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G'day, I'm Scott Sanders and welcome to the Reach Australia podcast. The vision of Reach Australia is to see thousands of healthy evangelistic multiplying churches across Australia. Now we've just finished the Reach Australia National Conference. It was a great time to gather together as church leaders, with our team members, to meet up with other people to really push into this big vision of seeing the lost one all across Australia. This episode is a recording of one of the workshops from that conference.

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Reach Australia talks often about ecosystem in church. We encourage people to do ecosystem thinking. It's a framework that helps you think about what you're wanting for the individual disciple and what you're wanting to see across the whole church family as well. And we see church through five lenses or five outcomes or five areas. We want to see a disciple deep in the Word, loving God, on mission, serving others and in community.

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This episode is an ecosystem workshop called Deep in the Word. More people will come in, I'm sure, maybe not, but I'm Ben. I work here at EV, part of the pastoral team. I've been here for, this is my seventh year here now. I originally became a Christian up in Newcastle, did MTS at Hunter Bible Church there, spent some time at college, and then I've been here since then. I've had a few different ministry roles, but I've always been part of the maturity team here, and at the moment I'm just sitting in to head that up at the moment.

[1:38]
Yeah, so that's me looking after the maturity team right now, and this is the Deep in the Word workshop, Deep in the Word. But also, sometimes we use the word maturity. Sometimes we use the phrase deep in the word. We've got a bunch of different ideas. If you're in a church and using purpose statements to organise your ministry, you might use something like that, maturity, deep in the word. But this is us. This is our world. What we're going to do for most of our time together today, this is a good-sized group where we can have a lot of back and forward questions,

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clarifications, pushback, disagree, whatever. to do a lot of that and we're going to spend most of the time with four of us sitting up here who are introducing a little bit to talk through a handful of different issues connected to deep in the word but what I wanted to do first was just share a few of our key convictions around deep in the word that we have at EV and I think maybe some of the people on the panel agree and disagree it should be good but I think we're generally on the same page and so I'll run through a few

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conviction pieces. One thing that will be helpful to do is jump on the Reach Australia app and from the main page there, you can scroll down and find groups and find the deep in the word group and see a little picture in there which is the Pentagon that we've been using for ecosystem stuff. Come in guys, girls, grab a seat. but as I talk through some convictions that little pentagon if you can find that I'll give

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you a moment to find it is worth looking at because it's a really good description of it's a good picture of our theology and our convictions here at church is anyone still trying to find that not there yet so from the main page you scroll down you click groups and then you can search for deep in the there. Click on that and there's a file there that's this picture and there's a picture of the picture as well. Find the Pentagon, have a look at it. But our first conviction I want to

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share really is that that diagram with the Pentagon with deep in the word at the bottom separated out with its own line with five little arrows pointing up into the church life, that's an accurate description of how we think about deep in the word. Deep in the word is foundational for church life and church health. This is our first big conviction, really. And that's because of a theology of the sufficiency of Scripture. So you think of places like 2 Timothy 3, extremely clear there.

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All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching. And it can be used to achieve all of God's purposes, to equip people exactly the way God wants to. 2 Timothy 3 is very clear about the sufficiency of Scripture for achieving God's purposes in people's lives. and that sufficiency of scripture theologically it grows out of an understanding of the divinity of scripture really that the bible is not just a record of things that God has said true things that God has said but the bible is actually God speaking to us so the scriptures are sufficient

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because the scriptures are divine grab a seat guys uh you think of Isaiah 55 where it says that God's Word doesn't leave his lips, doesn't return to him having left his lips without achieving the purpose that he's given for it. So the divinity of Scripture, that it is God speaking to us, the Bible, gives rise to the sufficiency of Scripture for all of the things that we want for God's church, to see people grow in so many different ways. As you're looking at that diagram, if you've just got in, jump on the app, jump into the Deep in the Word group and find the little

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picture of the pentagon. If you're looking at that, you'll notice that one thing you could quibble with about this image is the direction of all the arrows and the way they're pointing. So you notice on the picture you've got a pentagon with deep in the word pointing in, on mission pointing in, loving God pointing in, serving others pointing in and community pointing in. And a question is, is deep in the word an input into the health of church or is it an expression of the health of church? Is loving God something you put into the health of church or is

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it an expression of the health of church? And as soon as you ask that question, I think you realise pretty quickly that all these arrows could be double directional arrows, back and forward. As someone is submersed in the Word and they're deepened in the Word, as that input happens in their lives, they grow a love for God's Word, they express a depth in God's Word and they want to get be submersed over and over again. Same with loving God, same with being on mission. All these things express healthy church life and they produce healthy church life at the same time. So that's

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a first conviction, deep in the Word is foundational for all of church life. The second conviction is, actually before I go to the second conviction, I'd just love to people, could everyone put up your hand if, put up your hand if you're here because for you, deep in the Word maturity is study groups. You came because you have something to do with Bible study groups in your church. Can you put your hand up if you're here because you're thinking Bible study groups? Okay, not as many as I thought, that's great. Well, that's good. So we've got more than just the

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people leading Bible study networks because the second conviction is that deep in the Word is much bigger than growth groups, which is what we call them here, small groups, home groups, or anything like that. Deep in the Word is much bigger. You see that again expressed in that Pentagon, it's all of church life pushes forward and grows through depth in the Word, not just Bible study groups. A classic thing that happens is someone, you know, you jump onto a ministry team, you get appointed as the maturity guy or the maturity girl or something like that,

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and you go, okay, now I need to get people deep in the Word, the whole church, and you look down and you realize, hang on a second, my job is just Bible study groups, that's all I'm doing. But our conviction is that it's much bigger. For a church ecosystem to be growing, the Word needs to be throughout the whole thing, everywhere. So that if you're running a membership course for new people joining church, that needs to be a deep in the Word course, where people are submersed in the Scriptures, they come to understand God's plans and His desires for a church and for the world around.

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That's the method that we just need to use to keep maturing people. If you're doing an evangelism to have the Bible in your evangelism course. Your goal for your neighbours who don't know Jesus is for them to be submersed in the Word and come to a knowledge of God through that. So deep in the Word is much bigger than just Bible study groups. You think of the, in the Bible, the things you actually have to do for church ministry, you need to publicly read scripture, you need to preach,

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and you need to sing. These are three massive levers for getting your church deep in the Word, well as you sing that you're singing with the message of Christ dwelling among you richly, you sing well then the people around you are built up in the gospel, I sing the gospel to them, I hear them singing it to God. It's great that it's critical that if your job is to get your church deep in the word that you take responsibility for what you sing at church and how you sing it,

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that'll have a massive impact. Our singers, our music leaders always laugh at how much work the sermon that no one ever remembers and they have to do so much work to keep them awake through the whole thing but they'll spend the week whistling tunes to songs that are okay and the lyrics are all right. The singing ministry is really important for getting people deep in the Word. Obviously the public reading of Scripture is really important and the preaching ministries as well. If your job is to get your church deep in the Word, you're responsible, depending on what your role is, that'll shape what your responsibility looks like, how you execute it, but you're responsible

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is good, solid Bible teaching, that it's immersing people in the Word week after week after week on Sundays. So they're some of our convictions. One of them is we won't be able to do that with 20 minute sermons. We won't be able to preach 20 minute sermons and expect Christians who can sit through hours and hours of Netflix every week to be able to get just a little dose of 20 minutes of Bible and then be okay. But we want to submerse people in the Bible, want to hold their head under in there for a while so they really suck it down and love it. So your preaching really matters for

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that and that's one of the big realizations as a maturity pastor or someone like that is that the big lever for helping people grow is actually Sunday and not Wednesday. What happens on Sunday is so much more significant and you can also do a lot of other ministries as well outside of Bible study groups. So it's not just here are our existing ministries, how do we make sure that and our membership ministries are Word ministries. But you can also create new ministries that aren't Bible study ministries to get people deep in the Word.

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You might decide to write some daily reading notes for your people just to keep chipping through the Bible on their own during the week. You might start up prayer ministries that involve some Bible. You might have midweek teaching ministries. You might sign up for a PTC course to do that with a group of people. There are lots of different things that if you're responsible for getting people deep in the Word, lots of other levers that you can pull to see that happen. apart from Bible study groups. So there are first two convictions. Deep in the Word is foundational, that pentagon is correct.

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The second one, deep in the Word is bigger than growth groups or Bible study groups. Third conviction is growth groups are great. Bible study groups are great and a fantastic lever to use to get people deep in the Word. Once you've got all those other things in place or they're getting stronger, it's so powerful to put people together around God's Word, where they grow in their relationship with each other, they're reading the Bible together, they're praying together. But there are a handful of convictions around that that will shape what you're doing there. If you decide to run a Bible study ministry to get people

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deep in the Word, then you need to decide we're going to use this to get people deep in the Word, which means saying no to some other options. So we've not run our Bible study groups as groups for non-Christians. Non-Christians are not invited to our Bible study groups, sometimes they get in there and that's great, I love them, but as soon as you ask a Bible study group, can you please also do evangelism together, your ability to go deep in the Word with the

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Christians who are there is immediately pushed aside because you have to think about that new person, new to the faith, the study has to work for them first and foremost when they're there. The prayer is different when you're not just praying with your brothers and sisters in Christ. It changes the whole thing. And so you've got to work out, if you want to run Bible study groups to get people deep in the Word, what do we have to say no to? Are these going to be singing groups? Are we going to get our groups every week to get out a guitar and sing together? You could do that, and maybe that's the best thing for your church to do in your groups.

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But if you want to do that, and get people deep in the Word, and do evangelism in there, and do ministry together and a bunch of other things, you won't be able to do everything well. You've got to pick and choose what you do. And so we've really picked three things that we do in our Bible study groups. We read the Bible, we pray, and we do that together. Bible, prayer, in community. Community is really the context that we do this. It's not just people sitting on their own and reading the Bible. Bible and prayer and community, they're the three things that our Bible study groups are for.

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and we say no to everything else so that we can do those better. If we had extra time and extra energy, we would just do those things better. We wouldn't add extra things to our Bible study ministries there. So Bible prayer community, if you've got groups that are doing those things, growth groups will be great. They'll be a really helpful lever for getting people deep in the Word. But now you need leaders. From there, you're just stuck with the problem of how do I get the people

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You'll be capped, your maturity ministry in the Bible study world will be capped by how many leaders can I find when I look around, can I find some leaders and how good are those leaders? That's going to be the big blockage to how useful that ministry is going to be for pushing your church deep in the word. Where can we find the leaders? And so a lot of what we're going to talk about when I invite these guys up is what do we do looking for leaders? How do we do that? How do we find them?

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where people are changing the way they view work and they do that from a distance. How do we do that with women working full-time now? Lots of different options there. How do you do it when it gets big? What do you do when you need lots of leaders? Lots and lots and lots of leaders. So we'll do that in just a moment. Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Reach Australia podcast. If you'd like to get a bit more help for your church, maybe a church health consultation could be the thing for you and your team. We analyse your church's data, visit your Sunday gatherings, meet with your leadership team, and then put it all in a bunch

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of recommendations, a formal report that will help you start to implement some of these things. And then we get alongside and provide coaching for the first few months. Go to reachaustralia.com.au for more information.