03 Our Vision For Ministry in the Local Church
“Our Vision For Ministry as a Local Church”
April 26th, 2026
Justin Marbury
This is our third of several Vision Sundays for 2026. The first was January 4th. Our second was February 22nd. If you have not listened to these messages, “Our Vision For the Sunday Gathering,” and “Our Vision for Leadership,” please go back and listen to them. In addition to talking about specific areas of the vision, I also shared in some amount of detail:
What we mean when we talk about Vision: A picture of who we are becoming…rather than what we will be doing.
Why we haven’t had Vision Sundays before this year: We weren’t ready. We didn’t have a clear enough picture.
The historical development of the different aspects of the vision and its inception in 2020.
The process of reveal, refocus, reform, and revive: A slow, not always clear, process that requires a lot of patience and is critical for developing the Vision.
As elders, we believe that God has been taking Calvary Wolfeboro, for the last 5+ years, through a process of reveal, refocus, and reform. While we have had clarity about certain things along the way, it has been a journey of faith through uncertainty in many ways for all of us. And while God will most likely still reveal other areas where reform is needed, we find ourselves at a point in our growth where we can begin to communicate the vision in ways that we haven’t been able to before. In other words, the spiritual map, our place on it, and who God wants us to be, are clear enough to communicate. This will be a significant part of what we believe God wants to do in 2026: To communicate and propagate the new and still developing vision of who we are as Calvary Wolfeboro, with Vision Sundays throughout the year.
Introduction
Back to beginning, once again, remind ourselves of the foundation…
19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.” Eph. 2:19-20
The presence of the Holy Spirit In the church in the NT
From Pentecost to Patmos, the Holy Spirit is the person of the trinity who we see emphasized over and over in Acts as the source of guidance. “It seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit…”
The Holy Spirit steps into the leadership of God’s people in a very new way at Pentecost.
In the explosion of numerical growth and expansion, Informal human leadership was critical - Spiritual Gifts and Equipping giftings. Both Spirit empowered and guided.
Spiritual Gifts: 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 - Examples, not exhaustive.
Equipping Giftings: Ephesians 4:11, “Jesus gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherd/teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…” I think this list is more comprehensive. These are what I previously taught as Spiritual Personalities. Where the Spiritual gifts are abilities, these are personalities, tendencies, that provide specialization for equipping or training functionalities.
Add these two together and you can see how no two individual members of the body of Christ are exactly alike. This is the sweet diversity.
You can also see how the Holy Spirit could utilize the abilities and personalities in a local body as an aspect of leadership to bring about conversion, discipleship, growth and maturity independent of the elders or deacons - independent of formal leadership. Every believer has full access to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the one meant to lead the Church.
If humanity wasn’t fallen, broken, riddled with iniquity, selfish, self-serving, and generally blind to our own sin, shortcomings, and hypocrisy, we wouldn’t need formal leadership. We wouldn’t need elders and deacons. But as we see in the story of the early church in Acts (Acts 6, Acts 15) and the reality behind letters like 1 and 2 Corinthians, it is necessary in this time in human and church history, to have formal leadership. Let me say this as clearly as I can and make sure we don’t miss it. Human leadership in the church age, after Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, formal human leadership is an accommodation. The NT letters are a revelation, in part, of the fact that because of our brokenness, our flesh, our iniquity, our selfishness, we are simply incapable of following the Holy Spirit’s leadership without formal human leadership.
The same thing can be said for formal/named ministry. If humanity wasn’t fallen, broken, riddled with iniquity, selfish, self-serving, and generally blind to our own sin, shortcomings, and hypocrisy, we wouldn’t need formal, ministries.
Formal ministry, like formal leadership, is an accommodation to our condition. Which means it should also be established and developed only to the extent that it is needed.
Back to the foundation and what God began to build as the Holy Spirit empowered and guided the church through the early stages of development:
Matthew 28:19-20 - Make disciples of all nations, baptism and apprenticeship to the way of life of Jesus.
Acts 2:42-49 (Applying the teachings of Scripture to our lives, Koinonia, communion, prayer and worship, and caring for those in need. These are the things they automatically did, no one told them that they had to or even that they should, filled with the Holy Spirit, they begin gathering to consider.
Acts 15 and Galatians 2:10 - holiness and caring for the needy.
In the NT, examples of what we could call “formal ministry” are almost non-existent. Paul alludes to a widow care ministry in Ephesus, where Timothy was: 1 Timothy 5. There are examples of offerings being collected to care for the church in Jerusalem.
On the other hand, the NT is full of emphases on what the church should be focused on:
-Our mission of making disciples who become more and more like Jesus, being conformed to his character.
-Unity in the Spirit
-Being God’s family, living according to the way of God’s kingdom, becoming more and more like God, as revealed in Jesus, and spreading His Kingdom through the replication of Kingdom families.
This is what guides and directs our values and emphases as a local church when it comes to ministry.
-As we become more like Christ, we will do the things on his heart, as revealed by the Holy Spirit.
This is the real ministry of the Church. Everything else is either supporting that or just faking it.
Equipping
Administration
Church communication - web, email, app, social media
Property management, cleaning, and maintenance
Weekly:
Communion Service
LifeGroups
Monthly:
Men’s Rally
Women’s Gathering
Youth Group
As Needed:
Baptisms
Baby Dedications
Weddings
Funerals
Training/CW recommended resources
Classes/CW recommended resources
Seasonal Emphases (Lent, Summer, and Advent)
Special events
Outreaches
Service Ministries
Calvary Helps - including widow care
Calvary Closet
Is this it? Probably not. There will probably be others, but our commitment is to be careful and prayerful.
Unity: A beautiful side-effect of these few things: If we all take ownership and engage in all these we will cultivate unity.
When a family goes from being an organism to being an organization, from a healthy tree to overgrown and over developed. Constant pruning is needed.