30 ways to bless your workplace
As God has matured our church body, more and more often I hear the question “I want to be a missional presence in my office. I just have no idea what that looks like.” If you’ve ever had that desire to be an effective office-missionary, but haven’t known how here’s a GREAT post I stumbled across this morning.
So good I’m reposting it below.
Read More30 Ways to Bless Your Workplace
A few weeks ago I posted some very practical ideas for engaging your neighborhood with the Gospel. To follow that up I have compiled 30 ideas for engaging people in your workplace. The workplace is an everyday context where many people spend the majority of their time. It is important for us to know what it looks like to bring gospel intentionality to our jobs. Hopefully this will help spark a few ideas for connecting with and blessing your coworkers.1. Instead of eating lunch alone, intentionally eat with other co-workers and learn their story.
2. Get to work early so you can spend some time praying for your co-workers and the day ahead.
3. Make it a daily priority to speak or write encouragement when someone does good work.
4. Bring extra snacks when you make your lunch to give away to others.
5. Bring breakfast (donuts, burritos, cereal, etc.) once a month for everyone in your department.
6. Organize a running/walking group in the before or after work.
7. Have your missional community/small group bring lunch to your workplace once a month.
8. Create a regular time to invite coworkers over or out for drinks.
9. Make a list of your co-workers birthdays and find a way to bless everyone on their birthday.
10. Organize and throw office parties as appropriate to your job.
11. Make every effort to avoid gossip in the office. Be a voice of thanksgiving not complaining.
12. Find others that live near you and create a car pool.
13. Offer to throw a shower for a co-worker who is having a baby.
14. Offer to cover for a co-worker who needs off for something.
15. Start a regular lunch out with co-workers (don’t be selective on the invites).
16. Organize a weekly/monthly pot luck to make lunch a bit more exciting.
17. Ask someone who others typically ignore if you can grab them a soda/coffee while you’re out.
18. Be the first person to greet and welcome new people.
19. Make every effort to know the names of co-workers and clients along with their families.
20. Visit coworkers when they are in the hospital.
21. Bring sodas or work appropriate drinks to keep in your break room for coworkers to enjoy. Know what your co-workers like.
22. Go out of your way to talk to your janitors and cleaning people who most people overlook.
23. Find out your co-workers favorite music and make a playlist that includes as much as you can (if suitable for work).
24. Invite your co-workers in to the service projects you are already involved in.
25. Start/join a city league team with your co-workers.
26. Organize a weekly co-working group for local entrepreneurs at a local coffee shop.
27. Start a small business that will bless your community and create space for mission.
28. Work hard to reconcile co-workers who are fighting with one another.
29. Keep small candy, gum, or little snacks around to offer to others during a long day.
30. Lead the charge in organizing others to help co-workers in need.
Would love to hear other ways you have connected with the people you work with.
Is church membership biblical?
This week I asked Pastor Matt to address a topic in our WG’s that is becoming increasingly controversial and passively hated in our culture. I asked him to answer this question:
Is church membership Biblical?
To be open, I came to The Bridge three years ago convinced that the answer to this question was “no”. In fact, no one knows this until now, but I put off leading my first membership class for over six months because I didn’t think it was Biblical. This is basically what I thought…
Church membership is just an institutional construct that the “institutionalized” American church made up to control things. The church was always supposed to be an organic (and by “organic” I meant “disorganized” even though I didn’t realize it then) movement; when you organize the church, it loses its power. Every Christian is already a part of God’s Church (big “C”). As long as Christians are connected to other Christians for mutual discipleship and are helping The Kingdom advance in some way, they’re fine.
This has been my vague assumption for the last few years and because of it, we’ve never really made a big deal about membership at The Bridge. Recently, I’ve realized that this has been a tremendous failure on my part as a pastor and allowing our culture to continue to treat the church like a one night stand instead of a bride is a sin.
For those of you who – like me – are skeptical towards the concept of church membership, here’s a summary of the New Testament’s teaching and then I’ll unpack it in brief bullet points:
Church membership is an implicit, not explicit, command in the New Testament. In other words, although it never gives the command to “become a member of a local church” the New Testament assumes formalized church membership, and it is impossible to fulfill the commands of the New Testament without being a committed member of a specific local church.
Evidence from the New Testament…
- The New Testament uses the word “church” to refer to both “the church universal” and “the church local”. Many times someone will say something like “one church, one membership”, meaning that the NT uses the word “church” to refer to all Christians and therefore all Christians are inherently members of the one, true church. It is definitely true that “church” in the NT sometimes means “all Christians” (Matt 16:18, etc). However, the dominant usage of the word “church” in the NT refers to “local churches” – distinct, organized, and identifiable bodies of Christians with specific marks and practices. If this weren’t the case, you wouldn’t find any results for the plural word “churches” when you searched the New Testament.
- Acts 2 and 4 give numeric records of the number of people saved and baptized, showing that the church was apparently tracking growth.
- Acts 6 depicts an election taking place to address a specific problem in a specific church. It’s obviously implied in the text that this is a clearly identified group of people functioning as an organized body.
- 1 Timothy 5:3-16 depicts the church’s practice on how to handle widows who couldn’t care for themselves. There are specific criteria laid out for who qualifies and who doesn’t and how to approach them. The church at Ephesus is clearly organized – to the point of keeping formalized lists and rolls – and is working out a plan.
- If church membership isn’t assumed in the NT, who (specifically) are you supposed to submit to and who will pastors (specifically) give an account for? To me, Hebrews 13:7 highlights the most clear reason why it’s impossible to obey the NT without being a member of a local church. It says, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will give an account.” To steal two sentences from Matt Chandler: “If there is no biblical requirement to formally belong to a local church, then which leaders should an individual Christian obey and submit to? Second, and most important, who will I as a pastor give an account for?” Without clear, committed church membership this command (and the dozens of others like it) cannot be obeyed on either end.
- Commands for church discipline assume (and necessitate) clear, formal church membership. Many passages in the NT refer to church discipline, but none as clearly as 1 Corinthians 5. In this church there was a man who was refusing to repent of sleeping with his stepmom… seriously. Here’s Paul’s command to the elders of this local church: “Let him who has done this be removed from among you… When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” Later his command to the church body is, “But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” Think about this for a second: How are you supposed to kick someone “out” if there isn’t an “in”? If Paul isn’t assuming that members of this church are formally recognized by the church body, the elders, and the unrepentant sinner then this passage literally cannot be carried out. How are elders supposed to know who’s part of the body (and may be in need of discipline) and who’s an onlooker that’s not under their care and authority? How are people supposed to come under that care and authority? The only answer is that this (and dozens of other passages) assumes church membership.
A common objection
Over the last three years this has probably been the most common objection-ish response to church membership:
“I’m already functioning like a member; why do I have to come to a class or sign a paper?”
To cut to the point, my generation is riddled with authority and commitment issues and this objection is a reflection of those issues. Consider this: the same person who asks me this question will probably walk out of church, buy a $6 lunch with a credit card at a Mexican restaurant, and have no qualms whatsoever about signing a receipt to make that purchase official. Their issue is clearly not with signing a piece of paper. At the very least, it SEEMS LIKE their issue is with making a commitment official that establishes a spiritual authority over their life.
A final word
This stuff – actually having to be a heart wrenching part of facilitating things like church discipline – is what convinced me that when you look at these texts together it becomes clear that God’s plan for Christians is that they belong to a local, covenant community of faith. To be blunt: this isn’t a matter of personal preference, but of Biblical obedience.
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