“Strengthening the Local Church Blog Series”

Monday, January 29, 2018

Lord willing, I plan to write a series of blog articles that I hope will be helpful for the church. It will be titled, Strengthening the Local Church.

I love the local church. It is an important part of God’s plan for the spiritual growth and development of His people. He has not left us to serve Him all by ourselves, but has put us into communities of like minded followers, who seek to honor and praise Him, to reach out to the lost souls in our lives, and to build up (the main Biblical term for this is, to edify) one another.

I do not travel extensively around the country, and certainly not, around the world, but I have been concerned in the last several years, when I have had the opportunity to visit Christians in other places, to see that many congregations are suffering losses of numbers, workers, and morale. Many have resigned themselves to just keeping house for the Lord and not to prospering and growing as the Lord intends for His people to do. That doesn’t mean, if I have been to the congregation where you worship that I am automatically talking about you. There have been many that are doing quite well and that I have learned some really good things from.

But many churches are struggling mightily. And nobody in those churches wants that to happen. But it is easy for discouragement to set in and for disciples to mentally give up. I want to give Christians something to work on, some ideas to try to incorporate in their collective activities and some goals to try to achieve for the glory of God.

I have developed a long list of ideas over the years through the experiences that I have had, both good and bad, that I believe will be practical and helpful for others to read about and consider. Everything I write will not work for every individual Christian or for every local church. But I have had my share of disappointments and failures in certain areas of my work for the Lord, as well as some successes, hopefully defined from a Biblical perspective, not a worldly one. I trust that I have learned from both success and mistakes and would like to share some of those lessons.

Over the years, I have written a few articles (not many, but some) for gospel magazines published by Christians, that people have responded to in a very positive way. They have written or emailed me to thank me for the things I have written and told me that they hope to utilize some of the ideas in those articles to help strengthen the local church they are a part of. That kind of feedback has always encouraged me greatly. Most of those articles were published in Biblical Insights, which is no longer in publication. A few of the articles I will include in this weekly blog will be a reprinting of those articles, but most of them will be additional thoughts and ideas that I would like to share with others.

I hope you will read the postings and I do pray that they will help you and the local church where you are a member. Please feel free to print these articles off of the blog and to distribute them to other Christians where you worship, if you are so inclined. If you know of preachers who might be encouraged by these articles, you can let them know about the series. The internet has been the source of much bad stuff that goes on in the world, and we hope to use it to accomplish some good.

The plan is to post a new blog article each Monday morning, for however many weeks it seems to be profitable. If you wish to be notified of each new posting, you may sign up for that notification on our website.

A few of the blog articles that I plan to publish include: Time to rebuild, A Deliberate Evangelistic Strategy, One Generation Away, New Convert Follow-up, Effective Teacher Training, Restoring the Fallen, Balanced Preaching, Tightening Up Our Services, Strengthening Our Young People, Effective Gospel Meetings, and many others.

In Ephesians 4:16, Paul speaks of Christ, “from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” If each of us, as Jesus followers, will do his or her part, using our talents and abilities in every circumstance where God gives us opportunities, the local church will grow and prosper.

We often hear prayers that ask the Lord that our work of evangelism will “enlarge the borders of the kingdom” and I hope that we all believe that God can and will answer those prayers. That happens at the local church level, but as each congregation grows and is strengthened, the universal church will grow as well.

It is my desire that these postings will contain helpful information for preachers, shepherds, teachers and all faithful disciples who wish to serve the Master in an ever greater way.

Please understand that these articles will be my opinion about important Bible subjects. I don’t expect anyone to agree with everything I will write. That is fine and I would be happy to hear from fellow Christians about these writings, even if you don’t agree with what I have suggested. I don’t want to get into any on-going debates with those might have a different view of these ideas, however.

It should be the desire of every child of God to see the body of Christ grow spiritually and numerically as we faithfully serve Him who loved us and gave His Son to die on the cross for our salvation. May we all seek to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves. If this series of blog posts will help us toward that goal, it will have been worth my time to write them.

May God bless each of us as we seek to love, serve and obey Him. And may we all assemble around His throne some day to praise Him for all eternity.

--Roger Hillis

RogerLeeHillis@gmail.com

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