Five Oaks Survival Manual - Introduction

It doesn't take long after starting to attend Five Oaks before you realize we have our own language and way of doing things. All churches, organizations, groups and families do. At Five Oaks, if you call it a "bulletin," someone will quickly correct you. "It's a 'worship program.'" We don't have a lobby or foyer at the Woodbury campus. It's the "commons." And don't call the gym a gym. It's the CLC or Community Life Center.

And that's the easy part to get. The harder things to understand have to do with the culture: response time, small groups, daily Group Life, the meaning of membership at Five Oaks, why we fill out Communication Cards every week (and ask everyone to fill one out).

The reality is that over time many long-time members forget the why behind the what. As one of our Elders said at one of our meetings, "Someone asked me to convince him that membership was important, and I'm not sure I gave him a good answer. What should I tell him when I call him back?"

So consider this a "survival" manual if you're new and a refresher course if you've been around for a while. The subjects may seem mundane, but what I'm going to cover in this series of posts is actually quite important to our mission. It's not the only way to do things, but it is the way we do some very important things. Hope this Survival Manual helps.

Weekend Messages: Response

This is the last in a series of posts on changes in our approach to the weekend messages. Previous posts:

• From Application to Implication
• From Trying to Be Relevant to Demonstrating Relevance
• More Bible Teaching
• From Believer/Seeker to Gospel Saturation

This last change is the most obvious one of all--we've pretty much flipped the order of the service and added a variety of ways for people to respond to God and his Word in personal and corporate ways in the service.

Someone recently commented on it by saying, "We use to set up the message with the music, but now it's like we set up the music with the message." I prefer to say we give time for people to respond to the message right there in our service.

A few months ago Lois and I were visiting our youngest son's home church in Appleton, WI. Great church. Great service. But when Lois left, she said she wished we had had some time to respond to the message in the service. She wasn't saying that they do it incorrectly. She was just saying that she's grown to appreciate that time to respond in our services. And from the looks of it, so have a lot of other people.

How does this impact the messages themselves? Not so much except that I'm constantly thinking about how to tie the message to the response and offer some spiritual direction weekly.