Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group Leader podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms, and changes the world together. Hey, Life Group leaders. Welcome back.
My name is Dallas. I get to be your host today. I get to be our young adults pastor. And with me, I have one of our friends.
Hey. It's Esther. Yes. The women's pastor.
Yes. Thank you so much for having me. We are excited for this. This is the big one.
This is the Christmas service. Yep. Twelve services too. All of them.
One of two services they go to. Mm-hmm. Maybe some of your coworkers. So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
Yeah. Of how can you invite your friends, but also the importance of your life group. Is your life group even meeting this week? Mm-hmm.
Because it's the week of Christmas. What does that look like? What's a game plan? But if you are meeting, we want to walk through because it's a beautiful passage in Luke 126 or 33.
Mm-hmm. But there's actually a really cool lean in question that I would love to maybe discuss a little bit because you talk about leadership and maybe there's something that we can catch here and learn. But think of some of the best leaders you know, personally or in the world. What are some defining characteristics of great leaders in your mind?
Whoa. The first one that comes to mind is somebody that I just met with Carmen. Carmen Sherman is one of our senior coaches. She actually is going from senior coach of stewardship to senior coach of leadership development.
It's kind of in our women's world. Her background was working in finance with Taco Bell and PepsiCo. Oh. Yeah.
But her, I mean, not a lot of people know her. Quote-unquote. You know, and she's just using her gifts, her talents from the marketplace and also as a Christian to serve her church and that in those unseen spaces. So I think she's one of the best leaders that I know.
So characteristic, like any unseen behind the scenes? It doesn't mind like not getting the spotlight, but wants to see individuals highlighted, developed and seeing their gifts and their season match with the roles that they're in. Yeah. So humility.
That's great. Amazing. She's great. I love seeing it.
She's always here in the office. It's so great. Yeah. She's so great.
How about you? I keep something next to my desk, so we're in my office and it's why leaders fail. And I set a list right here. So it's why they fail.
So like the things to learn would be like the opposite of that. So I keep these. There are 19 of them and I keep them right next to my desk so I can make sure that I let this out in their scripture on it, but really that discipline lifestyle when I connect with a leader and I ask them, hey, walk me through your day to day, extremely disciplined. Yeah.
Regimen to it's beautiful. That's awesome. So that could be a really great conversation. So that's getting everybody to talk and then we look down from passage.
Gabriel, Mary, Jesus, it's the passage. So beautiful. Greetings you were highly favored. Mary was troubled.
Do not be afraid. Such a beautiful passage. Any thoughts there? Yeah, I think it's just interesting how the passage talks about how Mary is called someone who's highly favored and culturally getting pregnant, unmarried is not highly favorable for you, for your family, for your relationships and for your community, you know, and that space of being misunderstood.
But in God's point of view, she was highly favored because she got to carry the person of Jesus. And so yeah, I think that that's such an interesting part to notice in this passage. Yeah. That even like in our culture, someone who's holding a child and not being married, even more so than in Mary's culture.
That's true. It's crazy. Yeah. Crazy that God would call her highly favored because of Jesus.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So that is that's the Christmas passage. Sorry, I'm grabbing a drink of water.
That is like the Christmas passage. We're going to look at it as a church. It's going to be really beautiful. Eric Eric's into a great job with it on what 12 times.
So lots of opportunities to see it, to experience it and kind of want to talk a little bit about you. You're hearing this on Friday. We still have Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Lots of services.
Yeah. So people use a leader to invite others, but how can you encourage leaders, your groups, to invite people? Yeah. Can we spend a little bit of time there?
Yeah, I would love that. You know, somebody once told me that the people who go to church, they're usually called CEO Christians or there are specific times of the year. Yeah. CEO is Christmas Easter and on occasion.
Yeah. And so I think that because Christmas is a holiday that's celebrated culturally, it's such an opportunity to say, hey, would you come and kind of experience this as part of your tradition? And you never know how much God will soften somebody's heart. We see unbelievers who came to a ton of our Christmas tree lighting and people will come for their kids too.
So yeah, I think it's such an great opportunity for people to, yeah, for us to end. And our church is such an amazing job with stewarding the production part for it to be great production and aesthetically beautiful, visually amazing. And the praise, even having some songs that we're used to traditionally. And so man, I can't think about that in our time for people to just be open and receptive to being invited to church during the holiday, during the Christmas season.
So I would say go for it, even extend the invitation and say, hey, come to church for me and then come to come over for dinner or come to church for me and then let's hang out. I think that that's great. Yeah. How about you Dallas?
Yeah, I like to go with some stats because stats are pretty crazy when you look at this. I have them up on my screen. We're looking at them. Like there's a survey done of what brought people to church and some like two or three percent said, oh, I liked a program.
So I showed up to church. It's not like they're seeing, hey, we have this program for women's ministry, men's or whatever it is. And that's what's bringing them. Eight to 10 percent like the pastor.
That's great. But like down here, 70 to 85 percent were invited by a relative or friend. Wow, that's amazing. Like that just shoots.
Yeah. And then they're invited by a friend. That's awesome. Like most people are going to say yes to an invitation, especially at this time of year.
So how can you encourage the people in your group, giving the boldness? I think there's a beautiful thing you can do and make it a beautiful prayer moment. Like in the group chat, hey, let's take some time and let's pray. Who are the people that you're going to invite?
And I recently got back from Kenya and we got to go to one of the universities and we evangelized. So we invited people to the college ministry. We talked about Jesus, but what we didn't just have flyers and go out. We actually took some time.
We role played with one another. Which was actually really helpful because we played different, like one person was really mean, one person was really helpful. And it actually really helped us like, oh, I can handle these conversations. It gave us encouragement, boldness, everything that we needed.
And then we just spent time in prayer. And we just started praying, Lord, would your favor go before us? Would people come to church? And the most rewarding thing is showing up and seeing people who said yes to an invitation because all they needed was an invitation.
So just to encourage you as leaders, I can encourage your group members to invite someone to church, but you have to lead the way. Because we lead the way in that with inviting someone to church. So maybe you come up with a list and you get to lead the way in the group chat. So here's three people that I'm going to invite for Christmas this year because we know it's not just Christmas.
Like if you're a part of there's a strategy behind it, come to Christmas because what's starting in January on the table rooted. All of that. But yes, it's on the table on the table gets rooted. And if you've been through rooted because you're a life creator, you know the life change you've sat in the water as people got baptized.
It's amazing. So it's really a beautiful run and journey that starts this week. That's right. Wow.
So being encouraged and I pray that the Lord gives you boldness. I'm going to put it on the record because we're going to invite our neighbors. We've been learning their names. We moved there in April.
So we're learning and we're going to invite some of them and we'll see. That's awesome. The worst thing they could say is no. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. And that obedience and faith, you know, of inviting people, their stories on the other side, you know, you never know. It's amazing. And maybe you're from now they're listening to this podcast because of your readers.
Oh shoot. Oh, come on. It's so beautiful. You never know who's on the other side of your obedience.
Yeah. Amen. So as we start to think for the future, like Christmas is coming and then a lot of things shut down because it's restful as are what you're doing for the holidays. Oh man, we are just going to be home.
Home. Honestly, yeah, we've just done a ton of because Thanksgiving Christmas are so close. I feel like it's just going to be a time for us to just be home. The kids are not in school for us and we don't have work the last week.
And so yeah, I'm just excited to be at home with the kids. That's like a working mom and working parents. Like we get to just be home. Yeah.
How about you? We are local. We're going to stay close. We're going to rest.
Yeah. We're going to break during December, January or what have you guys decided to do, communicate with each other? Yeah. We did our Christmas party together.
We always do a wide elephant. We do desserts. We play games and then we won't resume until January. On the table starts, let's just rest for Christmas.
There's an end date, but with every end date, there's a start date. That's good. And we want to make sure we start because on the table, it's our third year in a row that we're going to do it. Wow.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't wait. I've already got to sneak peek at some of the messages, topics.
I cannot wait. And it's going to be really great for our church. That's awesome. Yeah.
It's going to be some pretty incredible discussions coming out on the table. We've been preparing our life group leaders for years now. Yeah, really. Yeah.
So life group leaders, just as Estranaire human beings and we're going to rest and our schedules are going to change a little bit the next couple of weeks. Be mindful of that for the people in your group. Yeah. So take a break.
But with every end date, what's the start date? That's right. Coming back on the table, you're not going to want to miss it. So Merry Christmas.
We're thankful for you. Take care. Bye. Bye.
Bye.