Ask the Pastors S6 E2: “How do we make our church resolutions more tangible? (part 2)”

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Welcome to Ask the Pastors. My name is Brian and I'm coming to you with a quick intro for today's episode. We sat down together as a pastoral staff and recorded our thoughts on Pastor Will's list of 10 New Year's resolutions and how to make them practical. And we had such good conversation that we had way too much to say for just one episode, so we chose to after the fact, split up the recording into two episodes. So on today's segment of the recording, on today's episode, you'll hear conversation around resolutions number six and seven, which were mission heartedness and gospel focus. We hope you enjoy.

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Welcome everyone to Ask the pastor as a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have a chance to submit and receive answers to your questions from our pastoral staff. Biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive, I believe are the adjectives we use to describe our responses. So let's try and keep it biblically grounded and pastorally sensitive. This afternoon. Guest, my name is Will Deval. I am your special guest host filling in for Pastor Brian who is right there, but who is, we're once again this week flipping the, turning the tables and I get to play host

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Tables have been turned,

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Letting you guys weigh in since I already got a chance to, so this is a part two episode for those who missed last week and who missed two and three weeks ago here at church. The context is we had a New Year's resolutions mini series the two weeks after Christmas and then after New Year's where I just sort of laid down for the church some things that were on my heart for us to think about as we hit it into the new year for us to really be prayerful and focused on and attentive to in this coming year, not necessarily our greatest weaknesses as a church and not necessarily the most important things, but some combination of that. Just things that I think ought to be on our radar collectively as a church. But that was mostly just my heart and so I wanted to invite you guys, invite our elders.

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We talked about some of these at staff meeting and inviting all our staff and leaders into this conversation and what would you guys add to the list? Change the list and specifically with this conversation, how can we make this list more practical? That was something that we got as a follow-up question from one of our members after that first sermon I preached on December 29th or whatever it was, was, Hey, I'm a real practical person. You did a good job of laying out some of these principles for us. How can we make these more applicable, more tangible? What can I do? Joe Congregant, Joe Congregant. A lot of this stuff maybe seems like it's at a high level for us as pastors, but how can we invite the church into this conversation in practical ways to step up and answer the call that we've kind of the charge that we put before 'em.

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  So we're continuing to unpack that, continue to work through. We're halfway through last week we talked about the first five sort of challenges of remembering and preserving our legacy as a church, safety, security and better being prepared as a church, diversity inclusion prayerfulness. And so we want to unpack items six through 10 and as a reminder, I laid these out and what for me was kind of increasing order of importance. Again, just the combination of just intrinsic objective importance of the thing we're talking about. So number 10 is going to be soul winning and seeing more conversions for obvious reasons, but also just in terms of yeah, where are we right now as a church? So for instance, the one we're starting with and part of the reason we wanted to lay to make sure Pastor Austin was here we're starting with number six, which was mission heartedness.

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  I say heartedness because I think it starts there. Our hands are going to, like Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, mouth speaks, the hands act. And so it starts with changed hearts. God gives us a heart for your own heart for the least and the lost I have seen in no small part to the credit of these two guys and leadership over the missions team, which gives leadership and helps shape the culture of the church at large. I've seen a lot of progress in my six years in lead pastoring at West Hills now in this area. That's why for me it's fallen into number six as opposed to in previous years it might've been number eight or nine on our list potentially, but I think we've done made some strides. I think we've still got a long way to go. So let's get practical about it and maybe Austin, we'll start with you for that reason Pastor admission. So how would you invite Joe and Joe congregate into this call to action to, let's see, west Till's, we want to prayerfully see West Till's be more mission hearted and more mission handed. Where would you start? How would you call people to roll up their sleeves and get involved?

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  So let's start general things that everybody can do and get more specific to what can just some people do because not every missional opportunity is going to be fitting for every congregant or every household or every life group or every discipleship group. So the first thing that everybody can do is pray, and the one that everybody should do is pray. There's nothing that we can do in our effort of the mission of our church without help empowerment of the Holy Spirit and without his work to change people. We can't change people's hearts. He changed people's hearts,

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  He

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  Brings us opportunities. We want to find those opportunities and we also need workers. Jesus was very right when he said that the harvest is plentiful, but the labors are few. If I just in a moment go through some of the list of local missions partners that either I've identified or other congregants or teammates have identified, there is no shortage of opportunity.

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  All of these missional organizations, whether they're not profits, whether they're church partners, whether they're something else, they're all underfunded, they're all understaffed, they're all under volunteered and they're all good. They're all doing really good work. So if you're sitting home bored, tired of being angry at the news, man, have I got something for you to do? Either way though, prayer is something that everybody can do. Now I know that some folks say, okay, I want to pray, but I don't want to just pray generally about, dear Lord, please empower the mission of our church. How can I pray specifically? So we're trying to do a few things to increase our specificity and our intentionality in prayer, and this has been incorporation with Bill Anon who are our deacons over the prayer ministry. They do a really good job of collecting prayer requests and disseminating prayer requests.

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  So what we've tasked the mission team with doing is partnering with all of our missionary partners. So these are organizations that we fund on a monthly basis. We'll get to ones that we do outreach that we don't necessarily cut checks to, but these are all the ones that we do in fact write a check to every month and we've asked them to provide prayer requests to us on a monthly basis. It's hit and miss as you can imagine. They're busy, we're busy, everybody's busy, but some of them we also get their newsletters and the Conex are also taking the job in combination with the diminish team of taking those prayer requests, putting them into our prayer drive, our prayer system, and having those available. So if you want to pray for West Hills missionaries, that's an available option. If we don't have it on the newsletter currently, it's something that we need to start doing soon or in the very first kind of eight week stages of getting that going and everything just takes time.

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  Also, if in the subject of prayer, I encourage at this point I'm actually just not going to encourage. I'm going to ask if you're a life group leader and you're a D group leader, or if you're in a live group and you're in a D group and you're listening and it hasn't come up yet in your group to sort of adopt one of our missionary groups to pray over indefinitely, I'm going to ask you to do so go to our missions alcove. If you don't want to find it on our website, go to our missions alcove and pick one. I don't necessarily care, but if you say, Hey, I really want to pray for the Pinellas that are in Ethiopia, pray for the Pinellas. If you say no, I want to pray for Asia, Christie here in town, pray for Asia. If you want to pray for the nerds, whoever it is that you want to be praying for and start doing that on your own, take some kind of peripheral ownership over that particular missionary group and just watch what God does. That's one I would say first of all, get involved with prayer. I'm

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  Glad you mentioned that. Just to interrupt for a second, that was a rhythm that we were in as a family. Gosh, it's probably been a couple of years ago now, was praying through our mission area of the month that we would identify and just as a family at home, I want to disciple my kids to obviously just be thinking about other people in general, but especially be thinking about people in other places all around the world who are in many cases on the front lines of and who we have a relationship with and who we're already supporting as a church. And yeah, it's a point of personal conviction for me. We need to get back to that as a family. But then think of spiritual family and life group. That's a great suggestion and rhythm.

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  It's easy to do if you're already sharing prayer requests with each other. We should be able to make the prayer request of the missionaries available to your group and then you can just look 'em up and that as a group can, I dunno if you use a group chat, some people use email, we use GroupMe, whatever. However it's that you like, if you want to print it off and bring it to your group, whatever is the most convenient way for disseminating, distributing the prayer request. But that option is available and I just encourage everybody to be doing that. And even if it's over and above the prayer request, you're going to start building relationships with these people. And so when they come for a missionary visit, it's less transactional. It's like someone that and care about and you can ask, Hey, how's it going with that new bible study that you all started on Tuesday nights for this particular family or people group or whatever it is. And so you're invested in a different kind of a way and also helps us understand that the people of God goes beyond South 40 Road. It's much larger than that.

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  That's great. So I'd also just get to kind of blast through a little bit of where we are with some of our local mission partners. Some of these are people that we have established relationships with, other ones are kind of sort of in the works and we're trying to identify how we're going to partner. So some of this might be getting the cart before the horse, but worse things could happen than we get too involved.

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  And also I know we're going to kind of get soul winning at the end, but missions and soul winning kind of overlap a little bit. So I'm going to sort of maybe drift a smidge, but one of the first ones, the project we have ongoing this month is with Oasis International. And for those of who aren't familiar, their ministry is serving refugees. Now with a new administration, the number of refugees coming in could be dropping dramatically. That doesn't change that they have a lot of refugees already in their ministry to be caring for. One thing that I like about Oasis is that number one, they've got a great reputation. Two, they really want to show people the love of Jesus, but three, they have ways that a church like ours can get involved at a lot of different levels. So for example, this Sunday, the women's ministry who collected gifts for a mom, for a baby shower are going to go and actually deliver those in person.

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  So that's a great opportunity for the women's ministry to be involved and say if you're a D group and you're just a lazy group and you want to do something as a group, it's a great way to do it because you can plug in at a specific level. Number two, they do English tutoring for largely Muslim refugees on multiple days of the week, usually Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you're somebody that has Tuesdays and Thursdays that available around 10 o'clock in the morning, you come in for an hour, an hour and a half and they have the curriculum there and they kind of guide you through the process. You don't have to be an English teacher to get involved. They do furniture delivery. So when refugees get here, they usually don't have any belongings whatsoever. They don't have a land, they don't have a bed, they don't have a mattress.

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  And so much of what they do as a ministry is collect furniture and then distribute the furniture. It's a great opportunity for men's ministry if you're the kind of guys that you know what sitting around talking about the Bible makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but man, do I like serving shoulder to shoulder with other brothers in Christ, great opportunity for you. Find a Saturday and get involved. They also have an opportunity on Thursday evenings to do English tutoring for Muslim men. It's a little bit trickier in the city and it's not the safest part of town. So I know it kind of narrows our list of people that would be willing and available to do that. But that opportunity is available with Oasis. And then finally, of course, donations like we're doing right now, our drive goes to the end of the month. The pods container is out there. Call the office to find a time when you can drop your stuff off or just bring it on Sunday morning and that's fine too and we can make sure it gets inside of the container.

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  So it's a very practical way for us to get involved really and truly with those that are in sort of the least of these kind of situations. So there's one, furthermore, moving on down the line next month as an outreach opportunity. This is not domestic, it's not local to St. Louis. It's definitely cross-cultural, but it's with Compassion International. So Compassion International seeks to end poverty and provide care for children in all various parts of the world. Really excited about their ministry. Pastor Will was able to go and do a vision trip with them to Guatemala last year. They reserved a community force. They've kind of earmarked us for a community down there in Guatemala. And so February 23rd, that Sunday we're going to have a compassion Sunday where we'll have the opportunity as a church to support and be involved and fund that particular community with the end of building relationships with those children and then scheduling a cross-cultural missions trip to the country of Guatemala, to the actual city and community we'll be supporting. So even if you can't go on the trip, get involved and by, if you're going to go, if you want to do a mission trip overseas, this is a perfect way to do so. It's not as costly of a country to go to. It's not like going to Africa or Asia where it's really far away. I know traveling international, with the exception of Canada is always a bit of a hike, but it's certainly more reasonable than others.

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  When I went down in June, I think it was less than six hours on a plane or something,

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  It just dropped straight down,

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  Very doable. I mean, you have one stop layover here domestically and you're going to be on the road at least that long.

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  So

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  It was very doable and a safe country too. So that was part of just in our thinking and okay, where do we want to go somewhere where we can really take people and establish those relationships in-person relationships

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  With

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  The kids we're sponsoring and stuff. Just recognizing for better or worse, I mean, yeah, we're West County Church and we've got folks who we struggle sometimes to get 'em to come across to East St. Louis to serve at places because of the safety stuff and maybe for understandable reasons. So some of those countries could feel more like East St. Louis, Guatemala's safe, very safe

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  Relative. So it could be something like the families could participate in not just adults over the age of 21. I'm

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  Going to take my whole

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  Family down. And so I think the number is 12 that we need 12 to 17 I think is the sort of minimum requirement. And I told John I think we're going to be able to pull that off. And the target, just so you know, for us in this community, for us to pull it off, we need about 50. So if you're thinking about this and what number is the church looking for? It's not five 50. Yeah, 50 kids. It's not five, it's not 200, but it's 50. And I think for us, a doable number,

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  I'm sorry, next year, 2026,

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  Not to go down there for the compassion Sunday on February 23rd we want sponsor.

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  So potentially next year missions trip

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  Potentially. Yeah. It's a complex matter because you have to identify what's good for our calendar, what's good for theirs, but also the countries have to, it's like permits essentially to be able to get permission to go. It's not just booking flights. So we're working through that. In part of that, I'll determine on how many children we sponsor on a production Sunday.

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  Sure. And I mean it's $38 a month per child to give the listeners a frame of reference. What does it actually mean to support a child that's $38 a month? Which could be, hey, I want to, our life group wants to adopt a child to collectively we do that, or an individual family or a D group or there's multiple ways you can do that.

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  And obviously John will be with, and if you're talking about more of all that's involved with that, that's education, that's healthcare, that's spiritual care, that's meals, that's daycare, that's all kinds of resources that they're providing. Not just rebel little Jesus on it, but real practical hands and feet of Christ in not only touching the life of this particular sponsored child, but their whole family, their whole community. And for me, being down there seeing the impact, it was just incredible to see how when they're 50 kids, something like that, they're able then to open a whole new center in a whole new town down there and to just see the impact for

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  Generations

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  That that can have on providing education and the church component, the spiritual component of it, and just literally changing communities through their presence there.

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  Anyway. No, it's good. We got even more So going into March, we're hoping to have our project of the Month mission's project of the Month Reach, which is the new pregnancy resource center that we've identified. We already did, and big thanks to Casie Campbell who quickly whipped together 500 letters or something to write as handwritten letters as a part with some West Hill and everybody who participated

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  To be able to send out to new sponsors and new because they're kind of in startup mode. I mean it's a nonprofit, but the same concept of at the beginning you're entered in the market, you're going as fast as you can, you're trying to get people involved and whip up some excitement. So we're really excited about that. But also broadly about what we're trying to build out, we're starting to build out a life team that's involved in facing the abortion issue and looking for ways that we can help those that are in crisis. And so that includes the pregnancy resource center outlet like Reach, but also we're wanting to build a part of one that helps restore people in the context of the local church because ultimately people need discipleship. They need to see that there is hope that's available because of the work that Christ has done.

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  And so although we want to be funding organizations that do that kind of on the ground work, we also want to be able to bring people into our church, into our people to find relationship and healing. So we're looking at doing that as well. A couple more that are on here is that we look at is one is called Restore St. Louis. So they're kind of the missions arm of New City Fellowship Church, which is a group of three PCA churches in the city. And they do things like tutoring in town. They do a prison ministry, they do Workday projects and they almost act like a missions broker, if you will. Only about 5% of the volunteers that participate in their ministries are the congregants of their own congregation. It's really more like, okay, we built out something that's bigger than just New City.

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  So we're trying to find out any of these, where do we line up? Well, no question that they're doing good work. We're trying to see if that's a good fit for us. So that one's still kind of in early stages. The one that I'm most interested in that we haven't really done that. If you're like you're listening and you have an interest in, I would love to see somebody take the lead on the prison ministry side of that. I think it's a really exciting year that we've never touched that there's definitely a need for, but he needs somebody that kind of has the heart for that. Some of the tutoring ones, the really good Brooke, Brian and I have talked and the time of day and the group of people available, it might not be a great fit. So looking at maybe tutoring in other places to be kind of a better option for us.

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  We've also looked at international student ministry. I mean we support a local missionary, Isha Christie who does that down at Wash U, but it appears that there's an opening opportunity perhaps out here in West County at Maryville and it's right in our backyard. And it also I think helps serve our last week's conversation about the diversity. It is getting people that are here that I think, I forget the percentage, but it's an extremely high percentage number of international students will never see the inside of American's home during the time that they are here as a student, 80 or more. It's over 80. And so it's a very high number. And so what a low hanging fruit opportunity to do that. And I'll tell you the folks that have done that for very many years are the moins, Eric and Kerry Mopp and have done that kind of ministry for a long time.

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  And they welcome international students into their home in hopes in their neighborhood on a weekly basis on Tuesday evenings. So they're certainly I ones to talk to about what is that experience like? I'm interested in doing that. How do I even do it? Who do I talk to? How does that work? I know it's a good idea, but I don't know what my next steps are. My encouragement is just to reach out to Eric and Carrie and talk to them. There's an organization that does that ISI. And so we're kind of in some early stage talks about should we work together? Is this a good fit and all that. So there's more to come as well. And the next one that I'll just mention on just the serving organizations is love the Loo. They do a lot for poverty restoration and racial reconciliation in North St.

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  Louis. And we have two congregants that have been really involved in that. Again, still very early stages, but I mean we want to be doing the refugee stuff. We want to be doing the international stuff. But I also think that we as the church in a city that has been broken by the tragedy of racism in our country, need to find whatever way that we can be involved. And I know that that's a really hard problem to get right in the thick of, but we need to find some way that we can play whatever our small part is.

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  Now I know we're going to talk about soul winning later, but I do think it's important to kind of bring that into the missions conversation because helping our organizations meet the needs of the poor is good, but also we want to deliver the gospel to those that have the need of hearing Christ proclaimed. And there's at least two that I think are very good for us to be looking more closely at. And one is FSCS, the former Fellowship of Christian Sciences. So we've talked a little bit about this here lately in that our church is the closest geographically to Principia, which is the only K through 12 Christian science school in the country. And Christian science is relatively small religion in terms of America as a whole. But in terms of St. Louis, it's fairly large. You have 60,000 followers. We have congregants that have come out of that tradition and we've identified a local missionary, Katie Eshi is her name, and she'll be coming here in a couple of weeks to teach two Sundays about that religion and about what's engaging with it.

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  That is her entire world. Her entire life is built around ministering to people that are in or coming out of that faith. I was really grateful to have Michael Raki come in a couple of weeks ago and it was like, Hey, I want to get involved in submission stuff. I was like, Hey, I can't go to this. We were doing our planning and zoning, speaking of gospel focus, our planning and zoning meeting thing for our parking lot. And I was like, Hey, can you go? And Michael's gone in, he's dove in with both feet and even this morning he was texting me again about an event that he's going to do this week with Katie and her team. And so I say that to say it's very practical outreach, it's relationship building. It's meeting people that have come out of that faith and help a love on them because most of them experience a great dear of spiritual trauma.

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  It's just not like that they converted and all of a sudden their lives are rosy and peachy is that they have a lot to heal from by being under an oppressive kind of cultist religion from many of them, most of their lies because they get indoctrinated young and they may not come to faith until they're an adult. So if you're interested in like, Hey, I want to do outreach, but I'm nervous, I don't want to know where to start, but I know how to make friends with people, that's basically all this is. You're making friends with people that are in a different faith tradition and you bring them into your

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  Circle.

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  So FFCS is an opportunity to do that. And the other one I just feel convicted about as well is that we have a large Muslims community here in West County out at the mosque on Weedman Road. We have two congregants that have come to come in and they're not members yet, but they're active and they are essentially local ministries, let's called missionaries to that group. And that's Mike and Mary Pyles and they just joined our life group and have a huge heart for reaching the Muslim community, but they can't do it alone. That particular community, Muslim like Judaism is very thick. And so because the community is so thick, meaning all of their life is centered and built around this religion, the plausibility of other religions is very hard to do. They need to see that there are strength in numbers. And as Mike has told me, they actually take us more seriously when more of us show up to the mosque.

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  If it's just him, they don't take us as seriously as if eight to 10 show up or whatever. So he's asked, I need more people. I need more people to go with me. And that's what I was worried about. I was like, is that going to be standoffish to them? It's going to seem like we're just showing up in droves. He said, actually, no, they'll take you much more seriously if you show up in greater numbers. And he and I have had the opportunity to sit down for about three hours with a fellow, it's called him Mark. His name's not Mark, but just kind of for his own sort of privacy and protection where he is, but Muslim man that's memorized the Quran in Arabic. But you need to be able to sit with them in those long form conversations to slowly compare to the scriptures.

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  But Mike can't do it all by himself and Mary, she can't do it all by herself. So I'm saying that to say that for the person that goes, you know what, Christian science, that's cool. I'll pray for that. But I really have a heart for Muslims and I don't know where to begin. Good news for you too. We have people that are doing that kind of work now and it's available come and I'll start connecting you kinds of people. So I have talked a lot I know, but I think it's good for our people to know Missions is not an abstract concept. We are really seeking to make inroads very practically to get everyone involved. I also like I encouraged for life groups and D groups to get involved in terms of prayer. I encourage your Life group in D group to serve, to do something missional, skip your group for a week. You can save Romans six for the 19th time that you've studied it for a week and just pick one of these and I can help you find a week that's a good fit for you to go and do an outreach event in one of these ministries. You don't have to do it every week, you don't have to do every month, but find at least one time a year to get involved. And my hope that in doing that, you'll see the goodness that is available to going and serving as a community.

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  Yeah, absolutely. I think those opportunities are really even just group bonding opportunities for and the times we've gone and done that went down and served at Thrive even this past Wednesday at our Life group and like you said, shout out to Cassidy for helping organize, and we spent half of our group just writing letters, hundreds of letters to churches, to pastors to ask them, Hey, would you consider partnering with this new organization Reach and letting 'em know? Because a handwritten note, you're much more likely to open open and actually read it and not throw it away. So anyway, I love that. One of the things I love about you've done, and again, building on a lot of what you started to do with the Mission Sam Tooth that is giving enough diversity. We talked about diversity last week, but enough diversity, there's something there for everyone, every life group, every family, every individual at the church, I heard eight or nine opportunities there. Not every single one of 'em has to be for you. And frankly, nobody has the bandwidth to go really be super invested in all of those or even half of those.

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  But you can find one, you can find one or two that you say, Hey, as a family, this let's really once a month or every other month or something, let's find ways to come alongside and to serve and to invest time and resources and this or that parachurch ministry that we as a church are partnering with.

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  I was just going to say, and if there is either something that's not on the list that you're like, well, actually that doesn't fit me, go find something that does and then invite the church and your friends to come be a part of it. And second to that, if you are already serving with a really good organization, parachurch ministry, let us know about it so that we can encourage you, support you, invite other people to go with you if you've not invited them yourself. I know we have congregants who are serving and we just perhaps don't know about it and we want to encourage you in those efforts.

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  Yeah, a hundred percent. We had that conversation today, and in fact, I'll give Love Lewis as an example is that inside of a week I had both Catherine Linden Schmidt, who's apparently been serving there for three years, bring this up to me and Steve Johnson who apparently has just suddenly been appointed to their board of directors. I'm like, okay, well this is a sign from God. This is one we need to look closely at. So instead of just Google searching, what's a good thing to support in St. Louis, we already have people that are doing it. It's like it helps us understand, okay, what does this really fit? How can we get involved? Is this the right kind of organization for us? So yes, please, if you have other ones or you're doing outreach and ministry in a particular community, we want to go and send people with you.

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  Yeah, I would love mean I've pitched this vision to both of y'all. The Crossing big mega church here in town does a great job. They have a whole separate section of their website. I

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  Want to build that out.

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  It's like 30 or 40 different of these parachurch organizations that they partner with this that again, just probably came out of people at their church saying, Hey, I'm super passionate about this fellowship of former Christian science. And they said, well, yeah, let's add it to our list. And so they got basically a database click on it, you can see contact info, how to serve, where to serve, how to give, et cetera that they use for things like their serve week to help mobilize and really get people the tentacles of the church in all kind of parts of the wider community serving. And I think it's great. I

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  Do too. And if I can tap on that one, I think we should do it, but that also, I'm going to just use that to kind of skip a little bit to one of our categories as leadership essentially. Kind of like Michael's being for FFCS and I imagining Catherine and Steve being for Love the Loop. If we go down that road, we kind of need brokers. I can't be the one that maintains the relationship in deep detail with 10 of these and our own people. So if you're like, Hey, I really like that and I want to be kind of that person that helps interface between whoever leads their ministry and Austin or Will, whatever, then please raise your hand. We don't need to be the ones running the entire show on this thing. If you've got that kind of ability to be sort of a representative and know how to get organizations to talk to one another, I would love to get a little bit out of the way and empower you to be able to do that. Just a reminder, he's

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  Here, but yeah, no, you need the Catherine's bought in. You need the Michaels, you need the Cassidy.

  (31:15):

  So please do volunteer. Anything else on the mission? I know half an hour in, we've only talked about once, so do we want to keep moving? Cool, thank you. Let's go to you first on this one, pastor Ed, because you specifically had an idea on how we can be more gospel focused this year. And as a reminder, the thought there is, we got a lot of stuff hopefully prayerfully coming up down the pike for us as a church this year. Big building expansion program that started more modest and now has just kind of snowballed and okay, maybe we actually need to as all

  (31:55):

  Building projects,

  (31:56):

  As they all do big building, which means probably some fundraising type stuff. So how do we, in the midst of all that and potentially being out of our building for a year and whoa, this could be unsettling, destabilizing. We could very easily as church staff, elders, whatever, as a church in general, we could get sucked down and lose sight of why are we doing any of this? What does the church exist for in the first place? And just get so consumed with dollars and cents and two by fours and whatever. So thoughts from you slash from everybody on how can we maintain gospel

  (32:32):

  Focus? Yeah, I think there's to whether you want to take these as tongue in cheek or not, but don't be a distraction and don't get distracted

  (32:44):

  With all of the exciting things going on. There's opportunities to get distracted and I think particularly the elders, to get distracted, to get bogged down in some of the different details in weeds, which we shouldn't be. Even at our last elders meeting just talked about, Hey, we've done enough of some of these details. We need other people to help us think through what does it look like for the carpet? What does it look like for some of these rooms? We need different committees. And so one way in which the church body at large can help, it's just to volunteer to help alleviate things that'll distract the elders, pastors staff from the actual work of ministry. And just even with that, it's really exciting. But to not let everything we talk about and do only be about the new building project and the exciting things with that, although we are excited, but the work of the ministry is still going to be going on, and if we get distracted by all of those other things, good things, we're going to lose focus if we're going to do this big building project and come out on the other side and be asking question, what did we really accomplish?

  (33:53):

  And I think secondly, I say, don't be a distraction and not to say, Hey, don't be afraid to send an email or call or text, but make sure that you yourself are focused on the gospel, the work of the ministry that you trying to not be a distraction from the work, but in fact you're trying to be an encouragement in the work. And I would just add a second plug with that, this gospel focus to seek to be especially aware of the temptation for all of those involved with this building project to be distracted and discouraged by it and instead to be an encouragement. I think particularly you will with we're talking about being out of the building for quite a bit of time and then in a different space and preaching and the extra burden of leaving a staff and preaching weekly and that, and I imagine it will be discouraging in that the church body can be encouraging even just not just praying for you, which I assume they are, but letting them know that they're praying for you and want to encourage you in that and to not be a distraction, but to be an encouragement in that.

  (35:07):

  And like you said, it is a fine line there because there are, I'm confident going to be many practical things that have to get trouble shot and have to get navigated. We will be in a new building somewhere and the kids' ministry will be in a different wing and there'll be questions about what's the security thing? Or do I check 'em in here? There's going to be any number of just changes that are going to come that are going to have to be navigated. But I think the more I like people can be understanding gracious and try and keep in mind, like you said, why are we doing this? It's a good thing to be able to welcome more people ultimately into our church family and build it, and it's going to be worth it.

  (36:05):

  I really think it can go either way. I think people can, depending on your attitude going into it and throughout it, you can be sort of in that mindset of just, well, I just got to grit and bear it for however long this takes. Or we can view this as an opportunity to be a part of something special in the life of our church that when we're speaking of last week's sort of remembering and preserving the legacy of the church, we're sitting down on Thursday with June and Sandy and Barbara and some of them to do a podcast and record to roll out for future episodes of this and telling the story of the church and big milestones. This is it. I mean, this is going to be a big milestone in the history of our church and the folks who are here now get to be a part of it.

  (37:01):

  You get to be a part of making it happen through your giving, but also through your making the transition as easy as possible. Remembering, yeah, we're all in this together. And to a certain extent, yes, we are the leaders and things, problems have to get solved and all of that, but also just having the grace and having the understanding and the more you can step up and help fill those needs and help be a part of the solution to those problems and answers, the better. So yeah. Other things that you guys, I mean that's all specific to some of the building type stuff, but other thoughts that Brian Austin y'all might have on this one about how can Joe, Jill Congregant help us as a church be more focus centered? We even talked about it this past Sunday in numbers being centered on Christ and making that our number one thing and not getting too distracted by the other stuff. How do we practically do that?

  (38:19):

  I'll add something just the other day that was really helpful for me and could be encouraging to others and having a hard day weighed down with the burdens of the world and things that were going on during the day and just needed to take some time to sit down and actually write out how the gospel applies to each of my felt needs in the moment. And it really helped me to centralize, to make central, once again, Jesus's sacrifice for me and familiarity with my sufferings and my temptations. Like Jesus has done that and he's bore the weight of all of those rejections, all those temptations on the cross. And he's actually made a way for me to conquer those things by his blood and by his spirit at work in me. But it really took me just sitting down, maybe it's a just practical thing.

  (39:13):

  I just sat down and wrote down some of those longings that I was really feeling in that day. And another column was just like, man, this is how I feel in the gospel that I belong, that I'm loved, that I'm seen and known in these practical ways. And man, there was something about just sitting down and visualizing those things that really lifted my spirits and my heart to God in a way that I probably would not have experienced. Just a way to make the gospel really practical to felt needs and hard things that happen in life was for me just to slow down, write out how I'm feeling and how the gospel applies to those things. That's good. Just like if you're a Joe or Jill congregate struggling today, encourage you, write down how you're feeling and how the gospel meets you and your needs.

  (40:03):

  That's good. That's really important to do on a personal level. But even thinking collectively on a church level, thinking about some of the things that could come our way that could distract us. Absolutely. Yeah. Thinking about, okay, yeah, I could get frustrated that I have to go to another meeting with the architect to go through the third phase of designs, but okay, how, let's tie this back to the gospel and why we exist as a church and why we're doing any of this building stuff in the first place to find more of a sense of purpose in it and as opposed to just letting those things become a burden or, that's good. Thank you.

  (40:42):

  Yeah, I would add in the need to just maintain the community. West Hills has always, since I've been here, a church that has been really healthy in terms of the relationships we have with one another. And a lot of that community depends on this building. So when we're out of it, we probably had to be a little bit more intentional about making sure that we maintain those. So on Sunday mornings, wherever we are gathering, be sure to say hi to people that you maybe wouldn't see as regularly because maybe there's no Wednesday night here or whatever. But in the rest of the time, open up your house. And I know if you're thinking, but Austin, my house is messy. I have two dogs and two toddlers. I get it. And that's okay too. And sometimes it's okay to show our vulnerability that I didn't get that toilet cleaned, but the other ones got done, and that's okay as well.

  (41:24):

  And so I think that just trying to be intentional about maintaining community during that period of time, and also just a reminder of speaking, say that on a team for architect whatever, or aesthetic or whatever or something is that we believe in God's providence, that God has brought this people to be this particular church, which means he's brought your gifting here. And so that is kind of part of the gospel focus is that you are specifically you, not just because you are a person that has a skillset, but you have a story that contributes to this bigger story of our church in this time.

  (42:00):

  Well, thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar at West Hills or by asking them online through our website at www.westhillsstl.org. If you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button, subscribe and share it with a friend. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you next week.