On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the fundamental functions of church ministry. He outlines five core church functions: worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, and fellowship. Iorg explains that churches should strive to balance these functions, recognizing that no church perfectly executes all five simultaneously.
Creators & Guests
What is Lead On Podcast?
Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.
From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.
Put these principles into practice and Lead On!
Welcome to the Lead On podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. On this podcast, we talk about the daily grind of being a ministry leader in a local church or a ministry organization, try to get to the heart of what it takes to be effective in those roles. Well, I started out this year with this statement. Ministry is difficult, but it's not complicated.
Jeff Iorg:Ministry is difficult, but it's not complicated. Now I focused the first podcast in this little mini series that I'm doing on this theme on the reasons why ministry is so difficult, and I would reference you back to that podcast to understand why ministry has always been difficult, ministry is difficult, ministry is always going to be difficult. If you're waiting for the easy day to come as a ministry leader, it's it's not going to ever happen. Ministry is difficult. But ministry is not that complicated, and for many reasons, we have overcomplicated it.
Jeff Iorg:Especially in church ministry, we have slipped away from the simplest understanding of what churches are supposed to be doing
Jeff Iorg:and made it, oh, so complicated to try to lead in the ministry of something that should be fairly straightforward. Now remember, ministry is difficult,
Jeff Iorg:So doing the things that churches are assigned to do may be difficult, but it's not complicated. It's not hard to figure out what we're supposed to be doing, and I wanna talk about that on the podcast today and then a couple more still as we talk about this theme in more detail. Now today, I wanna focus mainly on the ministry of a local church when I say that ministry is not complicated, although I will also mention some aspects of this that relate to organizational leadership. Now when you think about the ministry of a local church, it's not complicated to understand what a church is supposed to be doing. I've surveyed literature for years on this to try to discern what different writers say about the ministry of the church, and basically, it always boils down to 5 functions.
Jeff Iorg:These 5 functions are evangelism, discipleship, ministry, fellowship, or worship.
Jeff Iorg:You can put them in
Jeff Iorg:a different order. Some people prefer worship first, followed by evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, and ministry. Some people prefer some different synonyms, and especially when you get into the academic community, you can have some discussion of whether evangelism or mission is the best word to describe that function of the church. The focus in using those words, evangelism or mission, is almost always on getting the gospel to new people. And in broad categories, and I realize this is a very broad generality, evangelism is often thought about what you do within your cultural context, and mission is what you often is often thought of what you do outside of or across our into another cultural context.
Jeff Iorg:So if you go door to door in your community, it's called evangelism. If you go to Guatemala and go door to door, it's called missions. And so it has to do with cultural intent or crossing cultural barriers,
Jeff Iorg:how people use these two words. Sometimes,
Jeff Iorg:as I said in the academic community, the mission of God is described as this mission slash evangelism imperative the church has, But either word works for me. I'm mainly speaking to those of you today who lead US churches, and so I'm gonna use the word evangelism because I think that's the focus of what we should be doing in terms of church ministry, and that evangelism, when we do it in another place, becomes mission. Another word in this list where there's a synonym often used or another word often used is ministry, and that word is service. And by service, we mean doing practical need meeting, acts which meet the needs of people in your community or church context. So whether you use the word ministry or service, it's immaterial to me, but one of those two words would better would best describe this particular function.
Jeff Iorg:So let's review again. The simple functions of a church are worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, and fellowship.
Jeff Iorg:Worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, and fellowship.
Jeff Iorg:Now it's just this simple. That's what your church should be doing, those five things. Now we start immediately complicating this. We start complicating it by several things, but one is making each of these a stand alone and in some way compete with each other for our allegiance, our resources, and our time. It's better to understand all of these five functions as being vitally important for a healthy church.
Jeff Iorg:All 5.
Jeff Iorg:And all churches should practice all 5 functions. But let's not put any undue pressure on ourselves about how perfectly we should be practicing all 5 of these all the time. Now I've recently been introduced to a concept called a balance wheel to try to explain, how churches can do multiple things together and try to do them in balance, but recognizing the reality that you'll never get perfectly to that form of balance. Now it's hard to do visuals on an audio podcast, so listen closely. A balance wheel, imagine that if you will, a wheel or a round drawing on a piece of paper, And that wheel has a center, and cascading out from that center are concentric circles going from the center hub out to the outer rim.
Jeff Iorg:And let's just say that there's 10 of those concentric circles, so that the hub is 0 or 1, and you get all the way out to the outer circle and it's a 10. Now, you've got that visual in your mind of a circle with concentric circles moving out in equal increments from 0 to 10. Now, think about the same circle with those concentric circles and now draw lines from the center out to the edge dividing it into 5 pie shaped pieces. Are you seeing it now? We have a circle with a center hub, concentric circles on our drawing going from 0 out to 10, and then the same drawing, drawing lines out from the hub out to the outer edge, dividing this circle into 5 equal pie shaped pieces.
Jeff Iorg:Now that's called a balance wheel. And in a perfect world, which does not exist anywhere, but in a perfect world, your church would label each of those 5 pieces of the pie with one of these 5 functions of the church. You'd label 1 worship, 1 evangelism, 1 discipleship, 1 ministry, 1 fellowship. Each of the pie pieces would have its own name. And again, in a perfect world, this wheel would roll along and all 5 of these pie shaped pieces would be equal, and they would all be ranked out to that 10th area, and so that would be a very smooth operating church.
Jeff Iorg:Well, that does not exist and frankly will never exist because we are not perfect people. We are not leading perfect churches. We are working in a context with real live human beings not running robotic machines. So your balance wheel is probably out of balance. In other words, go around that wheel and grade your church on how well you are doing these 5 things right now.
Jeff Iorg:Would you say that your worship ministries are a 5, a 7, a 10? Would you say your evangelism is a 3 or a 6 or a 9? How would you rate each of these 5 areas? And once you get them ranked, and if you were able to do it, you'd be able to squeeze your wheel to where it fit the rankings, and you'd have a blob amoeba looking thing rather than a true wheel. And if it tried to roll along, it would roll this way, ka thump, ka thump, ka plunk, ka plunk.
Jeff Iorg:It would struggle because it's not it's not in perfect balance. Now let me hasten quickly again to say, don't put too much pressure on yourself about this. You'll you'll never have a church that's functioning in all 5 areas all the time at a level 10 so that your balance wheel maintains its perfect circle form and rolls along without any difficulty. What most of us are going to experience is very different. What most of us are going to experience is that we have to go to work.
Jeff Iorg:Again, ministry is not complicated. We gotta do these five things. We have to go to work improving each one of these incrementally and as we can to try to build out the ministry of our church and bring it to that healthy balance that we're striving for all the time. Now, there are many factors which cause a church to be out of balance in its balance wheel of what it's trying to accomplish with these five functions. One of the things, that causes churches to be out of balance
Jeff Iorg:is that churches tend to emphasize
Jeff Iorg:their leader's passion or their leaders' organizational strengths in shaping the ministry of the church. So, for example, if your leaders are really great at evangelism, you're probably gonna be a 7 or an 8 or a 10 on evangelism. They may not be so great on ministry or they may not be so great on discipleship. They may not be quite as good on worship. So you're gonna be out of balance because of the passions and the interests of your leaders.
Jeff Iorg:Another reason that you might be out of balance is what I'll call the organizational heritage
Jeff Iorg:of your church. Organizational heritage, meaning it's what your church has been known for.
Jeff Iorg:Your church is a great evangelism church, or your church is a great worship church. Your church is a great discipleship church, but whatever it is known for, it comes to have that identity, and it gets to be a 10 in that area, but maybe the other areas lag a little bit. Okay. Another reason that we struggle with this is that we fail to recognize that these functions are often intertwined. So for example, if you have a church that's really strong on evangelism and people are going out regularly and sharing their faith both in formal and informal context, you must have in company in accompaniment with that, a strong discipleship ministry to strengthen young believers as they come to faith in Jesus and help them grow in him.
Jeff Iorg:And then if you have a good evangelistic outreach, it's very helpful if you can bring people back to a dynamic worship service where people encounter the presence of God and feel that God is working among them and really experience God's presence in that context. And so, these things intertwine. And when you overly divide them, saying that we segment these things out so that we do them each one individually, it gets more difficult and complicated because we fail to recognize the interdependence of these 5 functions. So another reason that we struggle with these is because of what I've already mentioned on the podcast, and that is what I call, unrealistic expectations or even false guilt about the perfectionistic tendencies we have in these areas. Look, no church practices all 5 functions at optimal performance level all the time.
Jeff Iorg:You're simply going to struggle, and that's just part of why ministry is hard. Not complicated. We know what we're supposed to be doing. We know how to apply ourselves to these core tasks. But the fact is, it's hard to find the leaders.
Jeff Iorg:It's hard to find the resources. It's sometimes hard to find the opportunity, and so it gets harder, because even though these tasks are simple and clear to us, they can still be difficult. So here's what we've agreed to so far. There's 5 functions of a church, worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, and fellowship. You can substitute a few words in there if you want to.
Jeff Iorg:We've looked at this with a visual image of a balance wheel where we have a wheel with a hub and out from that hub are concentric circles going out to the edge, and we've numbered those 0 or 1 to 10. And then we have the circle divided into 5 pie shaped pieces, and each one is labeled one of these 5 keywords I've given you. And then we evaluate, and we say, how are we doing? And if we're a 2 or a 3 or a 10 or a 7 or a 9, or even a 10, we put that as a score on where our church is right now. We already see that we're more of an amoeba shaped blob type thing than a perfect circle.
Jeff Iorg:Now, we've also talked already on the podcast today about some reasons why this is so complicated or why it's so challenging. We've talked about the fact that, it's hard to maintain equality among these different functions. It's hard to maintain all the functions all the time. It's hard to maintain the quality of functions at an equal level. It's hard because we tend to drift toward either our leader's passion or organizational heritage.
Jeff Iorg:You get the idea. Now when you're thinking about keeping ministry simple,
Jeff Iorg:how can you do that by using this model that I'm teaching you today? Well, first of all, you have to
Jeff Iorg:have the discipline to recognize that even though all 5 of these may not be your particular gifting or strength, your church has to thrive in all 5 areas. That's why I strongly advocate some kind of team approach to ministry leadership in your church. He may say, well, that's easy for you to say. I've got a church out here with 75 people.
Jeff Iorg:Well, I understand that. You're going
Jeff Iorg:to have some limited teams and some limited areas of, growth and opportunity in some of these air in some of these 5 areas. But that doesn't mean that you can't recognize that while you may be passionate about worship and that may be just your thing and you may want the church to be excellent at that, and you may want it so much that you neglect these other areas, that's just simply not acceptable. So as a leader, you have to say, well, I've gotta focus on some other areas, raise up some leaders, form a team, get some other strong voices who want other aspects of this ministry of the church just as much as I do. So you have to have the discipline to balance all five functions. And then second, you have to take the initiative to balance them.
Jeff Iorg:Not enough just to have discipline and disciplined thinking, but you have to have disciplined initiative actions to get this work done. I know, for example, that, you know, I tend on this on on this listing of 5. I would tend to drift toward evangelism, and I would tend to drift toward discipleship. Those would be sort of like the 2 of these that would be the most important to me. And, honestly, the the fellowship component, I'm happy to have good fellowship, but I don't I don't really think about it as much as, as I should in terms of local church ministry.
Jeff Iorg:And so early on in ministry, I recognize I've gotta get some people around me who really think about maintaining the caring, relating ministry aspects of a church so that we have people that are working intentionally to reach out to members who are not present week after week and who make hospital visits, and who call on people when they're bereaved, and who really take the initiative to extend the fellowship of a church out there to people who are needing it. And this slips over into the ministry area as well. Now, obviously, I I don't mind doing practical need, maybe ministry for other people, but because of who I am in assignments I've been given in leadership,
Jeff Iorg:you know, I tend to
Jeff Iorg:think in terms of strategy and in terms of preaching and in terms of communication. I don't always think in terms of, who's gonna bring the food for the potluck. You know, that's just not my first thought of my mind, but somebody needs to be thinking about that. Somebody's gotta be thinking about the ministry aspect of meeting the practical needs of the people and caring for the work that needs to go on. And so, I've learned learned a long time ago in local church leadership that I had to facilitate a team and I had to take the initiative to balance out that team by seeking out people who had different perspectives, different passions, different gifts, different interests that I had, and elevating them to the leadership team and giving them an equal voice in the leadership task that we were trying to accomplish.
Jeff Iorg:Now, another thing I wanna highlight though that that, makes this complicated and how we can, work to, make it more simple is you have to recognize that no matter how hard you work on this balance wheel, and no matter how hard you work on the 5 functions, and no matter how much discipline or initiative you take, the hard reality is every church does some functions better than others and ought to capitalize on those strengths. There's great disciple making churches. There's great worship slash prayer churches. There's great, evangelistic churches, and and they should not apologize for their strength. Now they need to work to make sure that they're balancing out these other areas as well.
Jeff Iorg:But don't apologize for your strengths. Just continue to capitalize on them and recognize that almost every church does some functions better than others. It has its particular nature identity. It has its thing that it's known for that it does really well, and you wanna capitalize on that. Now, let's shift gears just for a minute and talk about how this applies an organizational leadership.
Jeff Iorg:Because frankly, it's just not the same. Ministry organizations typically do not have the 5 functions of a local church, and if they do, then they're replicating church like activity and probably,
Jeff Iorg:are losing focus on their unique mission. Think about it
Jeff Iorg:with me for just a moment. When you
Jeff Iorg:think about the 5 tasks
Jeff Iorg:or functions that a church has, worship, evangelism, discipleship ministry, and fellowship, Most para church ministries pick one of these and pour their heart and soul into that one, often with a niche audience, and become really specialized at doing just that. So for example, for 20 years, I led a seminary, and there was one of these 5 that really was who we what we focused on, discipleship. Seminary is a teaching ministry. Its focus is on strengthening believers. Its, its its passion is biblical information leading to transformation so that students are both growing and maturing and changing as a result of this intensive discipleship work that's being done.
Jeff Iorg:Now you think about, well, yeah, but what what about organizations that serve meeting the needs of prisoners and people like that? Well, that's, organizations focused on ministry or service. I have been close friends with someone for many years, who worked with prison fellowship. You may remember that prison fellowship was the ministry that was founded by Chuck Colson and has developed extensive ministries to incarcerated persons and their families. Now in those ministries to incarcerated persons, they do some evangelism, they do some discipleship, but mainly, they focus on meeting the the needs of people in those contexts.
Jeff Iorg:And so, for example, for a number of years, I helped facilitate a summer camp experience that was put on by prison ministry, leaders for the children of incarcerated persons. And that was a very unique, very distinct niche of people that needed ministry, and we were willing and able to provide it for them. And that's an example of another need meeting ministry that focuses on just 1 or primarily on one function of the church. I could go on and on. You get the idea.
Jeff Iorg:So if you're leading a ministry organization, you are probably not concerned about all 5 of these functions. You're probably concerned about 1 of them or maybe at the most 2 of them being expressed in your ministry organization. That's why, and despite the fact that I've worked for ministry organizations for many years, I still passionately, convictionally believe the local church is where the where it's at.
Jeff Iorg:It's where the action is. It's where the work needs to be done.
Jeff Iorg:That's why being a pastor is the most fulfilling and yet also challenging work imaginable because you're able to build build into the lives of people this well rounded approach to both ministry and life, where you're focusing on all 5 of these functions. Now, we're talking on the podcast about ministry being difficult, but not that complicated. And I've talked with you today about it, there being 5 functions of the church and some of the reasons why the that we've complicated this and how we can maybe unspool some of that complication. The last thing I wanna talk about on the podcast today are some models models for implementing these 5 functions. And this is another reason why ministry today has has gotten a little more complicated.
Jeff Iorg:When I first started out in ministry leadership more than 4 decades ago, these 5 functions of the church had program expressions in the church which brought them some balance. There was a balanced amount of time that was expected for each one, a balanced amount of energy that was devoted to each one. There was balance built into the schedule of the church. So for example, we met the worship function by meeting on Sunday morning and Sunday nights. We met the discipleship function by meeting for Sunday school and sun and discipleship training.
Jeff Iorg:We met the evangelism function by having various visitation and outreach programs. We met the ministry function by organizing the church either by Sunday school classes or by small groups or by something back in the day called the Deacon Family Ministry Plan, where everyone in the church was assigned to someone who is caring for them and meeting their practical ministry needs. And, of course, fellowship. Fellowship was built into the the the life of a church with all of the different events and activities and opportunities for people to come together and share meals, share life, share conversation. And so, we had these 5 functions pretty well lined out in the old model which was a what I will call a methodological model where there was a method or a plan or a program for each one of these functions.
Jeff Iorg:Now, this had some strengths. Every function had prominence. Every function was included. People could still gravitate toward their passion, but even those people who were not passionate for one of the functions would be exposed to its need and to experience it. And leaders knew what box to put things in.
Jeff Iorg:So if you were thinking about what is your discipleship program, what is your worship program, you knew what box to put these things in because you had an organizational plan that really parallel these five functions and made it relatively straightforward to do. But the new model of church ministry is a little more challenging. It's an integration of multiple functions in the common organizations or fewer organizations. Now, we typically still have a Sunday worship service, but in most churches these days, it's one service or at the most, 2 services a week. And then, we've eliminated most small groups of different kinds where you had a Sunday school, discipleship training, missions program, and you've pulled all of that together or at least attempted to pull all that together into 1:1 hour time a week of bible study and, personal growth.
Jeff Iorg:And the same thing on fellowship and ministry. You no longer have multiple opportunities for fellowship. You have one small group and you're expected to participate in that as the primary expression of fellowship or community. Well, the strengths of this, this holistic approach helps us to integrate our faith and
Jeff Iorg:that's a good thing. There's a
Jeff Iorg:it's a streamlined schedule. There's just not that many church activities that people are expected to show up for any longer. And there's fewer programs in to manage for leaders so that we don't have to think about stretching ourselves over all these different program assignments. We can keep it a little more straightforward. But there are also some weaknesses, and that is some functions are simply ignored.
Jeff Iorg:I'm particularly saddened by the lessening of bible teaching in Baptist churches in my lifetime. Bible teaching has become much less emphasized. There's fewer Sunday school classes, fewer small groups classes, fewer discipleship classes, fewer study courses, or or or even, seminary type experiences. There are fewer men's and women's ministry groups. There's just fewer of them.
Jeff Iorg:So the discipleship ministry is, not necessarily totally being ignored, but it really concerns me that we have so few teaching opportunities these days. And then the short term gain of having a less stress schedule may be compromising the long term impact of really rounding people out in these 5 areas, And the fewer programs in the fewer areas, mean that there are fewer leaders needed, but it also means that fewer people are being trained and challenged and moved into leadership, where as most of us know, a person who's actually leading something seems to grow so much more from the experience than a person who's just, coming to participate in it. So I'm not saying that the new model won't work. I'm just saying it has some issues, some deficiencies, and some challenges that have to be addressed intentionally in order to get us to the place where we're fully including all 5 of these functions
Jeff Iorg:in the life and work of a church. So let's summarize. Ministry is difficult. No doubt about it,
Jeff Iorg:but ministry is also not that complicated, especially local church ministry. We know what we're supposed to be doing. We are supposed to be doing evangelism, discipleship, ministry, fellowship, and worship. Put them in any order you want, substitute mission for evangelism, sir, service for ministry. But, essentially, these are the 5 things that we're supposed to be doing.
Jeff Iorg:My friends, it's not that complicated. Build out your church so that these five things are happening. Recognize that the ideal would be a balanced wheel where every one of them and all 5 of the pieces of the pie on the chart would be maxed out to a 10, and the wheel would roll along smoothly with no dips, no chunks, no bounces. That's the goal. But also recognize that just because your church isn't the perfect church doesn't mean it can't be a healthy church and that it can't be an effective church.
Jeff Iorg:So focus on all 5 functions. Have the discipline and initiative to balance the 5 functions, and recognize that while no church does all 5 all the time, almost every church does one of these things really well and becomes very attractive to people who are looking for that particular need to be met in their lives. Be careful that you don't drift too much towards your passion or your organizational heritage. Be careful that you don't just do something because you've always been good at that, and that's what our church is known for. Capitalize on that strength.
Jeff Iorg:Yes. But don't fall back into thinking that's all you can do. Ministry is difficult. No doubt about it. But it's not complicated.
Jeff Iorg:You're a church leader. You know the 5 things you're supposed to be doing. You need a simple strategy to do all 5. You need to keep them in as much balance as possible and move along in all these areas in a steady way. Recognizing you'll never be perfect, you'll always have shortcomings, there will be challenges and difficulties, But nevertheless, we know what we're supposed to be doing.
Jeff Iorg:We can keep showing up day after day after day to get it done. Ministry is difficult, but it is not complicated. If you're in a local church, just remember, worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, fellowship is what we do. Do these simple things as you lead on.