Bringing Home the Message

How Community Can Multiply the Power of the Preached Word

Robert K. Perkins

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781620327364
  9781498205764
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630874216
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Believing that study and application of Scripture in the context of Christian community can greatly enhance the transformative power of the preached message, in Bringing Home the Message Robert Perkins aims to help pastors integrate small group ministry with their preaching. Perkins lays out the biblical, theological, historical, and sociological basis for the importance of hearing God's Word in the context of community, and provides a practical methodology for implementing sermon-based small group Bible studies. This helpful book also includes a sample fourteen-part series of Study Guides and Leader's Notes for the Gospel of Luke. Step-by-step instructions illustrate how to prepare effective inductive Bible study questions for small groups that will challenge members to grow in their faith and discipleship through understanding and applying God's Word together.

1

Preaching That Transforms Lives

The Church is in the business of transforming lives by living the truth of Jesus Christ. As a pastor, my prayer for each member of my congregation is that they might experience transformation as they know and follow Jesus, the living truth. For this to happen, a person must not only know the truth but he or she must also put it into practice. Transformation comes by living the Truth of Jesus Christ.

Communicating the truth of Jesus Christ is one of the most important tasks of any pastor. Preaching is the primary vehicle to accomplish this objective; however, merely communicating this all-important truth Sunday after Sunday—even if it is done clearly and compellingly—is not enough. Parishioners need to take what they hear from the pulpit on Sundays and apply it throughout the week, in everyday life. Unfortunately, many people regard their spiritual walk as just one separate compartment of life. To experience true transformation, parishioners must do more than merely attend church on Sunday morning and listen to the sermon. They must really hear it, then put it into action each and every day.

James writes: “Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22). How many people sitting in the pews on Sunday morning are merely listening to the Word, and are, therefore, deceived into thinking they are faithfully doing all that it takes to be a follower of Jesus? What can a pastor do to help the congregation take the Word proclaimed on Sunday into the week so that they become actual doers of that Word?

The Preacher’s Challenge: Loss of Community

A preacher’s task has become increasingly difficult in the postmodern world. Life is generally whizzing by at a fast pace and people in the pews have increasingly shorter attention spans and seemingly less time than they did in decades past. Worse, in our highly individualized society, they are increasingly detached from Christian community. This loss of community causes many Christians to be more significantly influenced by values and forces outside the church than by the Word of God or other Christians. Though the preacher’s task has not changed—to communicate God’s Word in a clear and relevant manner so that lives might be transformed by living the truth of Jesus Christ—traditional models of ministry have become less effective at bringing about this transformation.

To get the big idea of the sermon across, today’s preachers must compete with increasingly more worldly, pervasive, and persuasive messages of popular culture. Even when the message is delivered with eloquence, clarity, and power, a multitude of modern-day distractions can dilute the effectiveness of the proclamation of God’s word. Local congregations need a strategy to reinforce the preacher’s message, keep God’s word fresh in their minds, and provide mechanisms and structures for feedback and accountability. After hearing God’s Word, people need help to allow it to continue to impact their hearts and lives. The church needs a vehicle to foster community where Christians can challenge one another to apply what they have heard on Sunday morning, pray together through the implications of the message, and provide accountability for one another as they seek to obey the words of Scripture.

The Preacher’s Ally: Small Groups

That vehicle is sermon-based small groups. This book seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of supplementing the preaching of the Word on Sunday morning with continued study and application of that same Word during the week within the context of small groups. Parishioners in sermon-based small groups who have heard a sermon preached on a given passage on Sunday will continue to reflect upon that same passage in community with others who have heard the same. Together, they can explore the implications of the passage, wrestle with some of the more challenging questions and aspects that may not have been dealt with in the sermon, and, most importantly, consider ways in which the passage should be applied to one’s life.

Within small groups, growing Christian relationships provide the context by which believers are able to challenge one another to take seriously the implications of God’s Word. In this context, members “spur one another on to love and good works” (Heb 10:24). They are able to worship together, study God’s Word in community, and pray for one another. During the week, they can check in with one another to see how each one is doing as they seek to live faithfully the truth that God has spoken and impressed upon their hearts on Sunday morning and in the small group.

To demonstrate this, I have produced study guides used by small groups in the congregation I served, each corresponding to a particular Sunday morning message. I encouraged all of the small groups in our congregation to use this curriculum, and most did. For the pilot project of this book, I preached a fourteen-week sermon series from the Gospel of Luke with a focus on Christian community. I wrote study guides for each sermon, to be used by small groups, and assembled leader’s guides to be used by the group leaders. These tools are designed to reinforce each biblical theme for the week.

The Preacher’s Strategy: Multiple Reinforcement

As small group members meet during the week to discuss and apply what they have heard in church on Sunday, they are able to interact with the Scriptures in a much deeper and more personal way. Members of small groups enjoy intimate fellowship with one another as they experience the body of Christ in action. They are able to get to know each other well as they study together, pray for each other, and hold one another accountable. They experience each other’s joys and sorrows and can grow together as they seek to put into practice the truths from God’s Word. In this community context, significant transformation can take place.

In and of themselves, small groups can be powerful vehicles for growth and discipleship. When the content of the small group Bible study follows a unified curriculum that reinforces what is being preached on Sunday morning, the benefits are multiplied. This strategy of multiple reinforcement has been shown to be extremely effective through recent ministries that emphasize small groups as a component to reinforce what is being learned on Sunday.1 The 40 Days of Purpose, a program used by thousands of churches in recent years, emphasizes this. Churches participating in the 40 Days or other similar programs, using small groups as one of the components, have seen tremendous growth in numbers and faith commitment levels.

This strategy is unique in that it focuses on the reinforcement of hearing the same Word of God in more than one context—namely, the proclamation of the text on Sunday from the pulpit, followed later in the same week by the study of that same text within the community of a small group.

Through the reinforcement of the message in multiple settings throughout the week, people will not only be able to hear the Word of God, but also live and experience authentic transformation.

a Roadmap for Sermon-Based Small Groups

In chapter 2, you will find a biblical and theological exploration of community, specifically the themes of hearing, living, and applying the Word of God in the context of community and the theology of small groups.

Chapter 3 contains a survey of current literature on community and small groups, with a focus on how Christian community is essential if the hearing of God’s Word is to be transformational.

Chapter 4 describes how I put these ideas into practice in our congregation. Namely, I explore the effectiveness of reinforcing Sunday’s message in small groups by implementing sermon-based curriculum for the church where I serve as a pastor. I illustrate by example how to prepare sermon-based study guides. I have also included a full set of fourteen study guides for small groups to accompany a sermon series taken from the Gospel of Luke.

Chapter 5 contains a summary of what was learned through this project. Appendix A describes the history and context of the congregation I served while writing this book with the goal of helping the reader understand the importance of this methodology for churches like ours. Appendix B contains a sample companion set of leader’s notes to assist those leading the sermon-based small group Bible studies.

1. The orientation and leadership training materials provided for the 40 Days of Purpose campaign, originated by Saddleback Community Church and Rick Warren, emphasize the value of this strategy.

2

Biblical Foundations for True Community

In the beginning, God created . . . and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters . . . And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light . . . Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness . . .” (Gen 1:1–3, 26)

From the beginning, God has existed as a community. In fact, community is central to God’s very nature. God’s Words were spoken into the midst of the community of the triune Godhead. By his Word, God not only created the universe, but in the process of creating humankind, he simultaneously created community. This book explores the importance of God’s Word, spoken into the context of true community.

While much has been written in recent years from a practical standpoint to further small group ministry within churches, there is still a great need for the development of a biblical theology of small groups. A scriptural foundation for small groups—especially in relation to the preaching event—can help pastors better understand why small groups are essential to complement the ministry of the preached Word. The recent popularity of small group ministry has primarily been programmatic and pragmatic in its emphasis in most churches. Many churches have implemented a small group ministry in the hopes that such a program will build transformational community into the life of their congregation. Many books on the subject of community and conferences featuring small group gurus promise tremendous results of growth, both in numbers and maturity of the members, as a result of participation in small groups. Anyone surveying the plethora of books on the subject of community and small groups will soon discover that the vast majority focus primarily on the mechanics of small group ministry. More foundational than how one implements a small group ministry is the question: Why are small groups needed at all? This section aims to answer that question.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Preaching That Transforms Lives
• Chapter 2: Biblical Foundations for True Community
• Chapter 3: The Case for Community
• Chapter 4: Implementing Sermon-Based Small Groups
• Chapter 5: Lessons Learned
• Appendix A: A History of Newton Presbyterian Church
• Appendix B: Leader’s Notes
• Bibliography