Here’s an excerpt from our interview with EV Erina, whose leader Andrew Heard and his team, build their health and vitality through initiatives such as this.
Read the conversation below.
NCLS: Tell us more about how you’ve flourished in ministry.
AH: A driver for our church health ecosystem is the Word ministries. We’re evangelicals because we’ve bought into what Paul says in Acts 20 that it’s the Word which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance. So the public proclamation and teaching ministries for us, a massive piece that sets the vision, sets the energy, is the engine that drives the vision and all the rest. We also seek to nurture that pulpit ministry, word ministry into small group life, one-to-one conversations everywhere through church. But as the fuel and driver, and not as the exclusive piece we have pay attention to.
NCLS: Can you tell me about that pulpit ministry?
AH: That’s a broad question! On Sundays the preaching really matters and the kind of preaching we aim at is expository preaching. So we take a book of the Bible each school term. We have four school terms. We choose a book of the Bible each term and chapter by chapter, we work through. We’re committed to high bar preaching. So it’s 45 minutes, typically. And there’s a team of only four of us who preach. I would do the bulk of preaching. But we’ve got some very fine other preachers who, you know, do 30 to 40%, together.
We encourage review and assessment of preaching to keep improving and growing the quality. We have a lot of training with younger guys coming through into the youth group ministries and other contexts where they learn to preach and speak but in the pulpit, it’s guarded fairly, fairly firmly. It’s not just anyone gets up.
NCLS: So you’re actually investing in the capacity of people to, to, to do that sort of public speaking role in other settings?
AH: Yes, lots of training goes on because you know, if it really is a powerful piece in church life then we want to engage with it as well as we can. Acts 14 Verse one where Luke reports on Paul. ‘They so spoke a great number of Jews and Greeks believed’. They spoke in such a way so there’s got to be attention to how we speak and engage.
Being expository means that we’re not running church for the unbeliever. So we’re not a seeker service. We’re for the believer, but we have an intentional eye for the outsider.
We’re quite consciously preaching to grow the believer but our intentionality towards the outsider means we are inclined towards a view of preaching, I call ‘worldview preaching’. We want to expound the scriptures in such a way that it actually undoes a person’s worldview and rebuilds it to be God’s worldview. So now, it’s for the believer, but because it’s worldview preaching, it actually means that whoever’s there gets their world undone and remade.
So, people want their non-Christian friends to come and experience it, by and large.
