Serve

Our theme this year is Worship Way of Life. At this point, I think we have made it pretty clear that worship is more than just singing songs on Sunday morning. Worship is something we can and should do throughout the week. But we can also worship on Sunday mornings outside of singing songs.

There are few different ways to worship Sunday mornings, but today I’m going to focus on serving on a ministry team. It would be easy to just give you a list of the needs I have in Family Ministry and other ministry team leaders have on their teams. Trust me, I could give you a long list. But if we are being honest with ourselves, I think we are short on volunteers on all of our teams because of the way we have approached filling our teams. We have open spots that we need filled with a warm and able body.

Unfortunately there are too many times when instead of looking around and seeing who is available and willing to serve and helping them find a place to serve that fits with their spiritual gift and their passions, we create these positions on our teams and fill them with whoever says they might want to join a ministry team. It might not matter so much if they are the right fit or if it is the best place for them on the team.

I am fully aware that we have lost volunteers strictly due to shutting down in-person services for a few months and then having to slowly reopen and not needing as many volunteers for a significant amount of time. And I know that there are folks who will join the teams they were on pre-covid when they are ready to return to church again. But when I look around at the folks who have started volunteering again on any of our teams, I think it makes a lot of sense why they serve on that team. Their gift and personality seem to really fit what they are being asked to do.

One the other hand, when I have heard about someone who has told their ministry team leader that they are not planning to return to serve on that team again, it kind of made sense to me why they weren’t returning. This is  nothing against those people or those ministry team leaders.  In a lot of those cases I just don’t think they were in the role or on the team that best fits what they have been gifted to do.  

There are some things or some roles in a church that just have to be done by a volunteer. I might be wrong, but thinking back to our days as a mobile church, I’m not sure any one on our set up/tear down crew had the gift of set up/tear down.  But each week we had to set everything up and tear it all back down again. There is a reason why no one was begging us to set up and tear down in our permanent facility when we moved in.

There is something to be said for that person that has a servant's heart and will fill that role that needs to be filled despite it not really being something they can use their gifts in or something that they are passionate about. Every team needs those people. But it is hard, and possibly unreasonable, to ask someone to fill that role for an extended amount of time.  

So is it bad to ask people to serve on your ministry team with you?  No, in fact I am going to do that in this very newsletter. However, our primary objective as a ministry team leader or volunteer should be to help everyone find a role and a team that can use their talents and abilities to serve God and allow them to worship through service each and every week.

With that being said, here is a list of ministry teams and opportunities to serve. Just kidding, kind of. I’m going to take this opportunity to give you the why behind some of our ministry teams and a couple of events happening this summer that you can be a part of.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS TEAM:

Our First Impressions team’s goal is to give folks the best experience possible from the moment they drive into our parking lot to the moment they walk in the worship auditorium.  Their job is to make sure everyone knows where to go, make sure they feel welcomed, give them any information they may need to know, look out for first time guests, and provide us with delicious coffee and snacks. Why? Because when you feel welcome and people are happy you are there, it creates an opportunity for that person to have a meaningful interaction with Jesus. If you are worried that you are in the wrong place, or worried that you don’t belong, you are likely to miss whatever it is God is doing.

TECH TEAM:

The Tech team has two different audiences they are helping during our worship service. For the in-person worship service, the tech team's primary objective is to enhance the worship experience and eliminate any distractions from what God is doing during that time. That means everything from the lyrics on the back wall to the way the bass guitar sounds is important. For the online audience, they are almost solely at the mercy of our tech crew. If the sound system went out or the projectors cut off mid service (which they did, a lot during the pandemic) the service goes on, right?  The band could play acapella, the lyrics could be printed out. Sure, it's distracting but for those in person, we can get over it. If the audio or video feed goes out to the online audience they can’t see or hear anything. They can only see the camera shot that our video director chooses for them, they can only hear what our audio engineer adjusts for them. It can be a difficult job, but enhancing or quite literally enabling folks to worship is a very rewarding and special thing.

BRIDGING THE GAP:

Bridging the Gap is our non-profit organization. Every 4th Friday they open up the food pantry and clothes closet to the public where dozens and dozens of folks each month come to get help. They have a morning and evening distribution. It is a wonderful opportunity to serve our community and to get to know folks from the area.

FAMILY MINISTRY:

At Bridges we believe the next generation will change the world, because they will. We have an awesome opportunity to invest in the lives of our kids and teenagers who will shape the way the world looks decades down the road. Every child deserves an adult who cares about them enough to show up in their life each week and who shows them what it looks like to love God and love others. We have children’s ministry environments on Sunday mornings and opportunities to help with student ministry on Wednesday and Sunday evenings.

VBS:

We are doing a week of VBS for the first time in a long time this July. We are looking for help doing a number of different things that week. It will be a great opportunity for us to reach our community and invest in our kids' lives in a concentrated amount of time.

COLLIDE:

Collide is a week-long event for our middle school and high school students where we spend half of the week doing various service projects and the other half doing some fun activities in the area. It is a great opportunity to get to know some students and help instill in them a heart for serving others.

All of these teams have “holes that need to be filled”, but at the end of the day we are all better off when we are serving in a capacity that allows us to use our God given gifts and abilities to glorify Him. This is by no means an exhaustive list of our ministry teams, so if there is nothing here that stands out to you, keep looking. We are better individually when we are giving of ourselves and we are better collectively when we are all doing our part to serve one another.

*If you have any questions about any of these teams or events or if you would like to help out, email us at info@bridgeschurch.net.