Team Sunday is an opportunity to get connected with one of Vintage’s many teams and find ways to serve this house.
October 21, 2024
Speaker: Greg Sanders
How many read your Proverb this morning? There’s a proverb a day; every day, you can read your Proverbs, and it works. But that’s not my teaching today, although I do want to pull a couple verses out of Proverbs.
Chapter 20, verse 12, “Ears to hear and eyes to see– both are gifts from the Lord.” Ears to hear and eyes to see. Now, in context, I believe what the writer of Proverbs is talking about is not ears to hear and eyes to see in the earthly realm. I think those are both gifts, we’d say that. He’s talking about a spiritual understanding that the ear to hear the Lord– how many would agree that’s a gift to hear God? But the eye to see is something that I think we tend to minimize.
The eye to see is the ability to discern a situation and make a tactical decision with spiritual excellence. And we have to be careful in our day and in our time that we don’t become so charismatically bent that we’re useless; that we’re like, Well, you know, God didn’t speak about it, because He expects from us– I would just love to lay this in front of us– He expects both from us. That we’re tender to the Word of the Lord, we have an ear towards Heaven, but we have an eye to see, and we are skilled at being able to discern and make great decisions.
In the marketplace, what He expects is that we are there, gifted with a job, with an opportunity, and we’re there with great skill, with our eyes looking at it and seeing. But we’re never so arrogant to only work with what we see. We also will lean into what He’ll say.
And in this way, we are a people who carry a different DNA and a different ability to shift situations because we can bring the Word of the Lord and skill where everybody else can only bring skill.
What was always intended to separate the people of God from the world around them was their skill and their intellect coupled with the Word of the Lord. And we tend to err the wrong way; we forget our skill and our intellect matter, and we only want the Word of the Lord, and I would say that’s a fallacy. We need to be a people that have both.
Verse 18 says, “Plans succeed through good counsel: don’t go to war without the advice of others.” Different versions say “in the abundance of counsel is wisdom.” In other words, do not lean on your perspective. Learn the power of the wisdom of the crowd.
In every decision in life that you make, the only thing that keeps you from inviting other people’s perspectives is your insecurity. In every situation in life, the only thing that will keep you from inviting other perspectives is your own insecurity, because we’re hardwired to believe we should just know. And I don’t want somebody else’s input because they might not agree with me. Well, they might not agree with you because you’re wrong.
And if you go headlong into decision-making without learning how to ask the question of, Hey, I’m thinking about XYZ; can you give me your perspective? All you’re saying is, I’m too insecure to know what you say, because the Scriptures say in the abundance of counsel is wisdom.
Greg, where are you going with this? Let me tell you where I’m going with this. Today’s Team Sunday, that’s where I’m going with this. Now, Team Sunday is my least favorite day of the year because it’s a day when we have a bit of an agenda, and I always feel like it gets in the way of the perhaps of God.
But it’s necessary because for us to be the people God’s called us to be, in our day, in our time, and for us to accomplish the things He’s told us to accomplish, we have to be together in unison. How many understand that the Psalms will teach us that there’s a commanded blessing when people come together in unity? In other words, there’s an authority on the people of God when their minds are together on something.
So, if you remember back to April, I talked about the state of Vintage. There were four areas I wanted to see us grow in. We’re growing numerically, but there are places I wanted to see us accomplish. One of them was to develop a neighborhood prayer grid. We haven’t touched that one yet, still on the docket. It’s fine. I’ve set out some big, audacious goals in hopes that we could get towards them.
Releasing songs from this house. We’ve been doing that, that’s awesome. Increasing missional giving. We’ve been doing that. It’s incredible. The team put together a Vintage Give throughout the year, and what we saw was an incredible increase in generosity out of this house to the outside world. I love it.
The fourth thing was we need to add gatherings because we’re getting full. Well, that one is upon us. Growth is a blessing, always. It’s also a problem. Anyone who has recently had twins knows that growth is a blessing, but it’s a problem because all of a sudden, your house is tighter than it was.
So, I’ve been watching and praying and considering. See these two ideas in Proverbs, to hear the Word of the Lord, but to also use skill to see what’s going on? I’ve been assessing and I’ve been asking lots of questions. Say to your neighbor, I am the wisdom of the crowd. Here we go.
I want to talk about two things that have to happen for us at this moment as a family. Number one, I need your input in order to make a great decision for this house, and I need your engagement to accomplish that task.
So you’ll see these. They should be near you, close to you, should be some in front of you– “Vintage Gathering Census.” It sounds so official. This is a drilling down of what we’re looking at doing. I would say we are undecided and we’re undecided as to when. But if you look around right now, this historically has been our lighter gathering.
I want you to be aware, I think through a lot of contingencies; I am an obsessive stay-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night strategy guy. It drives me crazy, and I think it drives my wife crazier.
So, if the question posed is, why don’t we put out more chairs? Let me tell you why. At Vintage, in this building, we knew from the beginning that chair set would never be what limited our growth. Anybody know what would be? Parking. We knew that coming in. Parking. When this room is at about three hundred and seventy five people, our parking is beyond full. Now, in the summertime and springtime, we can get away with that. People don’t mind walking a half-mile to church after they drove and parked. At five degrees, a little harder to pull off.
So we’ve been watching, strategizing, trying to figure it out. So, what I’m looking for is information. I would love it if just one person from a family did it and answered for your household. We need the pieces of information.
Have you ever laid out dominoes in all the different shapes? When you do one, everything goes. That’s what this is like. The domino, once it tips, it starts toppling things in all different directions. And I love that. It’s the reality of running an organization this size, but I want to make this decision great.
So, select your preferred gathering from each side, i.e., which one would you go to out of those time slots? If your answer is none of the above, we have a different problem. Call me and let’s meet.
We’re going to try to move to three gatherings on a Sunday morning. For the last month, we have been piloting a shorter, tighter gathering timeline to see something. Because my preferred timeline would be 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00. It looks great in print, it’s clean.
The problem is it takes us thirty-five minutes to turn the parking lot for those of you that don’t come all day. There are a few of us here that do all-day church, and my answer is if you want to be in church all day, praise God. I don’t care. It’s never a bad thing.
So, it takes us thirty-five minutes. So we were piloting a question of can we do 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00, and we would do a seventy-minute gathering. And my questions are, I’m not ever going to do a gathering that doesn’t make room for the Holy Spirit to do what He wants to do. We’re never going to sacrifice the presence of God. We’re never going to sacrifice the movement of the Holy Spirit. Unwilling to do that.
So, we test-piloted it to see, and my answer was it’s too tight. There are just moments where we need to linger. There are moments where we need to chase something. I don’t want to lose that. I think it’s who God’s called us to be. And I don’t know about you, I’d rather do church at home alone than be at a gathering where it felt so truncated because we had a clock.
At the same time, I have this growth thing I have to fix, which is Saturday night. Let me tell you why I will not do a Saturday night: because the wisdom of the crowd is wisdom. I have interviewed pastor after pastor after pastor– friends of mine– who went to Saturday nights, and I asked them this question: What was the benefit? Oh, it grew like crazy. What was the drawback? Oh, it killed my team. That drawback doesn’t make it worth it.
I do understand that from this seat, you’re like, it’s awesome. Come on Saturday night, I get my Sundays. I get it because I would just put my name in the hat as the Saturday night pastor. You guys can do Sundays. I’ll just do Saturday night. You’re like, Wait, you could do that? I don’t think so.
But when we looked at it, and we’re like, that’s just not a solution that’s going to work for this house. I have a lot of young staff with young families. The last thing I want to do is stand before the Lord someday with a line of kids that say, Because of the way you drove my father or my mother, I didn’t have a relationship with them. You see, that’s a kingdom dynamic that I will not violate. So it means we can’t do that.
What about Sunday night? Have you paid attention to Sunday night? We have another gathering on Sunday night. DTS is on Sunday nights. We have a phenomenal ministry happening that is changing lives every week. We will not touch that. It’s why we’re here. We picked this spot to be close enough to the detention center that we could build a ministry that actually changed people’s lives. So, that’s a value thing; it’s a vision thing. We’re not going to change that.
Well, what about Thursday night? Let’s start our weekend on Thursday night. Great, that’s awesome. Do you know how many things happen on Thursday night that get bumped?
So I’ve been playing this game called “which kid gets to starve?” And the answer is, I don’t want any of them to. So, these gathering options let us still do the gatherings with the same schedule we do. It lets us have enough time to do the gathering the way we want to.
Just so you know how I’m wired– the answer is, when the Lord shows up in worship, teaching is an option. I don’t really love teaching anyway. So for me, the answer is, let’s just let the glory of the Lord rest. Let’s let people’s lives get wrecked by the Spirit of God. And if we need to study, we’ll study. If not, just come to the Bible studies.
So, what I need is this information from you, and here’s how we’re going to do it. There are two things I said: I need your wisdom, and I need your engagement. For us to be able to pull this off, I need teams to grow. I need you to be willing– if you could– to serve a lot because you want to, if you can’t, serve at least once a month. To me, that’s the minimum level of buy-in to the culture.
If you’re here and you’re like, I just want to go to church. I don’t want to serve– I think that’s a problem. I think that says something about your perspective on what it is to be part of the family of God that’s broken. “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give His life away for many.” That’s the model that Jesus teaches us.
So, around the building are tables. Now in the purest form of bread and cup, they shared a meal. Now this will be sacrilege for some of you; for those of you that have been around me a while, you’re like, Oh, we’re used to this. The idea of bread and cup was sharing a table together, having food together, and doing life together. So, in lieu of wafers and grape juice, we have pastries and coffee.
My hope is that we mingle around, we spend time together, we go to the tables, and laugh it out. It’s okay. I’m really quite serious. If you look at the early church, they had a meal together. They probably ate baklava for all we know. They were in the Greco-Roman part of the world. It might have happened.
I think it’s just as sacred to spend time as a family together, doing the diligence it takes to be the house He’s called us to be. That’s what today is about.
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