 Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here again with Val Yoder. We just did an episode on the Anabaptist view of church, how we do church, how we set our churches up, and I wanted to do something a little more practical. You've written two books on the church, and I specifically want to talk about your most recent one here, Being the Blessing. So this is a very, I'm trying to think of the right word, even kind of a hands-on type book, right? It's more of a workbook about how people can invest in their churches. Explain a little of the vision behind the book and what do you hope it will do for the people that read it. The first book was, I will build my church, and I wrote that I think in early 2001 or somewhere in there. That kind of came out of my classes at SMBI on the church, just kind of rewriting my notes into a written form. I didn't realize that that would become as useful as it became. There's been quite a few people who have gotten it and used it in their churches and Bible studies and so forth. And my own understanding of the church has continued to grow, so maybe it's time to write another one, but instead of doing that, what I'd like to do is write someone of a sequel to that with maybe more practical ways to bless our churches and bless those that we're relating to in our church. I had heard the story of the fireproof where the young man Caleb and his wife were having a very difficult time. They're riding the verge of divorce and Caleb's father comes along with this little manual and he says, Caleb, give me 40 days before you divorce your wife. Caleb very reluctantly decides to do that, but as he's going through these next few days and then into about halfway through, things really got tough for him and he just was ready to give up. As the story unfolds, as it gets to the end, he wins back his wife's affection through investing in her. In the process, he moves from just doing it because his dad told him to actually having a heart for it. It just gripped me that some of that same dilemma is happening in our churches. We go to church because we're supposed to. We go to church because we've grown up going to church and we kind of put up with it rather than really seeing the value to it and it's become part of our routine. Then people get frustrated with the new question that comes up and so there's division and part of the church leaves and the other part of the church says, good riddance to bad garbage and all those kind of problems that come. How can we help people to begin to love their church and invest in it and see it as being a very important component of their Christian experience? With an encouragement of my wife and her help, we worked on this which is giving us 52 weeks of projects that people can do to invest in their church. Each segment or each page actually has a scripture background and then good works that glorify the Father that we can reflect this scripture and then on this side kind of a journal to write out how it worked, which they did and the date. Each page has a different way of investing in your local church. Can you just read a few of these different ones people can do? This is great because we just had an episode on the theology, the mindset behind church, but this is getting down and real life day to day practical things. I really like that. Like week two, smile at your brotherhood in Christ. In Proverbs chapter 15, it talks about a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance. If I walk into church with a smile on my face meeting people, it's going to be a whole lot more pleasant to meet me than if I come in with a weary worn look on my face. A merry heart doeth good like a medicine and so just to challenge us to look at our own face in a mirror, what are people having to look at when they see me in the morning? Find a mentor. Again, the mind of Christ be followers of me even as I also am a follower of Christ. Paul was saying that. So following Paul was important for some of these young men and it's important for us to also have someone that is ahead of us in a spiritual growth and that we can follow his example. Choose a mentor from your church that's five to ten years older than you and walk with you through this year. Plan to meet monthly, pretend to discussion, working on what's happening. Attendance at church, another one that we talk about, sitting closer to the front. Why is the back of the church always the full part? Sit up in the front. That's really good. Blessing those that curse you, you get along with real well. Gifts to people, that particular one is to display honor to other members of the church. Develop an addiction. Did you know that you're supposed to develop an addiction? 1 Corinthians 16-15 says, you know the house of Stephanus that it was the first of the fruits of a K.I. And that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints. So they're addicted to ministry and that means you can't get along very long without ministering to somebody and get addicted to it. Those are the kind of things that we're talking about. That's great and I think the thing that especially to our audience should keep in mind is you've spent an incredible amount of time, you know, pastoring a church, being involved in different churches. This is not stuff you just kind of made up, I'm guessing. I mean, this comes from a lot of experience and having to work through some of these things yourself probably. Yeah, I pastored the church for about 13 years. I was ordained when I was 24 and then pastored for 13 years. And I went to an SMBI and was there for parts of 25 years and then I would go. Now I'm back pastoring at the church again. So you've invested a lot in not only a local church, but also the young people that make up a lot of these churches too. I'd like to just share one story that kind of underscores the importance of this. We had a young man who came to Igo a number of years back and he was really blessed by his time there. He was looking forward to spending the rest of his life in ministry in Asia. Then he got back home to his home church after his first semester. To his disappointment, his church leaders said, we don't want you to go back. They had some difficulties with some of the things that he had experienced or I'm not sure what all the problems were. So he got in touch with us as leaders and said, what do I do? I feel God's calling me to Asia, but my church leaders saying I can't come back. I was so blessed by our faculty that they said, you stay at home and invest in your church. Get some young people around you, help them if they're struggling with the church, work with them. He did. He got a group of five or six young people, young men particularly, who were struggling. He started investing in them and really developed a great relationship with them. And the church leaders saw what was going on and they saw the attitude change. Those leaders came back to him about two years later and said, you can go back again. That's the power of this thing of investing in your church rather than abandoning it, invest in it. No church is perfect as we all know and every church is going to create some tensions for us and we're going to struggle with something here and there. How do we invest in those churches in love without compromise? We don't need to just get more freedom. We need to learn how to actually give up our freedoms for the cause of Christ. And so these are ways hopefully to stimulate some thinking about how I can actually bless the group, bless the leaders, bless the young people, and make an attempt to create an atmosphere in our church that is welcoming and yet solidly biblical. You're basically, what it sounds like through this book is you're encouraging people to not be reactionary. Just like running away from, oh, this is horrible and let's just leave. You're saying look at ways you can actually be those changes you may want to see in your church, start by being that yourself. Every leader, and I'm a leader right now, we're very human. We don't see all the perspectives and so forth, but when we have people in our church who you know, they are trying to build this group in the context of supporting the leadership and supporting the parents and the family and so forth, and they're really investing in individuals in the church, whether it's a youth group or just visiting different people, and you know that they're trying to strengthen the church, well, that just gives your whole perspective to the church is one of, this is great, this is going someplace, this is where it's supposed to be, and so that's kind of what we want to emphasize with this. So I'm really curious, how does the book end? The book ends basically, which is the final thing. The final thing, okay, read about the importance of the brotherhood, works that glorify the Father, God's raised up a lot of dynamic voices today in writing, and so I'm giving a list of different books I would encourage people to read, such as the Anabaptist's View of the Church by Lutel, Church Membership by Lehman, of course I had to put my own book in there, I hope it was my church, and King Jesus Claims His Church by Finney Cravilla. Okay, we interviewed him actually. Did you? Okay, that's another great book, The Safest Place on Earth by Larry Crabbe as a book on the church, A Total Church, Uniting Church and Home by Wallace, and When the Church Was a Family by Hellerman, Why Church Matters by Harris, and there's a new book out I don't have in here because it came out just more recently by Gary Miller on Total Church, another good book. So that's the last one is just keep on investing in the church by reading. Yeah, like you're encouraging people, okay, you finished this workbook, but this is an ongoing journey. Yeah, I like that. And then, which we noted this on the last episode too, there's some contact info in there as well, if people, you know, have questions about some of this stuff. Yeah, and our website is listed there, www.kitchieblessing.com. We'll definitely put that in the description as well, so whoever's watching or listening, click through on that, check out, you know, and you have a number of other resources as well that I think would be helpful when it comes to church. And sometimes it may be that subconsciously don't value church as much as we should and we just don't put in the time really to learn some of these things. In Hellerman's book, When the Church Was a Family, he does a good job of talking about how God wants us to learn to love our mother and father and brothers and sisters in our genetic home. When we learn how to do that well, He's giving us the foundation for the major change that's going to happen when we become a believer to love that family. And Jesus even commented to those who came to Him in a crowd of people and said, your mother and brothers are out here at the door. And He says, well, who are my mother and brothers? And He said, these are my mother and brothers. He was making a very powerful statement about a change of what group is the most important family. And that could be a whole other session, but the whole thing of how we need to see our church family as the group of people that we're going to be with for all of eternity. The only way that our genetic family is going to be with us for all of eternity is if they join that church, otherwise they won't be there. And so that's why the church family actually takes precedence over every other relationship. Powerful stuff. I think you've given our audience a lot to think about. Thank you so much for sharing Val and all you've invested in writing these things, sharing these things with people.