The men’s team ministry model that we present to churches asks men to donate three hours of time one Saturday morning a month. Those three hours are divided into one hour of prayer, Bible study and last minute planning as a group, and then breaking up into teams and serving at the home of their care receivers for two hours.
The question I want to address in this post is how to lead a men’s team ministry devotional hour. I’m assuming the leader is a layman who has no specialized training in Bible study or public speaking.
Three purposes for your devotional hour
The purposes of the devotional hour are to ground your men in the biblical teaching relating to serving those in need, to provide a time of prayer and fellowship for your men, and to do some last minute planning for your teams’ service times. I use the term “hour” loosely. You’ll need to provide time for your teams to go to their care receiver’s home. So in reality, the meeting should last about forty-five or fifty minutes and can be divided into the following three sections:
- Fifteen Minutes – The devotional – entire group
- Fifteen Minutes – Discussion and prayer – individual teams
- Fifteen Minutes – Last minute planning – entire group
Show your men how your men’s team ministry fulfills biblical teaching
The purpose of your men’s team ministry devotional is to contextualize their service to their widow or single mom in the Word of God. You want your men to see how what they are doing fits into what the Word of God teaches. Contextualizing like this is important and powerful. Over time, your men will come to understand that serving the neediest in your church is a major theme in the Bible and they will view their time with their care receiver as an act of obedience and worship.
The purpose of the individual team discussion and prayer time is to help your men think through the implications of the passage you are teaching and get them comfortable talking to each other about spiritual things. Group prayer will also help them.
Finally, after the teams come back together, take some time to make sure everything is organized and set to go for your service time. Perhaps one team only has one member show up that morning. So you borrow someone from another team who can spare him. Or a care receiver has a plumbing issue and a person on another team knows how to address it, so perhaps he can go to that home that particular day. This is a time for anyone to bring up any issue they have with their care receiver.
Steps for preparing a devotional
Six simple steps for preparing the devotional:
- Select a verse relating to men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents
- Read it in its context.
- Meditate on it.
- Summarize it in one sentence.
- Think of a concrete example that illustrates your main point.
- Think of five discussion questions for your discussion time.
Topics for a devotional
You can select appropriate verses by looking up the following topics in a concordance:
- Widows, fatherless children, orphans, “the needy,” “the poor”
- The love of Christ, love
- Our relationship to other believers, the “one anothers”
- Good works, good deeds
- Our new covenant
- The body of Christ
- Service, servants, servanthood
Sources for a devotional
You can also use the devotionals found in the back of my workbook, as well as in my devotional study guide, “Doing Good Well,” and in my blog posts at NewCommandment.org. (Note: Use these devotionals as starting points, not end points. Please do not simply read them verbatim to your group.)
One final item. I suggest not providing breakfast or coffee and snacks for your devotional hour. As always, the reason is because we want to keep things as simple as possible in order to achieve long term, consistent ministry over years and decades.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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