weeks, but if you remember, we are spending the fist Drink Deeps of the year looking at why we do what we do, taking a look at church in general, but specifically here at Fire & Water and looking at why we do the things we do.

-because for many people, church is a routine. It’s just something we do. Some people don’t even know why they do it, they just know to do it. And we don’t want that. One, it’s not healthy to you, you should know why we do it. And two, if someone asks you questions about church or Drink Deep, if you don’t know why you do what you are doing, you can’t really help them understand. Saying we sing because “we’ve always done it” isn’t really an answer.

-so we are picking apart the things we do at Fire & Water and explaining why we do them.

-we started a while back with why we have hang out time and why we play games. We spend more than half our time here on Sunday nights, plus lock-ins and other things, just getting to know each other. But that’s important. It’s not healthy to learn about Jesus in a bubble, we’re supposed to be the family of God. And for us to be family, we need to get to know each other and spend time together.

-then we talked about praise and worship, or why we sing. We looked at what praise and worship really is and the history of singing. And it’s funny how our culture is becoming less and less about singing together, years ago uncle Edgar would pull out a guitar and the family would have a sing-along. That doesn’t happen anymore. But at church, we still like to sing. People almost want to sing at church even if they don’t sing anywhere else.

-last time we met we talked about why we have teaching. We also looked at how we are different from most other church experiences, we don’t just have someone stand up front and talk, we also like to get together in small groups so people can ask questions, so we can work out what we believe and why. There are many people who never, ever talk about their faith, not even at church, and we don’t want that to happen here, we want to give you a chance to add to people’s experience or ask questions.

-today we’re going to talk about serving. Even though there is not a specific “serving time” every Sunday, it is something that we place a high value on here. We have people who serve every Sunday and sometimes on Wednesday. The mission trip is the highest attended trip we do every year.

-this is so important, it’s one of our core values. The E in WATER stand for Equipping, another word for serving. We believe that in serving others we are equipping those people to have a better idea of who God is and how He loves them. Likewise, it also helps us learn more about what God is like as those who serve.

-so we’re going to start with how we can serve here and now and move outward.

1. HOW YOU CAN SERVE

MINISTRY TEAMS

-for those that don’t know, we have different teams of people that help serve here on Sunday nights at Drink Deep. One of them is our Adult Volunteer Ministers, but you guys can’t join that until you’re a little older, so although I am extremely thankful for our adults and all they do, I’m not going to focus a lot on them tonight.

-at the moment we have three teams that you can apply for to use your gifts and talents for God. One is the Worship Team. Everybody who is up front while we sing playing an instrument or singing, they are part of a serving team. They need to be here early on Sunday, they need to be practicing their music, they need to be practicing their instrument, and they have to work hard to serve God with their gift of music.

-we have another team that hasn’t really gotten too far off the ground. And part of that is my fault, I haven’t pushed it a lot, but we also have a Drama Ministry Team. We have a video camera that many of you have seen floating around during various nights and trips, and as you have seen, we have a big freaking screen next to my head that we show videos on. We would love to get a few people together who instead of me always showing TV or movie clips, these people would serve by making videos that go along with what we talk about or sometimes make commercials about what we do we can play to the congregation on Sunday mornings.