From Keith Ferguson’s Blog

Keith Ferguson recently shared this on his blog…

Another one of the books I read during my study-break was Dave Ferguson’s The Big Idea. Dave is the lead pastor at Community Christian Church in the Chicago, Illinois area. He also writes a great blog that I follow regularly. This book is primarily about how the church can make a bigger impact in people’s lives by slimming everything down to one main message per weekend. The team at their church then works to get children’s ministry, student ministry, small-groups, worship ministry, and preaching all making the same point each week. Ferguson makes the claim that this multiplies impact throughout the families in the church.

Of course, it has take their church years to get to the place where every part of the organization can work together. But one of the great challenges I took away from Ferguson’s book was to do sermon writing and planning earlier – work ahead! This sounds easy, but it is not common among teaching pastors. Ferguson’s group does some things I think are strange in sermon-planning (group-preparation) and some things I don’t agree with philosophically (topically-driven 4-6 week sermon series), but they do great work in getting their work done far in advance. This in turn helps the creative people on their team to have time to supplement the message with additional communication elements. I really enjoyed this work and appreciate their impact for the kingdom – also a great church-planting church (started the New Thing Network).

Here’s a summary of The Big Idea:

• Ferguson’s main theme is that people are overloaded with too much information throughout their daily life, and that this process continues at church, where many small ideas are communicated through unaligned ministries. He advocates aligning ministries and messages into one Big Idea every weekend that focused on application of biblical principles, not just communication of biblical truth.

• One big question is whether the different ministry areas of the church that are overseen by different ministry leaders/staff are all heading the same direction and aligned in their purpose – are we helping or hurting families by our efforts?

• Ferguson advocates that small-groups use discussion guides built on the sermon each week and gives the following five reasons for this alignment:

1. Increases likelihood of application of biblical principles
2. Diminishes people’s fears of leading a small group
3. Eliminates the question, “what do we study next?”
4. Makes the group another venue to communicate vision
5. Increases the quality of the small group experience

Link to Keith’s Blog article