On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the importance of building community within churches, emphasizing that while ministry is hard, it doesn't have to be complicated. He defines Christian community as mutually supportive relationships built on union in Jesus Christ and shared commitment to church functions. Iorg highlights that true fellowship transcends denominational labels or social groups.
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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. We're in the middle of a series of podcast under the general theme, ministry is hard, but it is not complicated. Listen, ministry is difficult. There is no getting around that.
Jeff Iorg:I admit that upfront. It's hard for me. It's hard for you. It's hard everywhere. Doing this work is difficult, but it is not that complicated.
Jeff Iorg:The work of the church is supposed to be fairly straightforward. As I've said, in introducing this series, the work of the church is generally described in 5 words, evangelism or mission sometimes, discipleship, ministry, fellowship, and worship. These are the 5 things that churches do, and they're the 5 things we're supposed to be leading churches to accomplish.
Jeff Iorg:And yet, we seem to wanna get so many other things caught up in
Jeff Iorg:the work that we're trying to do or do some of these things in such complicated ways that it becomes more difficult or more challenging than it really does need to be. So ministry is hard, but it's not that complicated. And one of the things that makes it not complicated is that is the clarity that we're supposed to have about what the church is supposed to do. So today, I wanna talk about fellowship or to use the word that's more commonly used today, I wanna talk about community. Now, let's start with a kind of a working definition of community.
Jeff Iorg:Community is a mutually supportive relationships, built upon our union in Jesus Christ and our shared commitment to the functions of the church. Community is built on our union in Jesus Christ and our shared commitment to the functions of the church. So I'm gonna use the word fellowship and community, sort of, synonymously in this podcast. I think fellowship would be, more rooted in the biblical word koinonia, which describes this kind of intensity and closeness of relationship, but community is really the word that people use today to describe what it means to have fellowship with believers. Now let me say that unbelievers can enjoy the benefits of Christian fellowship
Jeff Iorg:but really don't understand fully what that means.
Jeff Iorg:You see, Christian fellowship or Christian community is rooted in our union in Jesus Christ. It's not rooted in our denominational, label. It's not rooted in our church name. It's not even rooted in our family or our group of people that we may feel close to as friends.
Jeff Iorg:No. True community rests upon being in Christ.
Jeff Iorg:This doctrine of being in Christ is taught throughout the New Testament and really is the summative way the Bible describes this new identity we have and this new connectivity we have among believers. We are in Christ, and I said in a different speech, we're not in the Republican party. We're we're not in a certain university or school. We're not in a certain social club or social strata. We're not in any of these things.
Jeff Iorg:We are in Christ, and because of that, we have connection with God and with each other that really surpasses anything that is natural or explainable in our world today. Now, unbelievers can certainly enjoy the results of that unity, but they don't really share it until they come to faith in Jesus. When I say they can enjoy the benefits of it, I mean, they enjoy what it produces in communities or churches or what it produces in the outworking or the benefits of what community accomplishes. That's what I'm trying to say. They can appreciate or enjoy that even though they can't really be a part of it.
Jeff Iorg:And then this definition, we're having community built on our union in Jesus Christ and our shared commitment to the functions of the church. In other words, we're in community to actually do something. And as I'm teaching you in these podcasts, we're in community to do evangelism and discipleship and have fellowship. We're in community for ministry and worship, and we'll talk about those 2 in the weeks to come. So this is our working definition of fellowship or of community.
Jeff Iorg:It's mutually supportive relationships built upon our union in Jesus Christ and our shared commitment to the functions of the church. And while unbelievers can enjoy the benefits of this community, they really can't share in it until they come to be in Christ. Because being in Christ, not being in a particular church or denomination or social group or even political movement, being in Christ is what defines us and gives us the possibility of true community, and then the doing the functions of the church together is the most natural outward expression of that community. Now I've already talked about one biblical foundation for this is the doctrine of being in Christ. Another biblical foundation is the example of the early church.
Jeff Iorg:You can read, for example, in acts chapter 2 verses 42 to 47, a remarkable description of the unity of the church in its embryonic form. You can see this same unity described in other places throughout the book of acts and then examples of this unity, throughout Paul's letters and even into the other letters of the new testament as churches came together to work together, as believers came together to have experiences of ministry that work together, and as, the church is described as being this kind of fellowshipping community on mission for God. Another biblical foundation that helps us understand community is the illustrations of the church in the New Testament are all corporate descriptions. For example, the Bible says the church is made up of living stones. Now you say, wait a second.
Jeff Iorg:A stone is a singular. No. The imagery is of a stone wall or a stone building. So we are all living stones, meaning that we're living components of something much larger that's been interlocked together to create something much stronger. Another illustration of the church is we're the family of God.
Jeff Iorg:Again, a plural or a corporate description of what church looks like. We're a family. We have components and members and different people with different relationship. Another illustration is, the church is is fruit on a vine, and that speaks, of course, of grapes, which there's always clusters of them. And so, this illustration also is corporate or plural in the sense that it's a coming together of more than one thing to form this, this church, this fruit of the vine and fruit that God is producing that produces the church.
Jeff Iorg:I could go on and on. You get the idea. The illustrations of the church are all corporate and plural. They're all a description of multiple pieces coming together to create a one or a whole that accomplishes something good. So we've talked about a definition and a brief biblical foundation.
Jeff Iorg:Now, why is building community so difficult? Why is it so challenging? Well, let me give you some reasons for that. First of
Jeff Iorg:all, we're working to build community while the devil is working to destroy it. There is no question,
Jeff Iorg:but there is demonic activity about us and working to divide us, to, create cults and clicks and sex and segments among us. The devil is hard at work. So one reason that community is challenging is because while we're trying to build it, the devil's trying to tear it down. A second reason why building community is difficult is because we're working with people. You know, community is made up of people.
Jeff Iorg:It's not made up of buildings. It's not made up of programs. It's not made up of curriculum. Community is people, and people, if you haven't noticed, can be very challenging. They are all kinds and all shapes and all perspectives, all ideas, all kinds of needs.
Jeff Iorg:Community is hard because we're working with people. Another reason that it's hard is because many Christians define community quite differently, and that word means something different to different individuals or different groups. When some people think of fellowship, for example, they think primarily of eating together, or some others think of fellowship primarily as, coming together to to share ideas or to talk, about what they're learning, maybe like in a Bible study context. Other people, when you say the word fellowship, they they mean sharing deep emotional needs or deep emotional connections. That's what they mean by by fellowship.
Jeff Iorg:There are all kinds of definitions for this, and frankly, all of these that I've just given as illustrations have a little bit of truth in them, but community is more than any one of these things, and we have to be careful that we don't define it in such a narrow way that we miss the full orbed meaning of what biblical fellowship or community really looks like. Then another reason why it's difficult is because most Christians are just busy. They're very busy people doing very many different things, and some and some churches are busy. Man, I read some church newsletters or some church websites, and I'm tired from just reading through it. They're just busy, busy, busy, and they're seemingly caught up in trying to accomplish a lot of activity, and in doing that, maybe sacrificing or compromising some of the possibilities of community.
Jeff Iorg:Well, there's probably, more reasons, but that's a few to get us started. Community building can be challenging,
Jeff Iorg:can be difficult, can
Jeff Iorg:have a lot of factors working against it, but nevertheless, fellowship, our community, is one of the 5 core functions of the church, and so it behooves us to think about some strategies for building the fellowship or the community of a church. So let me walk through, 4 or 5 suggestions here today on the podcast of how to build healthier community or better fellowship in your church. Number 1, create a structure or a means or a plan to meet the needs of your church members. Create a structure or a plan or strategy, if you will, to meet the needs of church members. Now if you're in a small church of 50 people, the need might be or the strategy might be the the pastor just takes care of it.
Jeff Iorg:There's not anything wrong with that. In fact, that's one of the benefits of a smaller church is that you get a lot of a lot more personal attention from your pastor. It's a good strategy. It's a good plan. But if your church is growing or it's larger, then that may mean that you have to develop a larger plan or strategy to meet the needs of your church members.
Jeff Iorg:It may mean that you have to involve other leaders,
Jeff Iorg:or other members in meeting those needs so
Jeff Iorg:that your church then begins to have deacons or elders or a committee structure or something that is busily working to meet the needs of church members as they arise. Now what are the kinds of things I'm talking about? Well, let's take some basic ones. Hospital visitation or caring for people when they're sick. This is a good thing that churches should do.
Jeff Iorg:Jesus had incredible compassion for sick people and many examples in the New Testament of reaching out to people that were hurting and physically ailing and caring for them in their need, and so it's not uncommon to walk into a typical church building, especially a smaller one, and see some kind of marker board up that says hospitalized members, and it'll list a name and the hospital that they're in, and typically, if it's in a smaller community, there's just the one. So if your name's on the board, everybody knows where you are, and that name is put there so that the pastor or whoever else might be assigned that responsibility make sure to make contact with that person or with their family. Now in today's world where hospitalizations are often very brief, it may not be appropriate to always go to visit someone in the hospital, but it may very well still be appropriate, especially if they're there if they are, in the hospital for surgery or for a prolonged stay to make one or more visits to them in their illness. Another kind of need meeting ministry is caring for people,
Jeff Iorg:in bereavement so that when someone dies,
Jeff Iorg:there's a response from the church. I was a member of a church that did this extremely well. I take no credit for it. I I didn't have anything to do with organizing it, but it was a marvel to watch. When there was a death of a person in our church or in someone's family related to our church, there was a very clear protocol of how to respond.
Jeff Iorg:The pastor would make a response, deacon assigned would make a response, and then there was a committee of people that was responsible for helping to plan the church's response to this to the memorial service and any meal provision or any care for the family that was provided. And because this was a larger church with a lot of people that were connected in different ways, there were a lot of these services that had to be coordinated. And so this team of people did it, and they did it masterfully, and they did it well. But this church had a very good organizational plan to care for the needs of its bereaved members. Another one is on the opposite side of life, and that is caring for people who are starting families, having babies, launching out into those early years of all of that.
Jeff Iorg:Again, I'm familiar with the church that does this very well so that when a woman is, nearing the time when she's going to have her baby, There's extra care provided for her in her home. There's meal services that are made available. There are some people who are willing to care for the other children. There's a plan in place for that phone call when that mom needs to the hospital. Dad needs to go.
Jeff Iorg:Maybe those children need to be cared for. All that's arranged in in advance. The church is ready for it. Then when the woman comes home from the hospital, there's some provision for days of meals that are provided, other kinds of care that can be given. You get the idea.
Jeff Iorg:These are simply some examples of what I mean when I say that churches build fellowship or community by having a plan, a structure, a strategy for how to meet the needs, especially these ongoing frequent repetitive needs that come up in the lives of church members. And whether it's something like hospitalization or bereavement or new babies being born, there's this sense of taking care of people and of making sure that gets done. And again, if it's a small church, you say, well, the pastor just takes care of most of that. No problem. That's perfectly fine.
Jeff Iorg:That's one of the benefits of both being a smaller church and of having that immediacy of connection with a pastor. As you get into a church that has a 1,000 attenders, that's not likely to happen that you can have one person meet all these needs. And so, a wise pastor puts into place a way for church members and other church leaders to take on these responsibilities so that these needs continue to be met no matter the size or shape or or scope of the overall ministry of a church. So the first strategy or first step for building the fellowship or the community of your church is to create a structure to meet the practical needs of people that as they arise and to meet the crisis or critical needs of people so that there's a sense that people have, my church cares for me, I belong to my church, my church notices me when I'm hurting, my church is there for me. Okay.
Jeff Iorg:A second strategy to build community or fellowship in your church is to create a small group structure that encourages relationships. Now, I don't think that the small group structure has to only be established for relationships, but I think it can be established to encourage relationships. For example, a Sunday school class can be primarily tasked with studying the bible together. But in the context of bible study, there's also time for prayer requests to be shared, for mutual prayer to be offered, for support to be organized, if that's the way the church chooses to do to do it, to meet the practical needs of members, etcetera. But organizing either Sunday school classes or home groups or other kinds of small groups that encourage a fellowship or encourage, relationships, I should say, is another strategy that can be employed.
Jeff Iorg:Now I wanna give a caution or 2 here, and I can be a little bit of an extremist on this, and I can say things a little stronger than I really mean them, so I'm trying to be balanced here. But I wanna caution you against creating groups or allowing groups to drift toward emotional support groups or what I call therapy groups in church. Now if you've got a group that meets for that purpose, like a recovery program or something, that's different.
Jeff Iorg:Or
Jeff Iorg:rather
Jeff Iorg:So second strategy, structure, Hunting. Our 3rd strategy to build a ministry.
Jeff Iorg:Groups or evangelism groups or worship groups or discipleship groups, but to create opportunities for people to build relationships, share community, if you will, around shared interests. Whether it's ministry, evangelism, worship, discipleship, these other functions of the church, allow people to come together around those functions to build relationships around those shared interests. My wife and I recently attended a larger church, and it had a very large choir accompanied by lots of musicians, almost a full orchestra. It's a big church.
Jeff Iorg:Afterwards, I, asked the pastor,
Jeff Iorg:of the people that were playing on the stage in the in the orchestra, how many of those were paid people from outside the church, and how many of them were church members? He said, well, there might have been a paid person or 2, but almost all of them would be church members. He said, we occasionally get into a situation where, for whatever reason, we don't have certain instruments that we need to round out the orchestral sound, and so we live in a community here in Nashville where there's a there's a lot of musicians. And so, occasionally, we'll have to augment with someone that may come in for a while and play a certain instrument that we don't have until we find the volunteer church members who can take on that role. But he said, almost everyone on that stage, almost everyone every Sunday is a volunteer who plays because they feel like it's their ministry, here in our church.
Jeff Iorg:I told my wife a little later
Jeff Iorg:in the car, I said, you know, I hear a
Jeff Iorg:lot of people talking about building community while at the same time not allowing their church to have a choir. And I said, I I've known a lot of church choir people over the years, and they love singing together. There's a certain, joy that comes from blending your voices and mastering the harmonies and working on the nuances and experiencing the practices together, which gives you the reinforcement of the words of the songs that you're singing over and over again into your lives. There's something really community building about that, sharing that together, and I thought about this church and how much of the choir and the orchestra are 2 different communities and communities that really come together. And then within those groups, the subsections of the people who play different instruments and the people who sing at different voices, alto, soprano, you know what I mean.
Jeff Iorg:All of that, and how the community has built, not around bible study or not around sharing of life, meaning that they have to sit together in a circle and talk about themselves, but, no, it's community built by doing something together that they mutually love, which is singing and playing and enjoying the creativity of that. Man, that's community building. So not just in choir or orchestra, but in other areas of your church. Think about building community around doing something together. Now I've given the illustration of men and women working in community in choir and orchestra, but really wanna focus for a minute on men's groups.
Jeff Iorg:If you tell a group of men, we're gonna get together and and and we're gonna pray for an hour, and and we're gonna talk, you
Jeff Iorg:know, in-depth about our deepest feelings and and our our most profound struggles, you you're you're not gonna get much response. I'm just telling you, it's just not gonna happen. But if you tell some guys, hey, we wanna get together, and we're going to, go over to a older couple's house in our church that are not able to do this anymore, and we're gonna spend a a Saturday, cleaning up their yard and, doing some repair work on their house, and, we're going to to spend most of that day just helping this couple in our church to just get some things taken care of that will enrich their lives and communicate our love for them and our appreciation for their long years of service to
Jeff Iorg:our church. And we're looking for a
Jeff Iorg:half a dozen or a dozen guys to go and do that. Well, you'll get that group together. Now when you get them together,
Jeff Iorg:and you get them over
Jeff Iorg:to that house before you get started to work, say,
Jeff Iorg:hey, guys. Before we get to work, let's circle up here for a minute.
Jeff Iorg:Let's pray together, and let's pray for this couple that we're gonna be serving, and before we do that, I I just wonder, anybody else here have a prayer request today or a prayer need, and guys will pop those out right there around that circle, And then you can say, let's pray together, and you lead a prayer, and you say, now let's make some work assignments, and let's get started. While we're working, get to know the guys you're working with and just, enjoy this time of not only working together, but getting to
Jeff Iorg:know some fellas, and guys will do it.
Jeff Iorg:While they're working, they're gonna be talking about their work and their families and their questions they have about the Bible and just different kind
Jeff Iorg:of things. They're gonna do that. Then get them back together
Jeff Iorg:at lunch and say, hey. Let's have our lunch together, and, hey. While we're doing lunch, I wonder if I could just do a lot of 15 minute bible study I've been working on here and just give you guys something to think about. And you do that together, and then you pray again with them about what they've just been learning. Listen.
Jeff Iorg:Those guys are gonna leave that day with a sense of community and feeling connected to the men of the church because of what they experienced in prayer and Bible study, but mainly in working together and sharing the task of ministry together that day. You know, some of the most meaningful relationships I have are with people that I've been through a meaningful ministry experience with, and it bonded us and it marked us, and it gave us a sense of identity and togetherness like nothing else. It can be something like a Saturday workday, but it can also be something that's a little more prolonged. I think about, for example, when I was working at Gateway Seminary, and we went through the prolonged process of having to relocate the seminary. I'm telling you, the vice presidential team that went through that together, we were bonded for life.
Jeff Iorg:We share a bond that no one else can really understand. A bond of doing something together that was enriching and challenging that took everything we had that caused us to pray for one another and love one another and stand with one another and support one another.
Jeff Iorg:I get a little catch in
Jeff Iorg:my voice just thinking about it today on the podcast. So one way to build fellowship and community is to bring people together to get something done, and in the doing of something, you're going to find that relationships are built, emotions are shared, truth is discovered, and community really happens. Okay. Number 4. Another strategy, this may surprise you, is to plan times for your church to slow down and enjoy itself just
Jeff Iorg:a bit. You know, that's why
Jeff Iorg:I always loved things like Christmas Eve services and summer concert services or Thanksgiving dinner services. Services where we exhale a little bit, where the church came together and said, you know what? Tonight, we're just gonna relax
Jeff Iorg:a little bit. Now back in the day when I
Jeff Iorg:was in a church where I even, you know, wore a suit every Sunday, and many churches still do that today. But in those days, even in these services I just described, Christmas Eve, summer concerts, Thanksgiving dinners, I'd even dress differently just because I
Jeff Iorg:wanted to feel to be different that night, just more relaxed, just coming together and exhaling so that we can take a little time and enjoy one another.
Jeff Iorg:Don't don't think every service, every time your church gets together, has to be driven, focused, accomplishing, moving forward. Now most of them do need to be that, but there's also a way to build fellowship and community to exhale and to call the church together and say, let's relax a little bit tonight and enjoy one another and enjoy the sharing that we're doing together. And then finally, another way to build community in your church is to celebrate the successes your church members have, perhaps even outside
Jeff Iorg:their church. For example, this is
Jeff Iorg:why it's important to celebrate things like graduations, to celebrate high school graduations and college graduations, and to celebrate something going on outside the church and in people's lives, it's also important to celebrate and can you can celebrate things like job promotions, other accomplishments, like moving on to new occupations or getting inducted into the military or getting some kind of
Jeff Iorg:a significant award. You know, a few years
Jeff Iorg:ago, we were, in our church plant in Oregon, and one of the first families that started coming to our church was a local high school football coach. He became a lifelong friend of mine, but at at the beginning, he wasn't yet a Christian, and we were trying to reach out to he and his wife, and they were coming to our church, and then he was chosen as the high school coach of the year for the state of Oregon. And when I saw that in the newspaper, I was like, you gotta be kidding me. This is fantastic. And so our church had a plaque made up that said, the name of our church and congratulating our friend and, not yet fellow church member, but hope we hope someday would be, but we said, you know, our church congratulates this person on receiving this significant award.
Jeff Iorg:And on Sunday morning,
Jeff Iorg:I
Jeff Iorg:just called him forward and said, would you please come forward for just a moment? And he was shocked, like, what? And I said, no, just please come and stand with me. Well, he knew me a little bit, and so he trusted me enough to walk forward and stand there. And, again, this wasn't a big old mega church.
Jeff Iorg:This was a church plant. We're still meeting in a middle school gymnasium. But when he walked up, I said, this is our friend who's been coming to our church these past few months. And this week, it was announced that he's the Oregon High School Football Coach of the Year, chosen by his peers across the state for his work. And I said, we wanna recognize you as a church this morning.
Jeff Iorg:We're proud of you. And we gave him the plaque, and we all applauded and saluted. And that really started our church in a in a path where we looked out for things that were being accomplished by people in our community. And we acknowledge them. They're not always with a plaque, sometimes just with an announcement or just with a printed document or something like in the news, in our worship folder or in our website.
Jeff Iorg:But we let people know you matter to us and we're paying attention to your life. And, we want you to know that we celebrate with you when something good happens. Well, doing that is just another way to validate people and let them know they matter. Today, we've been talking about building the fellowship of your church, enhancing community. It's one of the 5 core functions of the church.
Jeff Iorg:It's hard, but doesn't have to be complicated. I've given you some simple strategies you can put into place today that will enhance or raise community. It's one of the functions we have to accomplish. Let's get busy building community as we lead on.