Vibrance!

This ministry blog is one aspect of our endeavor to encourage businesses and professionals toward excellence and the support the church in her quest to honor the Lord through long term, effective ministry.

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The Facets of  The Vibrance Consultancy

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When it comes to churches, Vibrant is the opposite of lack-luster.

Vibrance means “Very much alive.”

There’s no way in the world you can limit a believer’s life to an hour on Sunday morning. God would appreciate our living vibrantly all week every week.. He expects it!  Your family and friends would appreciate your living that way all the time too!

To that end, here are four facets of ministry we would enjoy exploring with you if it seems we can help.

Vibrant Ink

• Copy-writing and editing services. Excellence written communication for you, toward your objectives, consistent with your style.
• We encourage, teach and challenge businesses, churches and families in print (this blog for example),
• Brenda’s touching article in the May ‘07 issue of Just Between Us, a national magazine for ministry wives, is a great example of this.

Vibrant Voices

We enoy encouraging the family of God through

• seminars and workshops, practical Bible instruction, coaching to the end of 1 Timothy 1.5 (love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith)
• speaking and /or music for church retreats and banquets
• voice-overs for church multimedia presentations
• narrations written and /or read for concerts, musicals, cantatas, etc.

Vibrance Restored

• We help couples who find themselves in crisis, yet resolved to recover and rebuild. Vibrance restored is a divinely wonderful thing. It requires resolve, re-thinking and re-wiring, the establishment of new norms, but it’s a wonderful thing, and well worth whatever it takes!

Vibrance in Worship Ministry

This is not glitz for the sake of an impression. It’s not the least bit flippant because worship is not a holy party-time. It is often joyful without apology, but vibrant worship goes far beyond exuberance. Worship in the local church presents ongoing opportunity to become deeply rooted, fully alive, prayerful, thankful, generous, serving, and spiritually reproductive.

We show local churches how to grow indigenous, lasting, vibrant worship ministries designed to nurture and disciple musicians and artists both now and into the future.  This is one of the most exciting things I do. Read on,  I’ll explain.

Many small to mid-sized churches take music and worship ministry seriously but don’t have the resources to add a full-time worship pastor to their pastoral staff. These local-church ministries are led by people who love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. Theirs are good hearts and clear consciences. These active volunteers and part-time paid lay-ministers would appreciate clear, concise principles to use in long-term ministry. And if they could be affordable —or free— even better! That’s what this blog and the in-person consulting I do is all about!

You’ll find articles here on Vibrance intended to help church musicians and creatives. For the sake of our discussions, “creatives” includes everyone utilizing music, the arts, and technology to enhance meaningful worship in your local church. That could grow to quite the list of people in your congregation if you think about it a while!

Check the various categories at right for articles intended to help you:

• disciple musicians and other arts-oriented people in your church
• focus your efforts
• encourage prayer-powered ministry
• eliminate distractions
• discuss ministry core values

Concepts and principles to help you:

• keep the main thing the main thing
• outlast passing trends and ministry fads
• invest in the generation coming up behind you
• bring honor to God through faithful living all day every day.

I am committed to

1. bringing you useful, purposeful, ideas and methods to consider,
2. pointing you to Scriptures to meditate on, and
3. presenting you with thought-provoking items you can print and take to rehearsal to discuss with the people on your ministry team.

I’m available to work with your church one-to-one to assist as you define (or refine) the scope of your local worship ministry and coach you as you align ministry efforts with principles taken from the Word of God. To explore the possibilities a little further without obligation, drop me a note using the form at the bottom of this page. We’ll explore the possibilities, see what God has in mind.

Some churches tackle their worship challenges themselves but find that while seminars and conferences are useful, there’s always quite a bit you just can’t bring home. How many times have you heard or said:

• “It’s nice, but it doesn’t fit our congregation.”
• “It would be great but we’re missing a few key ingredients – like people with those skills.”
• “We want to do our best, serve God with our talents, but we’re not even sure what questions to ask first, what to ask next and what to leave for later.”
• “We’ll muddle through again. We always do.”

The Lord has placed a keen desire within me to help if I can. Maybe those days will soon be behind you as a church. Wouldn’t that be nice? About three years ago a plan began to mature and develop, a way for me to help a handful of churches at once, putting blogging technology to work along with phone conversations with periodic visits to teach, coach and follow up.

It’s always good to know who this person trying to help is.  To that end, I’ve captured a few few things that may help answer those frequently-asked “who are you?” questions – and they’re important, no doubt about it.

I’m the product of the small church. My parents specialized in small church ministry for over forty years, some rural churches, some suburban. I was ordained by a small-town church in 1979 and have over twenty-five years of experience in worship ministry (Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, Illinois and Wisconsin). I know the limitations and challenges of being small. I know its advantages too — a strong sense of community, long-term ministry, sense of family (sometimes TRUE family) for starters. I also know the challenges and rewards of larger churches having served a church of 750+ for several years.

I bring to the table a solid conservative theological upbringing. I grew up in Bible churches through high school then attended the only school I could find where I could major in music while taking all the Bible analysis courses the school offered. That school is now Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I earned my M.A. in Ministry at Moody Graduate School where my Master’s project was on discipleship in the worship venue.

Brenda, my wife and partner in ministry, is an excellent student of the Word and a skilled communicator in her own rite. She’s a loving, yet critical thinker and she plays an important ongoing role in the refining and expression of the concepts we’ll explore should you invite us to help you as a church.

I’ve a wide range of musical interest, eclectic, you might say, including a deep appreciation of time-proven hymns, gospel hymnody along with an appreciation for many of today’s praise and worship expressions.

Because I take 2 Timothy 2.2 seriously, nothing excites me quite like seeing people I’m working with put concepts to use, enjoy the results, then teach them to still others! Everything I do in ministry is to encourage those with whom I serve. Encouragement (the KJV word for it is exhortation) is the gift that drives my teaching and administration gifts.

If you’ve already BEEN praying and these paragraphs seem to be an answer, or if you’d like to know more, drop me a note. We’ll see what the Lord has in mind.

Serving with excellence,

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(To leave me a personal (not posted) note, use the box below. To comment, look for the “comment” link below the box.)