Church Planting - Hive Resources

Discipling Unchurched Women 101: A New Series

May 4, 2016 By: demingglobal16 Comments

This April, I traveled to some of my favorite places talking to some of my favorite people about my favorite topic.

At the beginning the month, I led a women’s retreat for the Western Region of PA. Having lived and loved alongside these women for four years, it was a joy to return and spend some intentional time encouraging them to deepen their roots in Christ. Then, mid-month I attended the Missional Women Conference in Denver, where I lead a breakout session titled, Discipling Unchurched Women 101.

In both places, I was reminded of the hard work of discipling unchurched women, because both of these regions offer living illustrations of Jesus’ parable of the rocky and hard soil in Matthew 13. And in both of these places, a relatively small number of women are doing the hard work of cultivating healthy disciples in hard soil.

“20) But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21) yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles.” Matt. 13:20-21

Growing disciples in rocky soil is much harder than your average discipleship efforts. In fact, discipling a woman who is unchurched looks differently than discipling someone who has grown up in nutrient-rich soil of a church culture.

That’s because in areas with hard soil, discipleship is first and foremost a root building ministry. When you disciple an unchurched woman, you aren’t just concerned with positioning her to listen to the Spirit’s leading so she may bear fruit, rather, you are concerned with helping her develop deep and healthy roots from the gospel.

The reason many churches fail at seeing disciples with unchurched backgrounds thrive and bloom is because growing roots is a hard and time-consuming process. And much like a real garden, producing healthy roots in hard soil almost never happens without intentional efforts to provide a disciple with the right conditions where she might grow and bear fruit.

This is a lesson that God has taught me time and again, particularly as he keeps planting our family in places with hard soil.

The Story

I first became aware of this identifier “unchurched” when my husband and I moved to Southeast Asia for a work opportunity. We had no missionary designs upon arrival, but God continued to bring young women to me who desired to know about him. I found myself scrambling to discover how to disciple these women. Imagine trying to introduce Jesus to someone who had no framework for God, sin, or the spiritual world! I had to throw out all my “church words” and instead learned to share the story of the Scriptures – Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration.

Then, about five years ago, God moved our family to the difficult soil of Pittsburgh, where only 7 percent of its 2.5 million people are affiliated with any evangelical church. In the steel city, we teamed up with a North American Mission Board church plant – Living Faith Community Church – our family’s biggest faith-building adventure so far. It was in this church plant that God solidified his call on my life to unchurched women, because one of the largest demographics that came to our church were women – many of whom could be described as radically unchurched.

When these women decided to follow Christ, their walks looked very familiar to that of my international friends. Despite being bright and intelligent, they were starting their journey of faith from scratch – learning that the Bible had two testaments and each book was divided into chapters and verses.

Ultimately, the need for discipling these new believers became so great, I began to piece together a discipleship strategy for women who had no Bible background – not simply to provide them with much-needed Bible knowledge, but to help them become fully-formed disciples of Christ capable of replicating themselves.

In the coming weeks, I’ll begin to share some pieces of that strategy and the principles behind it. I’ll also share some of my biggest discipleship mistakes, and of course, stories of God’s biggest successes in hard soil.

The Series

Here’s what you can expect in this series:

–What is an unchurched woman and how can you spot her?

–Roots, shoots, & fruit – creating a discipleship strategy for unchurched women

–3 keys area for growing healthy roots among unchurched women

Are you ministering to unchurched women or struggling to know how to reach unchurched women in your area? Discipling women who have no shared worldview, Bible background, or church home is my passion. Join me in this series, and we’ll grow together in learning how to better engage this growing demographic in our churches and beyond.

About

Melissa Deming is the creator of Hive Resources — a site to help women sweeten their walk with Christ through Bible study, ministry and missions resources, and more. She is the author of "Daughters of the King: Finding Your Place in the Biblical Story." Melissa has an M.Div. in Women’s Studies from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A teaching event on how to study God’s Word

April 22, 2015 By: demingglobal16 Comments

Update! The material for this teaching event is now available on Amazon. Too find out more, visit here.

There is nothing that makes my heart sing louder than grabbing a front row seat to watch women cultivate insatiable appetites for the Word of God.

It’s a scene I’ve had the privilege of witnessing many times in our growing church plant, and it’s one I want to see replicated a hundred times over as we continue in a women’s discipleship strategy anchored in biblical literacy.

Recently, we hosted a special discipleship weekend that was made sweet for several reasons.

Sweet Purpose

If you know my heart, you know I believe every women’s ministry event should feed into the greater discipleship strategy of the church. The mission of our church is to become a church planting church, but in order for that to happen, the women in our church must become disciple-making women.

Because God’s Word is foundational to the discipleship process, our event served as a training weekend on studying the Bible and using Bible study as a discipleship tool.

Our theme for the weekend was “God’s Word is Sweeter than Honey” taken from Psalm 19:10. From this rich Psalm, we spent two sessions on why we should crave God’s Word above all else.

These lessons were important for new believers as they grapple with questions concerning the trustworthiness of God’s Word, but they also served mature Christians well who easily forget the importance of cultivating an appetite for the Scriptures.

In our time together, we dug deep and asked some hard questions of the women. How often do they feed on the Bible? Are they capable of self-feeding or are they lazy eaters enjoying the table scraps from someone else’s Bible study? What are some key obstacles keeping them from consistently craving God’s Word?

On Saturday, we moved from the feast to the hands-on cooking lesson with three sessions dedicated to Howard Hendricks’ three-fold Bible study method: observation, interpretation, application. He outlines this method in his book, Living By the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible.

At the end of each session, the ladies worked through a specified passage, putting their new skills to the test. A discipleship leader sat at each table to guide new believers through the process.

While there are many fruitful Bible study methods, I chose to teach Hendricks’ method for our weekend event because its three steps are easy to replicate. Disciplers can take those three steps and teach them to another disciple.

Sweet Partners

Pulling off a weekend-long discipleship event is no small task, particularly for a new church. But we were blessed by a number of sweet partners in this endeavor, namely the women of one of our sponsoring churches, Hickory Grove Baptist Church.

HGBC sent a mission team to provide childcare so all our ladies could spend time being equipped. They donated door prizes and personalized gift bags filled with all sorts of goodies – a treat our church could not have afforded otherwise. When we gathered with them to stuff our goody bags, they told us how they had prayed for us by name in the months leading up to our event. Their investment was both intentional and eternal.

If your women’s ministry is part of a larger church, consider partnering with the women’s ministry of a nearby church plant. You have an incredible opportunity to pour into the lives of other women for kingdom purposes.

And while I led in teaching, this discipleship event was not a one-woman show. The women who comprise the women’s ministry at our church took the lead in promotion, decoration, and food preparation. Since Christmas, they have planned and prayed and prepared for our time together. They are my sweet partners in the gospel, and I am so thankful for them.

Who knew discipleship could be so fun!?!? Thank you ladies of Hickory Grove and Living Faith! I love ya!

Sweeter than Honey is now available as a paperback and for kindle! For more information about the book, visit the book page.

This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, click here.

About

Growing a healthy women’s ministry: biblical literacy

March 10, 2015 By: demingglobal117 Comments

Women’s ministry has gotten some bad press lately. Millennials are calling for something new. Having grown tired of “their mother’s tea parties,” they stand ready to trade in the doilies of the 80s and the video-driven Bible studies of the 90s for something more.

I’ll be honest. I don’t believe women are sick of women’s ministry simply because it seems tired or fake, but because women’s ministry is often disconnected from biblical discipleship.

Recently, I’ve started strategizing ways for our church plant to minister to the growing number of new believing and seeking women coming through our doors. We’ve returned to the drawing board multiple times to tweak our strategy, yet this central truth rings clear. Women benefit the most from a women’s ministry that connects the dots to true New Testament discipleship.

This is the underlying message I hear echoed in blog posts bemoaning the current state of women’s ministry. True New Testament discipleship is about making replicating disciples, not simply attending a Bible study, enjoying fellowship with other women, or meeting up with a mentor for coffee.

Usually, discipleship doesn’t happen without any of those things, but it doesn’t mean biblical discipleship exists when those elements are present either. An effective and powerful ministry to women can only happen when the church intentionally trains women to intentionally reproduce themselves as a Christ follower by taking another woman along with her as she lives out her faith in her everyday calling and activities.

Today, I’ll share one element our church is pursuing to connect women’s ministry and discipleship: biblical literacy.

Teach women to read the Bible

Growing and encouraging women through Bible study is the most important component of any women’s ministry. Souls, hearts, minds, and eyes are transformed when the Spirit illuminates God’s Word in the human heart, helping us apply it to our everyday lives (Ps. 19).

And from video-driven studies to great new books, the American church has never had wealthier resources from which to draw to equip and disciple women in the Scriptures. Yet, spiritual poverty seems to abound. Because God’s Word is sufficient for every need and circumstance, the healthiest and most relevant woman’s ministries will encourage women to cultivate an insatiable appetite for the sweetness of God’s Word (Ps. 19:10-11).

I know that not all women are gifted in Bible study, but all are expected to endeavor in the task of becoming biblically literate. Women’s ministries would do well to evaluate if the women in their midst are equipped to read and study the Bible unaided.

So, here are some survey questions to help you evaluate the level of biblically literacy among the women in your ministry:

–Can you articulate the big picture of Scripture and identify it in any given Bible passage?

–Can you read a passage looking for the author’s intent in writing and overall context?

–Do you know how to do a basic word study using a concordance and/or lexicon (or utilize a Bible software)?

–Do you know the different biblical genres (literary types) and the different hermeneutics (interpretative methods) they require?

–Do you have a process for studying a passage or do you start by looking for the application? (“What does this passage mean to me?”)

–Can you explain how a particular passage points to or exalts Christ?

Some of those questions are technical, but they will provide insight if the women in your church are truly capable of studying God’s Word on their own.

A women’s ministry that doesn’t teach women to understand and apply the Bible for themselves will fail to make effective disciples. The women who walk out of our doors each week might be well-fed, but they will also be lazy, ineffective. and ultimately irrelevant in an ever-changing culture. (Ouch. I know.)

Teaching your women to study God’s Word may take some creativity, as women today seem to be busier than ever before. I’ve heard many women’s ministry leaders complain that the women they serve do not want to participate in Bible studies that have “homework.”

Consider these ideas for motivating others to study God’s Word:

–Start with a small number of women who show an interest in learning God’s Word.

–Instead of a 10-week class, consider hosting a special retreat or “crash-course” on how to study God’s Word. (Our church is hosting one such event in April centered on Ps. 19).

–Start a book club using one of the resources on studying God’s Word listed below. If you can’t meet regularly, work through the chapters on a private Facebook group or Google hangout, that way business trips and sickness won’t keep women from learning how to study God’s Word.

One of the lessons I’ve learned in women’s ministry is accountability is key. In the same way that having an exercise partner can motivate one to stick to a work-out plan, many women need accountability to study God’s Word. For this reason, our church doesn’t just offer discipleship classes or Bible studies, discipleship groups are also a part of our overall discipleship strategy. We want to see Titus 2 played out, but we also know, practically, that women need accountability to continue to read and grow in God’s Word.

Teach women to teach the Bible

A women’s ministry that doesn’t teach women to understand and apply the Bible for themselves will not only fail to make effective disciples, it will fail to make replicating disciples as well. Replicating discipleship is at its heart New Testament discipleship. And unless our women’s ministries are producing women who can teach other women how to read and study their Bibles, then we are truly failing to make disciples at all.

So, how do we change that? Again, here are a few ideas:

–Offer a better variety of Bible studies than simply video-driven studies or books written by the most popular teachers and authors. In this way, we’ll avoid the bandwagon of promoting personalities over God’s Word.

–Help the women in your church discover their spiritual gifts, keeping an eye out for individuals with the gift of teaching. Don’t assume you know someone’s gifting or area of interests. Ask regularly! You don’t need to identify the next Beth Moore, simply women who will faithfully handle God’s Word and lead others to do the same.

–Educate the women in your church about the cycle of discipleship. A disciple does not simply remain a student only. To become a fully-formed disciple, she will need to step into the role of teacher as well. Replicating oneself does not require a woman possess the spiritual gift of teaching; she only needs to be willing to demonstrate to others how to live out their faith in simple ways and rightly handle God’s Word.

–Intentionally challenge specific women to work through the same material with someone else they know – either one person or in a small group. In this way, studying the Bible becomes a form of replicating discipleship.

–Select material that is easily reproducible so women can lead other women through similar studies (see the material listed below).

–If a woman seems unsure if she is capable of teaching, ask her to serve as your co-teacher. In this way, she can practice teaching in small segments with you standing ready to step in if she needs your help. The co-teacher system is also a great way teach women how to facilitate discussion, encourage questions, and unpack God’s Word in a group setting.

3 resources for learning God’s Word

Looking for some good resources for teaching your women to study and teach Scripture? Here are three resources on teaching women to study God’s Word:

Living By the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible by Howard and William Hendricks is my all-time favorite book for learning how to study the Bible. Complete with pictures, graphs, and illustrations, this book is easy to read and offers easy-to-remember tools at the same time. Any Bible study on the market utilizes or mirrors Hendricks’ three-fold Bible study method (observation, interpretation, application) to some degree. It is a mainstay and a must-have for any believer.

I just finished reading From the Mouth of God: Trusting, Reading, and Applying the Bible by Sinclair Ferguson. This book is a wealth of information for studying God’s Word. And although it is not as easy to read as Howard Hendricks’ book, it offers helpful “keys” for understanding the larger context of Scripture such as its redemptive story line.

Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds by Jen Wilkin encourages women’s ministries to pursue the training of competent female Bible study teachers.

This book offers practical study tips and identifies some of the pitfalls into which women commonly fall when studying God’s Word. And although I wish she gave greater credence the role of learning the original languages in studying the Bible, I love that the author encourages women to keep the big picture of the Scriptures in mind when interpreting it. Every Christian woman should own this book.

If women’s ministries have any hope of becoming effective and relevant once again (and I think they do!), they must become more than simply a filling station to fuel up on God’s Word. Women’s ministries must also intentionally train women to pour themselves out for others and into others.

One of the best places to help women connect the dots to her role in the church and the kingdom is by teaching her to replicate herself through God’s Word.

What is your favorite tool or book that helped you learn how to study God’s Word? Share your resource in the comments so I can see what’s on your bookshelf!

This post contains affiliate links. For more info, click here.

About

The missing element of women’s ministries: the gospel & Titus 2

February 4, 2015 By: demingglobal111 Comments

When she said the words, I cringed.

“I stayed in youth ministry for 15 years full-time, because I never wanted to graduate to women’s miseries,” joked popular Bible teacher Christine Caine during the launch of Liberty University’s new leadership initiative called Propel Women.

It’s a sentiment shared by many women these days. As an increasing number of women spend the majority of their day outside the home, traditional women’s ministries framed solely around home and hearth can miss the mark.

“We are hemorrhaging a generation of women,” lamented Caine, quoting a study that has been circulating my Facebook feed recently outlining the reasons women are “unplugging” from church.

“Women are underutilized at church because their gifts are not recognized or respected,” she surmised. “So…some of these women can run Fortune 500 companies, but the most [they] can do at church is bake a casserole.”

The message of Caine’s speech was clear. For the next generation of women in the church, casseroles and children are out. Leadership and spiritual gifts are in.

Leading in Titus 2 ways

While I worry about establishing a false dichotomy between working in a nursery and being a leader, I agree with Caine to some degree. A woman’s role in the church should include more than potlucks and nursery duty. God gives each believer vast opportunities in which to use their gifts to serve his church.

I also believe that Titus 2 is not and should not be the exhaustive passage on women’s ministry in the church. In the New Testament church, women prophesied (Acts 21:7-9; 1 Cor. 11:5), taught alongside their husbands (Acts 18:26-27), provided gifts out of their own financial resources (Luke 8:1-3), and served in other notable and important ways (Rom. 16:1; Acts 16:13-15).

This is a lesson I’ve learned 10 times over as the core member of a Southern Baptist church plant in what is considered a pioneer area of the United States. Of Pittsburgh’s 2.5 million residents, 42.3 percent claim no religious affiliation according to the North American Mission Board. Our church currently averages 50 adults and 30 children on Sundays, further illuminating Jesus’ Matthew 9:37-38 statement that the “harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

Effective and healthy church plants rely on the service and investment of both men and women. And while this is true of any church old or new, personally, I have discovered more ways to serve and utilize my spiritual gifts in our church plant than in any church I’ve previously attended.

And while we bake our fair share of casseroles (everyone’s got to eat!) and crawl on the floor with the preschoolers, the women in our church plant are a stout group. They teach youth, care for babies, disciple other women. They open their homes, share meals with visitors, and foster discussion alongside their husbands in small groups.

They are idea-makers, servants, strategizers, evangelists, theologians, and teachers. They are administrators, encouragers, mentors, and wisdom sharers. For this reason, I look forward to what Liberty’s Propel Women initiative offers members of my gender who truly desire to integrate their faith, work, and church life.

Discipling in new ways

But here’s where I’d like to offer a word of caution.

I don’t believe women are leaving the church simply because they can’t find adequate ways to use their unique spiritual gifts. I believe women are leaving the church because the church isn’t fully discipling them.

Across the board, women’s ministries must implement better discipleship strategies that help women perceive needs around them with missional eyes and then train them how to employ their spiritual gifts in those areas.

Considering there are no “children’s ministry” spiritual gifts or “casserole maven” gifts (although, hello, that would be amazing), a true disciple will find a way to utilize her spiritual gift in any context. This is where my church planting context kicks into over drive, because a younger congregation typically has more needs and service opportunities than workers willing to serve. And no place is this reality more reticent than in church nursery and preschool rooms.

Women’s ministries, then, must help women connect the dots between the gospel and the Titus 2 activities that typically appear in women’s ministries. What is gospel activity about hospitality? How does the gospel underscore the importance of smart, gifted women serving in the children’s department or any area of the church for that matter?

Our church plant is only one of 68 other SBC churches serving a city of 2.5 million people. That means there is only one church in my city for every 43,754 residents. So, when I serve in our children’s department, I’m giving lost Moms and Dads a chance to hear about Jesus in the worship service. On numerous occasions, the children who hear our Bible stories go home to “teach” the truth to their parents. That’s important stuff.

Often, the first place we ask new believers to serve (after receiving a background checked) is the preschool class. Why do we do that? Because we aren’t just discipling children, we’re discipling new believers who serve in this capacity as they learn Bible stories in simple ways and then learn how to teach them for themselves.

Serving in the nursery is a gospel activity. Teaching women to see the missional aspect of serving children and how to utilize their spiritual gift in that capacity takes intentional discipleship.

Now, let’s talk casseroles and the gospel.

In the first year of our launch, our plant met in a two-room office building. Our homes became the central hub of our church’s gospel activity. The homes of Living Faith Community Church have welcomed lost neighbors, hurting community members, and even international students who had never heard the name of Jesus. And whether casseroles actually made an appearance or not, the point is food and the preparation it requires forms a bridge over which the body of Christ is strengthened and its mission more easily achieved.

Recently, a family in our church was struggling. Our church family surrounded them by delivering meals to their home. It was a living picture of the gospel nourishing the body of Christ. Last week, I attended a discipleship group where a Muslim woman attended for the first time. We dug into God’s Word and prayed together over sandwiches. That’s gospel stuff, but it took an older woman demonstrating to the young women around her table how Titus 2 intersects with the gospel as she orchestrated the meeting, opened her home, prepared the food, and led in Bible study.

So, here’s my point. Can women do other things in the church besides care for children and cook? Of course! However, in a day when our culture is already hard at work whispering in the ears our women that activities like serving a meal and teaching children are trivial exercises, let’s not fuel the fire by suggesting Titus 2 activities can be executed with the least amount of spiritual giftedness.

The missing element of most women’s ministries isn’t an adequate place to serve – it’s communicating what is gospel work about Titus 2.

When women’s ministries clearly connects the gospel to some of these very important, yet often under-valued ministries, discipleship happens and true leaders emerge. In this way, women’s ministry will cease to be a “miserable” or irrelevant experience and become a place of gospel empowerment.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be unpacking some ideas for getting women’s ministries realigned with its true goal – discipleship. Subscribe to follow the conversation.

About

6 elements to a successful discipleship group

January 12, 2015 By: demingglobal1comment

Our church plant is in the thick of unrolling a discipleship strategy for women. I’m over at Missional Women sharing some of our lessons on what works, what doesn’t, and what we can do without.

And while there is no single formula for leading a discipleship group, we’ve discovered a few elements that can determine how successful a group can be.

Recently, I invited myself to a friend’s discipleship group comprised of three younger women, and I observed several things “worked” for them. Not all these elements have to happen at each group meeting, but when they do appear, they ensure women are edified and equipped to make more disciples.

Here are 6 elements that make for a successful discipleship group. Click to find out what they are!

Before you go, check out this MUST-FOLLOW Pinterest Board featuring tips, strategies and ideas for Women’s Ministry! Enjoy!

Follow Gina Duke / Churchtown Ministries’s board Must-Follow Women’s Ministry Leaders on Pinterest.

About

Kicking off fall with a women’s ministry event

September 24, 2014 By: demingglobal111 Comments

So, it’s been pretty quiet around here. Not because I haven’t been thinking about you, lovely readers, but because God has been showing me some new ways to invest in the women God has placed directly in my life.

Like these cuties!

A few weeks ago, we hosted a fall kick-off event at our church, and I thought you might like to see some of our ideas.

Here’s the skinny:

Photo by Sami Beard

Making your Kick-off an Entry Event

You’ve heard me say it before: our church is new (technically called a church plant). That means we are small, but gradually, the Lord is bringing new women to us.

During the past year, we’ve discovered one of two things about some of these women: they have a limited biblical background and/or a desire to make disciples but don’t know where to start.

Either way, our church has been presented with an pressing opportunity to pour into the lives of these women and train them to be reproducing disciples.

So, our fall kick-off event wasn’t just a time of fun, food & fellowship. Although, there was cake there (see glorious exhibit A in the photos above), this women’s ministry event was part of a greater strategy we’re implementing to disciple women.

We used the fall kick-off as an “entry event,” where we outlined the various discipleship opportunities we’re offering this year (I’ll be sharing more about those on the blog later).

Then we asked the women to respond or register for the opportunities using this cute Ball Jar response card (see photo above). The response was overwhelming! Almost every woman in attendance expressed a desire to be a part of our discipleship emphasis.

Making discipleship missional

Photo by Sami Beard

As a first step toward learning how to disciple, we decorated our tables in meaningful ways. My friend, Julie, helped me assemble these lovely little tree centerpieces using this tutorial (on pinterest, of course).

We called them our Prayer Trees.

When the ladies arrived, the trees were bare, but they sprouted lovely fall colors as we asked the women to write various prayer requests (including their contact info) on paper tags and then hang them on the tree. Each centerpiece included instructions and ideas for what to write down.

Photo by Sami Beard

Before the women left, we asked them to pick up our version of a Jar of Clay and to select several prayer tags from the tree. The jar would act as a prayer jar to be put in a visible and accessible spot in the home, where the women could pray over the requests.

To make the tags, I used this Ball jar free clipart and added our theme verse from 2 Cor. 4:7. Next, I printed it out on craft paper and tied a tag to each jar using twine.

Photo by Sami Beard

It was such a joy to see the women fill their little jars with requests from our prayer trees. And because many of the prayer requests included the petitioners’ contact info, the women were able to contact those for whom they prayed to encourage them. Since our event, I’ve heard reports of ladies receiving texts, phone calls, and handwritten notes of encouragement from those who are praying for them.

What a sweet testimony to Spirit-led fellowship, modeled for us by the early church in Acts 2:42. As the early believers prayed for each other (among other things), they were granted favor in their community and God added to their number daily. A true picture of what it means to be a Jar of Clay!

Photo by Sami Beard

It is our hope that the women who come through our doors will be equipped to become intentional Jars of Clay. We don’t want pretty decorative teapots filled with lots of knowledge about the Bible or sitting pretty on church pews, but rather, women who are filled with the treasure of the gospel and stand ready to pour out their lives for others in Spirit-led ministry.

We’ve seen glimmers of this the past few weeks and it is encouraging! To God be the Glory!

What role does women’s ministry play in your church’s discipleship strategy? How can you make your women’s ministry more missional? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments as we continue to develop our own strategy.

About

Ministry Monday: The Big list of ministry ideas

August 17, 2014 By: demingglobal14 Comments

Last year, I started a series called Ministry Monday to share practical ways to be on mission as mothers, disciples, and women and sisters in Christ.

Most of the posts I shared came from real-life ministry and service projects in our now 3-yr-old Pittsburgh church plant as well as ministry ideas from our own home.

Because Ministry Monday continues to place among my popular posts, I thought I’d list them all here:

The 1 thing that always kills the Great Commission

3 ways to balance family & ministry

22 ideas for calling a family time-out

Why I don’t wear high heels to church

A app that shares the gospel in 40 languages

When Bible lessons fail

Easter devotional for families

How to teach your kids about new life with a new life tree

How to get to church without fighting

Teaching your kids about the resurrection

How to mold missions-minded children

Living and leading from grace

How to teach your child to be a dinner-table missionary

How to host your own home Bible study

Making Better Disciples

Grace vs. Knowledge (the motive of disciple)

Investment vs. Sacrifice (how we view discipleship)

Feeding vs. Feasting (the strategy of discipleship)

Missional Motherhood

3 ways to live on mission and still say ‘no’

How to connect the gospel with social ministries

When you’re tempted to throw in the towel on quiet times

My favorite missional motherhood tools

Simple Service

Real chicken soup for the soul

1 easy way to stir up love in your church family

The best way to encourage the mother of a challenging child

A missional meal for new moms or new move-ins

Summer Edition

When You’re struggling to each your child to serve

How to transform playdates into service opportunities

How to host the BEST grandparents camp ever

Banish summer boredom with ministry ideas for kids

7 resources for a summer of faith & fun

Passport to summer missions

Have a ministry idea you’d like to share or see featured?! Leave your ideas in the comments!

About

3 ways to live on mission and still say ‘no’

August 3, 2014 By: demingglobal1comment

When we train disciples to fulfill the Great Commission, we train them to say yes.

Yes to serving.

Yes to going.

Yes to doing.

But sometimes being missional also means saying no.

No to too many good projects.

No to serving in worthy areas that you aren’t gifted for.

No to keeping your same service schedule during a difficult season.

In my own life, I’ve discovered three ways that I can live on mission and still say no:

Click over to the full post to learn what they are!

About

How to find community at church

April 6, 2014 By: demingglobal1comment

Welcome to Ministry Monday at Hive Resources! This series is for everyday women who minister through the everyday mission fields of life. Posts feature resources and ideas for discipleship, outreach events, women’s ministries, Bible study, hospitality, and more. Subscribe today!

Today, many in the church try to replace community with church attendance, assuming the two ideas are interchangeable. But going to church and living in a community of faith aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Having grown up in the midst of church life, I see a looming difference.

If you’re on the fence about getting involved in a local church, I urge you to stop going to a building every Sunday and instead become a true member of the community inside.”

To read my full post, CLICK HERE!

The Missional Women Conference is THIS weekend! Sign up for the FREE webscast here!

About

Buy a pin, plant a church

April 3, 2014 By: demingglobal1comment

When my husband and I moved to Pittsburgh a few years ago, we secretly plotted to find the largest church in our area and hide in the back pew.

We were kidding, but sort of not.

But God has a pretty good sense of humor. Instead, he led us to what seemed like the smallest church in the city – a church that hadn’t even officially opened it’s doors!

And while we would have never picked out church planting for ourselves, we’ve been blessed beyond measure to be a part of one.

Through the month of April, friend and fellow Missional Women contributor Joy Rudolph is donating a portion of the proceeds from her Etsy shop to our church plant – Living Faith Community Church of Pittsburgh!

A church planter herself, Joy knows the roller coaster ride of pioneer missions. She interviewed me about our church planting journey over on her site yesterday. I hope you’ll hop over and marvel with me at how God guides us to the exact location he wants us.

Plus, I hope you’ll support our church by purchasing something from her shop! She sent me these adorable flower pins, and I thought of so many ways to use them – on hats, on wreaths, on just about any jacket or sweater, and even as a meaningful gift in an Easter basket.

Yesterday, one of my sweet friends I’m discipling stopped by. She looked so cute, I made her try on the black and white houndstooth pin. Thanks for being such a good sport and super cute model, Toni!

Support our church plant during the month of April and make a purchase from Joy’s shop! What’s more fun that shopping for a purpose?