You Are Only as Strong as Your Foundation

by: Eric Geiger

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Your ability to stand strong is based completely on the strength of what you are standing upon. My daughters make me nervous when they climb on top of something that is not sturdy, something that will give out and cause them to fall. Standing is really not about our ability but the strength of what we are standing upon.

For this reason, the apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian believers that they not only received and believed the gospel, but they continually stood on the firm foundation of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:1).

In the same way, community is only as strong as what it is built upon. The community (common unity) among believers in a church is only strong if it stands upon that which is everlasting and eternal. If community is built only on life stages, interests, or zip codes, the community is weak. And thus it disappears as the foundation shifts.

In John 17, Jesus prayed for us–those who would believe in Him through the message of the disciples. He prayed that our community would be strong and that we would be one as He and the Father are one. We see two challenges in John 17 that should inform how churches build community among those God entrusts to the church.

First, community must be built upon the pure and faultless Word of God. Jesus prayed for His disciples, “Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth” (v. 17). If folks in small groups, Sunday School classes, or whatever the church calls smaller gatherings, if they are not forming relationships around the Word, then the community is inevitably and infinitely shallow. It will not remain. God has anointed His Word as the living and active sword to wreak holy havoc in our lives. His Word sharpens and purifies us.

Second, community must result in mission. The end result of small groups gathering must not be merely small groups gathering. True community that stands on Jesus and His accomplished work for us results in mission. Jesus prayed, “May they all be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. May they also be one in Us, so the world may believe You sent Me” (v. 21). Jesus’ prayer for our community has always been that it would result in others knowing that He is the sent One–the One who came for us.

Church leaders, don’t just build community. Build community that lasts.

Many church leaders are deciding that they don’t just want groups of people meeting, but they want groups of people (kids, students, and adults) building community on the gospel of Jesus. They want people studying the gospel not in isolation but in community. Because of this longing from church leaders, we have recently launched The Gospel Project. It is an ongoing study (three years) that is designed to bring groups to Jesus through all of Scripture. It can also be utilized by groups that meet for shorter seasons. We have been overwhelmed with the response thus far to The Gospel Project. If you would like to take a look at the study, you can pilot the curriculum here.

Read more from Eric here.

Tags: Discipleship, Eric Geiger, Multiplication, The Gospel Project

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8 Questions that Leaders Should be Asking Themselves

by: Perry Noble

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Perry Noble, the founding and senior pastor of NewSpring Church in South Carolina, offers eight questions that leaders should be asking themselves on a regular basis:

#1 – Is there ANYTHING that God is really dealing with me about right now that I am trying to deny?  (Denial doesn’t make us a great leader…if God’s pressing in on YOU then He wants YOU to do something.)

#2 – Am I known as the person who sits around and complains about a problem or the one who rolls up his sleeves and dives into how to deal with it?

#3 – Would I rather hear about the church down the road having a major win or a major problem?  (This reveals our heart!)

Read the rest of Perry’s list here.

Read more from Perry here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Perry Noble

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Isn’t About Time Your Brand Adopted a Mobile Strategy?

by: Jon Thomas

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I received a sobering yet enlightening Facebook message from my aunt two weeks ago. After getting over my shock that she even knew how to use Facebook Messenger (she is not a technophile), I read her message:

Aunt: Guess what I got today?
Me: What?
Aunt: The iPhone 5
[cue jaw dropping]

I was reading this on my iPhone 3Gs, yet I’m the one who works at a global post-advertising agency. That’s when I knew it: Mobile has reached significant penetration and can’t be ignored by brands.

There’s more proof than just the fact that my aunt owns her first smartphone (three generations newer than my own). This past Monday, during a panel discussion of mobile marketing at OMMA Global (where Story happened to take home an OMMA award), moderator Matthew Snyder, founder-CEO of ADObjects, Inc., said, “We’ve been hearing since 1995 that next year would be the year of mobile adoption and exponential growth. I think 2010 was finally that year, and now we’re moving toward the next stage of mobile innovation.”

The stats back Snyder up. According to the Flurry Blog, 78 percent of U.S. adults between 15 and 64 years old own a smart device of some kind. The adoption rate of iOS and Android devices has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history; it’s 10 times faster than the one that marked the ’80s’ PC revolution.

A July 2012 survey by Google found that 67 percent of users surveyed are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site than they are from one that’s unfriendly, and 61 percent of users surveyed said they’d leave a website if they couldn’t quickly find what they were looking for. So if your site isn’t optimized for a mobile device, then you may as well just redirect your customers to your competition.

A FLAT TIRE

What Zappos.com is to your feet, TireRack.com is to your car. When I blew out the rear right tire on my car last week (pictured at left), I was instantly in the market for new tires. As I sat on the train yesterday, I thought I’d price tires on TireRack.com and possibly purchase them right there. But its website completely ignores the mobile visitor. Instead of a seamless mobile version, I got the full site, which took ages to load and had me zooming and swiping all over the page. I made it only halfway through the search process before I boiled over with frustration and gave up.

I could just have waited until I got to my laptop, but by then it was too late: My installer had already gotten back to me with prices, and I ordered through him. Data from Viacom indicates that 96 percent of tablet owners in the United States use their devices in their living rooms. Even when laptops or desktops are near, users still turn to their smart devices.

I’d been there on TireRack.com, on my phone, with time to kill and a need to fill, and the sale was lost because of a bad mobile experience. The value of e-commerce is in its 24/7/365 nature. Without mobile optimization, TireRack is leaving money on the table.

Speaking of Zappos, its mobile site is fantastic, and it also offers an iPhone application. The search function (for the mobile site) is right on the front page (see image at top of post) and has big buttons and simple criteria. No extra fluff, just a smooth user experience that creates the shortest path between customer interest and product sale.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOUR BRAND

Given that there are businesses that still don’t believe they need websites at all, it may seem premature to try to move the masses toward mobile development. But for most brands, having a website, even one that’s continually updated with fresh content (for inbound marketing and SEO purposes), isn’t enough anymore.

If your brand values consistent and recurring engagement, you’re doing it a disservice by creating a torturous (read: non–mobile optimized) mobile experience for your audience. Mobile optimization is not just for e-commerce sites, either. It’s for all sites. The fact that smart devices can access full websites doesn’t mean that the experience translates well. On the contrary, it rarely does. In fact, PostAdvertising.com is very bad as a full-site web experience, which is why it’s optimized for mobile and available as an iPhone and iPad application.

IT’S ABOUT TIME

Whether they concern moving a print magazine to the iPad, creating a mobile-friendly e-commerce site or constructing a stand-alone mobile application, these statistics and stories are, as Google put it, “a sobering reminder of just how quickly and deeply users’ attitudes about companies can be shaped by mobile site experiences.”

How has your brand embraced the mobile world?

Read more from Jon here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Jon Thomaas, Mobile Strategy

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The Church as Creature of the Word, Part 4

by: Trevin Wax

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Session 3 – Matt Chandler

God saves people, and it’s not always the same circumstances around conversion. The beauty of conversion is to see people saved in Sunday School or saved out of a strip club.

1. He calls us to be worshippers.

But what happens next? Worship in spirit and truth. Worship that is above the shoulders (informed by who God is, what He does, information about the living God that fuels worship). Worship is also below the shoulders (with passion, fervency, a glad heart).

If we’ve got any hope at all of being teams that lead in a way that is healthy, vibrant, and life-transforming, we’d better be worshippers in spirit and truth. Your people will be drawn to what you are most passionate about. Are you a worshipper? Does Jesus excite you? Or has ministry gotten rote and routine for you?

No matter how much you talk about leading teams and strategies, if you don’t have in your heart a love for Jesus and the desire to make much of Him, you’ll go off the rails quickly.

You can do everything we’re doing at our church and learn best practices and see nothing happen somewhere else. The Holy Spirit trusts people who just love Jesus. Massive growth is not always success. Do you have affections for the Lord, enjoying getting to know Him? Or are you in the text just because you have to be in the text?

The undershepherd must love the Good Shepherd.

2. He calls us to one another.

Let love be genuine, without hypocrisy. 

Hypocrisy is pretending to be more than you are, or pointing out the flaws of others so you feel better about yourself.

Abhor what is evil. Love is willing to engage an erring brother or sister. Genuine love says, “I think you are in danger.” It is not cruel to point out danger in the lives of others. You’re not a bad parent to not let your kid play in the street. It means you’re a loving parent.

Love one another with a brotherly affection...

The reason Paul is writing this text is because the church in Rome is not living this way. Be encouraged! The kinds of things your church is dealing with are the things Paul dealt with.

Your staff’s interaction with each other goes a long way in cultivating the culture of your church.

Questions for your team:

• How are you organizationally doing this (outdoing one another in love and good deeds)?
• Lead pastor, how open are you with other staff members? Are you isolated? To remove yourself from the trenches and retreat to books and study will take away the sharp edge of leading your people well.
• Does your staff do things together as friends after hours? Are there organic gatherings of people on your team? Life, not complaining. Celebrating what God is doing in your church. Foster that. Encourage that.

3. God calls us as servants. 

The gospel is not only the foundation for our service; it also radically purifies our motivation for service. We serve because Jesus has served us.

Pastors, are you modeling for your people a heart of servanthood? Kingdom hands are dirty hands.

If you walk in entitlement, you will simply create a sense of entitlement beneath you that leads to an entitled staff, and an entitled leadership, an entitled congregation that leads to the death of the church.

A healthy church, a healthy culture reproduces. The creature of the Word multiplies. Church planting, missions, etc. The more clingy you are about what’s yours the more you show your own culture and the desire to feel good about yourself.

There will be a day when no one cares about a big church name or your pastor heroes. How eagerly do you celebrate the success of other churches in your area? How easy is it for you to critique those churches?

Do you celebrate the kingdom? Or do you celebrate your kingdom?

Do you acknowledge that God is working in streams other than your own?

The more you think the ministry is about you, the more exhausted and weary you will become. The more you recognize the ministry is about Jesus, the more freeing you will feel.

The downward turn of our culture will shrink and purify the church, as people who are into church but not into Jesus will leave. Out of that, there is hope that God will do spectacular things. We will work for genuine gospel community to shine, as we serve one another in a way that confuses and attracts the world around us.

Read the prior posts in this series here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Read more from Trevin here.

Tags: Connect, Scripture, Serve, Trevin Wax, Worship

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The Church as Creature of the Word, Part 3

by: Trevin Wax

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How do we practically get consumer driven churches to shift their “culture” to experience transformation and to become a Creature of the Word?

Part 3 of this series, The Church as Creature of the Word, continues with a discussion among authors Eric Geiger, Matt Chandler, and Josh Patterson.

Josh: Truth be told, our church has a lot of consumers too. The irony is that the more we hit the consumeristic culture, the more people come to consume that message. This is a battle in the culture of our society, not just our church. The great thing is, God has brought transformation. People say, “I once was this, but now I’m moving towards this.” You always want people to walk away with the aura of Christ, not the personality of the person witnessing.

Matt: If you’re the lead pastor, what you’ve got to do is point to things that are of first importance. I want to bring as much attention to Jesus Christ as I can – not to me, not to us, not to our church, etc. There’s a certain baseline for comfort here. I want us to be lean as we seek to plant other churches and point people outside of us.

If you’re on staff or a lay person at a consumer driven church, know this: almost everyone has an opinion on what the pastor ought to be doing. Adding your voice probably won’t get you anywhere. People I listen to are people who I know love me and are in the trenches with me. They’re not in the stands judging how I’m fighting, but they’re fighting along with me. Be your pastor’s biggest fan. Serve him and walk alongside him and then float him stuff. There’s a way to respect and honor the position while being honest about what you hope God will accomplish through him in that place.

For guys considering joining church staffs, you’re not hired to set culture or theological positions. Deflect as much as you can and point to Jesus always about everything.

How do you bring about change when a practice is no longer effective, but for some, is a matter of theology?

Eric: Theology, philosophy, and practice matter, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have the same culture in every church. Think in terms of a house. The foundation is theology. The philosophy is the walls of the church. It needs to be in harmony with the theology, but there is some freedom in the philosophy of the church. “What are we going to value most?” You can move the walls in your house, but it’s hard and takes time. The practice is the finishing and furniture. You can move it around. You’ve got freedom.

What are we changing? Theology? Philosophy or practice? We need to know the difference. For philosophy, we need to know that it’s challenging. We’re moving the walls. To do it in a healthy way, you have to tie the philosophical change to the theology. We’re making a shift philosophically because of this, because of what we believe. 

You can dissect the culture by looking at heroes and stories. You can change a culture by heroes and stories. Is Jesus the hero of the church? What is celebrated is cultivated. Point to the things you want to see happen more. Celebrate the stories of people living on mission, living in community, etc.

Josh: I think this is the pivotal piece of the book. If there’s a disconnect between the theology and practice, then the people don’t know how to put the pieces together.

Eric: The older we get, the more humbled we are. When you “move the walls,” affirm anything that is affirmable. Find values in the former culture you want to move over to the new culture, brag on them, and show how they’ll be better realized in the new culture. Affirm the past. Don’t just assume that everything is broken. Point from the wall to the foundation. “You built this because you believed this. We’re going to build another wall because we share the same heartbeat.” Then, have the discipline to stick with it despite the criticism.

Matt: Every church is different. Wisdom is, “you honor what is old.” You talk about opportunity rather than making it seem like everything is broken and doesn’t work. I know young guys who make things worse by their rhetoric, ignorance, and arrogance. We refused to “pasture” the older saints. We had coffee with older men and said, “We need you.” We moved as slowly as we could, to honor the past while pushing forward into the future. Don’t define yourself by what you’re not. Have a compelling vision of what Christ is calling us to do.

What is a resource for examining what your church culture is? 

Eric: We’re going to launch in January on the Creature of the Word FaceBook page an annual audit. We’ll go through it for a year, making it private, but helping church leaders assess the culture of their church over a year.

This series concludes with Part 4. You can read the previous parts of the series here: Part 1; Part 2.

Read more from Trevin here.

Tags: Church Transformation, Eric Geiger, Josh Patterson, Matt Chandler, Scripture, Trevin Wax

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The Church as the Creature of the Word, Part 1

by: Trevin Wax

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Part 1 of a 4-part series.

A couple weeks ago, I reviewed the book Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church by Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson, and Eric Geiger. Many books today encourage pastors to be focused on Jesus in their preaching and teaching. But Creature  goes beyond the teaching ministry and instructs church leaders on creating a gospel-centered culture in the church, a culture that shapes all levels and areas of ministry.

Today, I’m glad to welcome Matt, Josh, and Eric to the blog for a brief conversation about the book.

Trevin Wax: The subtitle of the book is The Jesus-Centered Church. “Jesus-centered” is going to be new language for a lot of leaders who are used to hearing about “gospel-centered” everything. What do you hope this book’s focus on Jesus will communicate to pastors and leaders?

Matt Chandler: Our hope in using the term Jesus-centered is to create some distance between a phrase that has been used so much it’s become a junk drawer in many ways. We want to remind people that Christ is the head of the Church, and everything about how our church functions and operates should reflect the new life we are given in Jesus.

Trevin Wax: I pointed out in my review how this book benefits from having three authors with unique gifts. How did your particular strengths and weaknesses as leaders influence the insights you each contributed to the book? How has the Lord challenged you personally through the “iron-sharpening” process of working together?

Josh Patterson: We all enjoyed the process of approaching this book as a team. God has designed His Church to be made up of various members, all essential, to the building up of the body to maturity. We wanted this variety represented in the book.

All three of us have different gifts, strengths and weaknesses which helped us form this book in a unique way. We hope it has resulted in a balanced perspective on the nature, design and function of the Church both theologically and practically.

Personally, it has been a rewarding and edifying experience. We spent a considerable amount of time dreaming, talking, praying, pushing back on one another, and shaping our thoughts and words. In short, the entire process solidified our brotherhood as friends and encouraged our hearts to love the Church even more.

Trevin Wax: Many pastors are talking about being focused on the gospel in one’s teaching and preaching ministry, but this conversation hasn’t always made it past the pulpit and into important conversations about a church’s culture. What happens when ministry philosophy and church practice is disconnected from or in contradiction to the church’s theological commitments?

Josh Patterson: The phrase, “Jesus is the most important part of my life,” is uninformed at best. If we read the New Testament correctly, then Jesus doesn’t get relegated to a part of piece of life. He has come and boldly proclaimed that He is life, not a slice or sliver of it.

So, in the same manner, a church cannot compartmentalize Jesus to a certain aspect of her life and function. Ironically, many churches preach and teach Jesus from the pulpit or in Sunday School, but find Him strangely absent from other areas. We wrote in the book about the need to have a clear understand of how theology drives philosophy, which in turn informs the church’s practice.

We all face the temptation to let our pragmatics or practice drive our ministry philosophy. The danger here is that we can begin to drift theologically. But, the more immediate implication is that our people cannot see how our theological convictions are relevant to how we actually operate and function as a body. All of this has an impact on the church culture.

A church culture that is saturated in the gospel of Christ rightly understands that He is the life and breath of the Church in each and every aspect from theology to daily practice.

Trevin Wax: You give attention to the role of community in the church fulfilling its purpose. Some churches tend to fluctuate between an “authenticity” that excuses sin or a “righteousness” that breeds hypocritical living. How does being Jesus-centered challenge both those cultures?

Eric Geiger: The best way to answer this question is to look at the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry. He repelled hypocritical Pharisees and attracted sinners who recognized their need for Him.

In the same way, when a congregation is focused on Jesus, it becomes the kind of place where sinners come and find transformation. It’s a safe environment for people to be honest about their ongoing battles with sin. At the same time, we don’t excuse sin. We fight it fiercely.

The church that fails to focus on Jesus will excuse sin – either the sin of legalistic self-righteousness or the type of rebellion seen in the prodigal son. Gospel-centered community exists with the grace-filled tension of receiving sinners while simultaneously making war on sin.

Trevin Wax: What is your hope for pastors and other church leaders who read Creature of the Word?

Matt Chandler: My hope is that our theology (rightly understanding who God is) will drive how we organize and operate as a church. I fear that at times our practice drives our philosophy that in turn shapes our theology. This is backwards and dangerous. Our right understanding of God and His revealed word should shape our philosophies of ministry which should in turn determine our practice. I hope this book helps church leaders in this area.

Read Part 2 of this series here.

Read more from Trevin here.

Tags: Culture, Eric Geiger, Josh Patterson, Matt Chandler, Scripture

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The Church as Creature of the Word, Part 2

by: Trevin Wax

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Part 2 of a conversation with authors Eric Geiger, Matt Chandler, and Josh Patterson about their recent book, The Church as Creature of the Word.

This post is features Eric Geiger, vice-president of the Church Resources Division at LifeWay.

Eric is putting forth a leadership challenge about the atmosphere and culture of your church.

Opening illustration: The culture of mountain climbers at Mount Everest. It takes weeks and months of planning and preparation. The mountain-climbing culture turned bad. A man, David Sharp, was hiking his way back down from Everest, through the “death zone.” He sits down to rest in Green Boots Cave (named for a man who perished there with green boots). 40 mountain climbers making the ascent, seeking to achieve their dream, pass by David Sharp, who is dying. All 40 passed by him, but left him to die in order to not abandon their journey. The mountain climbing community was riveted by the events. Some blamed systems (lack of evacuation plans, rescue teams, etc.). But the founder of Everest mountain climbing said it was the culture of the mountain climbing community that was wrong.

You can tell what is of first importance, not by looking at the confession, but at the culture. It’s not your confession of faith of your church, but the culture of your church that reveals what is of first importance.

There’s a difference between simply believing the gospel in your confessional statement and standing on the gospel in your church culture.

Culture is massively important. It’s the overpowering alpha male in the room. If there is a conflict between your confession and your culture, the culture typically wins.

If your confession says the grace of Jesus is big enough for any issue or any sin, but your culture is closed and cold and looks with disdain on people who open up about their struggles, then people needing grace will not find it.

If the confession says we will live as missionaries, but the culture of the church determines success by how many events take place at the building in a week, then the culture will trump the confession.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter Drucker

Your church’s culture is your church’s personality. It’s the values and shared beliefs that drive the behavior of your people.

The church in Galatia is a good example. They drifted from their confession in their culture. Any time we seek to supplement the grace of God, we supplant the grace of God. They moved toward a culture of creating “levels of righteousness.”

A true, healthy church culture has alignment between the confession and the practice of the people.

You’ve got to inspect your church, to see if the gospel has made its way into the fabric of the church. An example: Budgeting season. Discussions about giving are good. Is the gospel impacting that discussion? If people are not being generous, then perhaps the culture is drifting from our confession that “though He was rich, He became poor for your sake.”

Another example: You need volunteers for children’s ministry, etc. You can do a campaign and a ministry fair. But what if we should first ask, “What’s the culture of our church?” Have we brought people back to the reality that God stepped onto this earth, grabbed a basin and a towel, and served us by washing our dirty feet?

The need is to come back to the gospel in order to influence the culture of the church. The culture is always teaching. We need more than a confession immersed in Jesus. We need a culture immersed in Jesus.

Read Part 1 of this series here. To read Part 3, go here.

Read more from Trevin here.

Tags: Eric Geiger, Josh Patterson, Matt Chandler, Scripture, Trevin Wax

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Is Your Church’s Vision Clear? How Clarity Changes Everything

by: Will Mancini

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Clarity Evangelist Will Mancini talks about Vision Clarity: “We’re addicted to product, but it’s process that makes the difference.”

Click the video above to hear a short interview by Jeff Moors and Think International.

Tags: Clarity, Vision Frame, Will Mancini, video

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Laypeople and the Mission of God, Part 4

by: Ed Stetzer

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Today I continue my series on laypeople and the mission of God. If you have been following this series you know how I don’t like the word “laypeople.” At the end of the series, I am officially declaring it off limits for a while. A few of you may have a moist eye, and I may have a sniffle or two, but we must move to the future with a different and higher view about what God wants done. Simply put, all God’s people are called to the ministry (1 Peter 4:10), and all God’s people are sent on mission (John 20:21).

One of God’s greatest resources to fulfill His mission is people who are currently doing little to nothing– and they have been taught that is what they are supposed to be doing. Churches are filled with passive spectators rather than active participants in the mission of God.

As I explained in an article for Q Ideas, millions of people live in the shadow of churches that have become consumer Christian centers. The mission of God is being cheated while consumer Christians enjoy the programming. In their book, God is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge described the state of the American church as the “Disneyfication of God” or “Christianity Lite – a bland and sanitized faith that is about as dramatic as the average shopping mall” (p. 189).

Believers who think like customers contribute to the underachieving church in America (and the West in general). But hold on. I believe the mentality in the pew (or cushioned chair) may have another contributing factor: pastoral codependency.

First, let me define a term codependent. I got this from Wikipedia–because you can trust everything there. “A codependent’ is loosely defined as someone who exhibits too much, and often inappropriate, caring for persons who depend on him or her… A ‘codependent’ is one side of a relationship between mutually needy people.
A codependent pastor needs a needy congregation. And we have too many of both. But relishing the applause that comes from being the local church superstar often results in performance anxiety and utter disappointment in an underachieving church. It is a vicious cycle where everyone ends up disappointed–including God.

So who started all of this dysfunction? Was it the needy, consumer-driven congregation? Or was it the pastor, hungry for significance? The pastor who insists on being the focus of local ministry trains the body of Christ to sin. Believers who demand all ministry to be done by “professionals” lead the pastor to sin. To break the cycle, the enablers must stop enabling. God cannot receive glory in the church when pastors are always up front receiving the credit.

I am a pastor and I love pastors. I don’t think they caused the problem and I am so thankful for the sacrifice they make. Actually, that willingness to sacrifice, to DO for others what God has called them to DO, is from the right heart but with a bad result. It hurts the church and it hurts the pastor.

We need to understand everyone’s role. When pastors do for people what God has called them to do, everyone gets hurt and the mission of God is hindered. God designed the church to act as the body of Christ. Here is what it should look like: “Based on the gift they have received, everyone should use it to serve others” (1 Peter 4:10). “A manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person to produce what is beneficial” (1 Corinthians 12:7). The church is most alive when every believer serves in the mission of God where assigned by the Spirit.

Wherever we live, it is a mission field. However, too often, we say we live in a mission field but don’t engage the mission force– the people of God.

Now, I am a believer in pastors– and see that there is a pastoral office. I am not looking to undermine that. However, we have swung way too far the other way in most churches– with rooms of spectators rather than servants, customers rather than co-laborers.

The average person sitting in the pew (or, more likely today, the padded chair) on Sunday is bored, unengaged, and under challenged. If he/she is not absolutely jazzed by babysitting preschoolers or helping park cars on Sundays, many churches have few other options.

Thus, I think it is essential to change the culture from passivity to activity and to break the consumer Christian / co-dependent pastor cycle.

Starting in my next post, I will walk through four essentials to changing the culture of your church to engage all God’s people in mission.

Read prior posts from this series here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Read Part 5.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Ed Stetzer, Serve, Staff Leadership Roles

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When Tragedy Strikes Your Community, Will Vision Direct Response?

by: Bryan Rose

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The church of Vision Room contributor, Rich Birch is starting a rally due to Hurricane Sandy. We wanted Vision Room readers to know about this initiative.

On October 29, Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City New Jersey as, at the time of this writing, the second-costliest hurricane in history. With over 100 fatalities in the US alone, millions without power, and more than $50 billion dollars in damage, Hurricane Sandy created an enormous need across the entire Northeast region.

As an organization that, according to Pastor Tim Lucas, bears the vision to “take church to the people,” Liquid Church in New Jersey has responded quickly and appropriately to Hurricane Sandy. This is possible because, even before the storm, Liquid has been meeting needs at street level. They have been even been recognized in their efforts by CNN and the New York Times.

In just a few days, they launched a nationwide effort to challenge churches to come together and unite to serve families hit hard by this hurricane in New Jersey and New York. Known as Sandy Thanksgiving, and focused immediately on the devastation at the Jersey Shore, Liquid Church is mobilizing more than 1000 volunteers to serve the region over Thanksgiving weekend.

Clearly, Liquid Church has been able to present a well crafted and practical action in this crisis, and gain needed enlistment of partnerships, because they already held the DNA to respond when needs arise. In any organization, Intentional Communication of the vision is strongest when actions reinforce and prove words to be true.

To find out how you can SERVE alongside Liquid Church or GIVE to the effort, as an individual or a church, visit the #sandythanksgiving website at www.sandythanksgiving.com

Tags: Bryan Rose, Hurricane Sandy, Rich Birch, Vision Frame

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