The Quest for Community

by: Leonard Sweet

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Someday I will hold up my Bible before a congregation, shake it, and yell at the top of my lungs, “This is not a book about propositions and programs and principles. This is a book about relationships.”

The church, not Hollywood, ought to be the world’s greatest image factory. The greatest image in the world, the image that draws people into real, life-giving relationship, is the image of God in Jesus the Christ.

I want my community

One of the favorite words used in the context of the Web is “community.” eBay is in the business of building communities, they say; theirs is less an information source than a social medium.

The paradox is this: the pursuit of individualism has led us to this place of hunger for community, not of blood or nation but communities of choice.

More than buying and selling, the electronic emporium is about posting messages on bulletin boards, discovering new friends, and launching relationships at the eBay Cafe. One user said, “eBay is bringing people together to do a lot more than trading goods. We are trading our hearts.”

Don’t laugh.

eBay may just be the closest experience of small-town America available to postmoderns. Where else can they find people with similar interests (whale oil lamps, in my case)? Where else can they be drawn into community around a single purpose? Where else can they tell the stories most central to who they are and find people eager to hear them? Where else can they participate so fully and have their lives changed by the experience?

Nowhere else.

Except, perhaps, the church.

And isn’t that what the gospel is all about?

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Read more from Leonard here.

Tags: Community, Connect, Leonard Sweet

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How to Survive – and Thrive – in a Crappy Culture

by: Build Network

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Everywhere you turn, you hear about the great cultures at Apple and Zappos and other organizations on those endless “best places to work” lists — and you’re urged to do what they do.

But what about organizational cultures that are irreparably poor? How are leaders supposed to function? A recent blog from Dan McCarthy, a former exec at Paychex and Eastman Kodak, addressed this common reality head-on.

“It’s easy to be a great leader in a company that values leadership, develops leaders, and is full of role model leaders to learn from,” he writes. “What about the rest of us? What about those aspiring wannabe leaders [who] happen to work at one of the other organizations that don’t make the leadership honor roll? Is it impossible to develop into a great leader, and to be a leader, in a bad organization with a crappy culture?”

His answer is no. He offers various tips to managers who find themselves in this situation, including:

1. Clarify your non-negotiable leadership principles and stick by them, no matter what. “In a tough economy, [it’s possible that you] just can’t afford to leave (at least for now),” McCarthy notes. “If you’re in a situation like this, you have to ask yourself, ‘How much are you willing to sacrifice when it comes to your leadership principles and values?’ …If you haven’t already, take the time to develop your own list of leadership principles, values, or rules. Then, given your current culture, ask yourself, ‘Which ones am I willing to be fired over?’”

2. Establish and maintain your own standards of performance and behavior. “Sure, the company may have set the bar so low that any warm body can meet expectations. High performers can give up and poor performers can settle in. That doesn’t mean your standards can’t be higher — much higher. Assess your team using a performance and potential grid and put a plan in place to develop those with potential and gradually weed out the bad apples.”

3.  “Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi When it comes to developing and encouraging leadership, actions speak louder than words. Be a safe haven for other aspiring leaders to come out of the closet. In a crappy leadership culture, role model leaders are few and far between. If you’re being a leader, people will be lining up at your door looking for advice, coaching, and mentoring.

Read more here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Staff, Structure

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12 Leadership Competencies to LAUNCH Your Church

by: Mac Lake

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Churches Multiplying Churches

LAUNCH helps local churches form area networks to identify, train, and send out new leaders. These cooperative efforts, called Hubs, consist of multiple churches committed to a holistic approach of leadership development. Our process is not built on cookie-cutter programs but rather on personal relationships, nurturing 12 Leadership Competencies in the church-planter.  LAUNCH partners and planters are working together to multiply impact and transform communities.

The 12 Leadership Competencies

As LAUNCH was first forming, we interviewed a host of church planters, indentifying the common denominators among a variety of healthy leaders. In pinpointing key traits, we endeavored to reverse-engineer the success of a healthy plant. While fully acknowledging that the “success” of a church is ultimately in God’s hands, we also recognize that as leaders we have been entrusted with the responsibility of being faithful stewards of His calling. Too many “good guys” with noble intentions, solid theology, and popular ministry models flounder. The need is too great to not be fully prepared for the task. So, with this in mind, we took our research and boiled it down to the 12 LAUNCH Leadership Competencies. We teach leadership competencies rather than a specific church-planting model because most church plants seem to fail not because of the model but because of poor leadership. The competencies are:

1. Identify and confirm a passionate sense of calling
2. Master the discipline of leading yourself
3. Cast a clear and compelling vision
4. Lead from a bold faith that takes prayerful risks
5. Identify the needs of your community and develop a specific strategy to meet them
6. Effectively raise and manage money
7. Develop measurable systems and structures to fulfill your vision
8. Identify key leaders to execute the vision
9. Think strategically and execute for results
10. Empower leaders to execute the vision
11. Evaluate your values and integrate them into the DNA of your church
12. Persevere through difficulty in order to get to the next level

To learn more about LAUNCH, go here.

To read more from Mac, go here.

Tags: Church Planting, Leadership Engine, Mac Lake

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The Culture Around Your Church Determines How Best to Reach It

by: George Hunter

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Emotional Relevance

A second principle behind contagious Christianity is emotional relevance.   The European Enlightenment taught that we human beings are unique creatures because we are rational creatures: while we still experience the emotions that we have inherited from our primitive forbears; education has come to lift us into the life of the mind.  With the fading of the Enlightenment, and the rise of postmodernity, it is becoming apparent that the Enlightenment was wrong by almost 180 degrees.  We are not basically rational creatures who sometimes feel; we are basically emotional creatures who sometimes think.  (Even what we think about is influenced by our background emotional state, and how we think about it is influenced by our feelings at the time.)

This discovery is more-or-less a re-discovery.  Even in the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment’s onslaught seemed unstoppable, the romantics found ways to speak to, and awaken, the heart—through poetry, fiction, art, and music.  In that same century, Jonathan Edwards reflected upon the indispensable role of “religious affections” in Christian experience, and John Wesley defined Christianity as, substantially, a “religion of the heart.”

Today, we need a fuller recovery of a more holistic understanding of human nature, in part because many people in our communities are fighting an emotional war within, and they are being gradually destroyed by emotional forces—like pride, fear, sadness, anger, hate, jealousy, low self-esteem, and other feelings surging within them that are hijacking their lives.  Furthermore, authentic Christian conversion involves emotional healing, as well as deliverance from a destructive emotional world into the new emotional world of the Kingdom of God, in which such emotions as gratitude, love, humility, peace, healthy self-esteem, and joy enter the convert’s experience.

Effective churches begin where people are, including their emotional struggles and their aspirations for emotional freedom.  Teaching, counseling, preaching, liturgy, evangelism, and other ministries are expressed with emotional sensitivity and relevance.  Today, as the recovery ministries of many churches are learning to engage the emotional baggage that attaches to addiction, they are learning to minister to everyone with emotional relevance.

Tags: George Hunter III, Kingdom Concept, Local Predicament

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The Culture Around Your Church Determines How Best to Reach It

by: George Hunter

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Radical Outreach

The contagion of culturally relevant Christianity and emotionally relevant Christianity are experienced fairly directly.  Take the case of a young man who is now one of our seminary students.  Eight years ago, two Christian friends initiated several conversations with him, and then they invited him to a youth service.  As he walked in, good news and hope were being celebrated through music that engaged him; the speaker spoke his language and seemed to under­stand people like him; and the message offered freedom from the “narcissism” and the “anger issues” that, as he reported, had “tied me up in knots.” He found himself responding, and he kept coming back, and he learned all he could; within several months, he was a man of faith.  The church’s culturally and emotionally relevant ministry engaged him directly.

Another cause of contagion, however, is experienced more indirectly.  I have called it Radical Outreach. This point begins very early in the Christian narrative.  Jesus and his disciples ministered to blind people and deaf people and lame people, to mentally handicapped people and possessed people, lepers and Samaritans, tax collectors and zealots, and others.  The establishment institutional religion of the Temple had written these people off.  Indeed, the Temple’s policy prohibited such people from even entering the temple.  Those populations, and others, were officially “hopeless.”  This is the point: Christianity was conceived in the radical outreach that engaged allegedly hopeless people. It typically begins when we visit their turf, and when begin where they are, rather than where we’d like them to be.

As the Christian movement spread to the cities of the Roman Empire, it gradually took a more institutional form, and in time became more like the Temple.  Rural populations were not urbane and were therefore hopeless.  The Goths, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Vandals, the Frisians, the Vikings, and all of the Celtic peoples, including the Irish, were not Latin speaking, Roman enculturated people. Obviously, all of those barbarians were not civilized enough to become “Christianized.”

This book of tragedy has many chapters, but we do not need to recount the whole volume.  Most churches today, in our nation and in our communities, assume that many types of people are unreachable; it would probably be impossible (they assume) for those people to become real Christians “like us”.   To be specific: For many (or most) churches, pre-literate people, “hard living people,” co-habiting couples, homeless people, bikers, Goths, jet setters, mentally-ill people, Mandarin speakers, people with tattoos, addictive people, introverts, and many others need not apply.

Perceptions, whether they are accurate or not, take on their own reality and, when acted upon over time, become self-fulfilling prophesies.

Using a metaphor borrowed from chemistry, consider “catalytic” growth. When an athlete takes in Creatine before a workout, the supplement catalyzes an energy source within muscles that permits two or three more bench presses, which in turn catalyzes more muscle growth.  In every society, there is an establishment population, and there are “fringe” populations whom the establishment people regard as “impossible” or “hopeless.”  Catalytic Christian movements begin when some of the “hopeless” people are reached, and some of those people experience transparent life change.  Such transformations catalyze spiritual openness in many other people, including establishment people, and the faith now spreads, contagiously.

Tags: George Hunter III, Kingdom Concept, Local Predicament

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The Culture Around Your Church Determines How Best to Reach It

by: George Hunter

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What makes Christianity contagious?  We are sufficiently familiar with some of the answers: Contagious Christianity is imaginative, engaging, enthusiastic, and growing. Those four ways we know; but three others warrant some explanation.

Cultural Relevance

Culturally relevant expressions of Christianity are much more contagious than culturally alien expressions.  The very early Christian movement had to schedule its first “council” to clarify and settle this important strategic principle.  The first constellation of house churches—in Jerusalem, led by James, constituted a culturally Jewish expression of Christianity.  Most (or all) of the believers in Jerusalem were Jews who affirmed Jesus as the promised Messiah.  Keeping Judaism’s Sabbath laws and customs, and worshiping in Aramaic, were completely natural to them.  Gentiles were very welcome in the Jerusalem church, if they submitted to circumcision, gave up their Gentile culture and adopted Jewish ways, and learned the Aramaic language.

There was, however, a problem.  Up north in Antioch, Gentiles were becoming disciples and were not submitting to circumcision, and so on.  So, as reported in Acts 16, James called a meeting in Jerusalem to settle the matter once and for all. Paul advocated that the faith should not impose one language and one set of customs on other peoples; the faith was called to adapt to every tongue and culture on the face of the earth.

Paul’s case prevailed, and the principle of (what came to be called) “indig­enous” Christianity became the policy of the early Christian movement.  Acts 16 reports the most important decision ever made to facilitate the expansion of Christianity—in every cultural context, in every age.  But it would be an under­statement to say that the Church has not consistently followed the policy.

Often, the Judaizing principle operates in more informal ways, short of official policy, in which Christian leaders simply assume that a specific dialect, and a sub-culture’s customs and aesthetic, are necessary for Christian expression and experience.  This was one problem that John Wesley observed in his Church of England in the eighteenth century.  The “common people” did not speak establishment Christianity’s language. They did not dress, conduct themselves, and enjoy the same kind of music that characterized polite, refined “Christian” society.  How could such people become “real Christians?”  You know the rest of the story.  Methodism’s approach began on the people’s turf, and the approach adapted to the “common people’s” style, language, aesthetics, and music, and a contagious movement emerged—of, by, and for the people that establishment Christianity had written off as unfit for Christianization.

We should not assume, in most of our churches, that we are at all past that problem today. Many secular people are not like  “good church people,” culturally, and they do not understand stained-glass voices and ecclesiastical jargon.  In case you have not noticed, among the unwashed pagan masses, there is no epidemic interest in eighteenth century pipe organ music!

As Jesus, in the Incarnation, took on Galilean culture and spoke Galilean folk-Hebrew, so his Body the Church is called to extend such incarnational expressions to every people.  Then Paul modeled the way, as he became “all things to all people” that “some might be saved.”   The indigenous principle can be stated in one sentence.  Each people’s culture is the natural medium for expressing God’s revelation to them.

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Tags: George Hunter III, Kingdom Concept, Local Predicament

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Budgeting for the Preferred Future

by: Mark Howell

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I’ve written about arriving at the preferred future a number of times.  My most requested talk features this concept.

The essence of the concept?  The present can be explained by an understanding of Andy Stanley’s insightful one-liner: ”Your ministry is perfectly designed to produce the results you’re currently experiencing.”

The probable future can be anticipated.  As Albert Einstein famously declared, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Want to arrive in the preferred future?  Don’t want to end up in the probable future?  You must begin to do different things.

What makes the new trajectory possible?  Among other things, budget reallocation.  Budget is a zero sum reality.  It must be allocated to the critical growth path.

How does that happen?  Peter Drucker’s wisdom is enlightening:

“Innovating organizations spend neither time nor resources on defending yesterday.  Systematic abandonment of yesterday alone can free the resources, and especially the scarcest of them all, capable people, for work on the new.”

Scarily efficient.  Not an endeavor undertaken lightly.  Which is why Carl George’s line is so compelling: “Leaders allocate the finite resources to the critical growth path.”

Tags: Mark Howell, Vision, Vision Frame

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Culture Trumps Everything

by: Eric Geiger

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Martin Luther referred to the gospel as “this article.” He said, “Most necessary is that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.” Luther knew that we have this proclivity to wander from our foundation. Thus we must constantly and continually beat the gospel into our hearts and into the people we serve and lead. To drill the gospel into the heads of our people, we need more than our confessions and our creeds to be centered on the gospel. We need the culture of our churches to stand firmly on Jesus and His work for us.

The culture of a church is powerful. It dominates everything else. It is constantly teaching, constantly showing people what is most important. By culture, I am not referring to a church’s ethnic or socio-economic mix. I am referring to the shared values and beliefs that undergird all the church does. And while your doctrinal statement, your strategy for reaching your community, and your leadership structure are important, in many ways your church culture trumps them all. For example:

If the doctrine of the church is that all believers are priests and ministers because our great high priest has made us priests through His death, yet the culture of the church values only “professional ministers” – the culture will trump the doctrinal confession. A pastor preaching Ephesians 4:11-12 one time will not automatically remove the unrealistic and unbiblical expectation that the pastor is the one who does all the ministry.

If the doctrine of the church is the true and accurate belief that the sacrifice of Jesus is bigger than any sin, yet the culture does not allow for openness and confession, someone who admits a struggle will be unlikely to experience mercy expressed from another. A graceless culture overpowers a grace-filled confession.

If the doctrine of the church is we are to live as missionaries because Jesus stepped into our culture to rescue us, but the culture of the church focuses almost exclusively on the church calendar and what happens in the building – the culture will attempt to squelch and suffocate desires to serve the surrounding community.

Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He was not diminishing strategy. He was simply recognizing the overwhelming influence culture has on people. If the culture of a church is at odds with the doctrinal confession of the church, the culture typically wins. The unstated message speaks louder than the stated one.

Tags: Eric Geiger, Folklore, Scripture, Symbol

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Laypeople and the Mission of God, Part 3

by: Ed Stetzer

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I continue my series today about laypeople and the mission of God. Let me start with a crisis point in my ministry that helped me to see the issue more clearly.

When I planted a church in Pennsylvania we started strong, particularly for the North, by growing to 125 the first year. We had 25 people in our core and 100 new people who came over the course of the first year. But the new 100 people didn’t do anything. They were passive spectators rather than active participants in the mission of God. And so we recognized that we had a cultural problem within the congregation.

There was a culture of non-participation. People came to be objects of ministry rather than co-laborers on mission. They wanted to be what I could call today “customers of the religious goods and services” distributed by our exciting new church. And, it was killing me.

I spent hour upon hour ministering, calling, working, and begging others to do that same. It was not working as people preferred to receive rather than to give.

So, we began to change the atmosphere to one of expectation that people will serve in ministry.

My motivation was not so complicated. What I tried to do was to shift the culture in my church from passivity to activity. When new people came into our church, most of them connected to the 100 passive people instead of the 25 active. A bad situation became worse.

So we took a full year to make a change through preaching, teaching, and training. We realized that we had to help people get it, so we did. We launched an internal campaign that was driven by a compelling question: “How do we shape the value of active service into our people?” And so over the course I preached messages about serving, we talked about it in small groups, and we did a training campaign on it. Finally, we asked the 25 to put positive, gracious peer pressure on the 100.

We had a print campaign, testimonies and videos. We went to each other’s houses and encouraged everyone to get involved. The end result was we wanted to change the atmosphere of expectation that people are responsible for the ministry of the church.

Part of the challenge was not just saying, “Hey, Jerry, you really need to do this.” We needed the tools and clear next steps. So we said, “Jerry, we want you to do this, but we want to train you for this. We have a course we want you to go through, a series of three courses. Would you go through this one with us?” At first it was slow over but over time people began to change.

How did it go? Well, not everybody got on board. One person in our church came to me and said, “Ed, my wife and I don’t think we should have to go through these classes. We’ve been Christians our whole lives, and why do we have to do that?” I said, “I totally get that, but this is the way we do it here at our church.” And I confessed, “Listen, I totally get that there’s no biblical command to go through these three courses, but our leadership and our church decided that this is the best way that God would have us to do things. So if this is your church, then this is what we think you should do.” So, they promptly left the church– and soon another left.

So, I’d encourage you to consider five truths about the tendency to being a customer of the church.

First, people naturally want to be objects of the ministry, not partners in it. That’s why the Bible says, “consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works” (Hebrews 10:24, KJV).

Second, people want to see others serving while they are the one being served. That’s why the Bible says, “Based on the gift EACH ONE has received, use it to serve others, as good managers of the varied grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10, HCSB).

Third, if you are a pastor, one of your most important roles is to equip people for ministry. That’s why the Bible says that God gave leaders “for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12, HCSB).

Fourth, it is not natural to be a giver. It is natural to be a receiver. That is what we desire, but that selfishness is what the Bible speaks against. That’s why the Bible reminds us that it is “more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Fifth, when only pastors do for people what God has called all His people to do, everyone gets hurt and the mission of God is hindered. God has given gifts to his people for the good of all. That’s why the Bible says, “a demonstration of the Spirit is given to each person to produce what is beneficial” (1 Corinthians 12:7).

When God’s people think less like customers of the ministry and, instead, see themselves as the owners of the ministry, it’s a whole different kind of church.

The next post in this series will unpack the incredible resource for the mission of God that is sitting comfortably right under our noses each Sunday.

When we change our expectations of God’s people we might be surprised at what God does.

Read Part 4 here; go back to Part 2 here.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Ed Stetzer, Serve

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The Gospel and Community

by: Aaron Armstrong

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A lot of time is spent discussing of the mission and purpose of the church in the world. What should it look like? What makes it unique? Does it still matter? The answers are incredibly varied and nuanced, but usually they tend to focus on a couple of elements: doctrine and practice. We need to develop a sound theology to undergird our understanding of the church and our practice ought to flow from this. For the most part, most books I’ve read all agree on this point (even if the particulars of these vary drastically).

But there’s something else that’s missing in the discussion—the culture of your church. The church’s culture reveals what’s really at the heart of the congregation… and if we’re careful to look closely, we might find a disconnect.

It’s why so many churches face the difficulty of saying they’re about the Bible, yet the congregation never opens it, or we value evangelism, but our event schedules are so booked with classes, lectures or pot-lucks that we don’t have time to actually get to know anyone who’s not a Christian.

So how do we develop a culture where we’re actually about the things we say or think we’re about? In their new book, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church, authors Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson, and Eric Geiger offer their insights into creating a gospel-centered culture that fuels every aspect of the local church.

The gospel and community

The authors divide the book into two parts, first examining the unique attributes of the “creature of the Word” (that is, the Church)—how God brings together a people, forming a body for His purposes in the world, and how it is to behave, worshipping, multiplying and serving in community. While many might consider this a “yeah, I get it” point, the authors remind us that we must always start here:

For just as an individual must continually return to the grace of Jesus for satisfaction and sanctification, a local church must continually return to the gospel as well. Our churches must be fully centered on Jesus and His work, or else death and emptiness is certain, regardless of the worship style or sermon series. Without the gospel, everything in a church is meaningless. And dead. (Kindle location 201)

We cannot move too quickly past the need to honestly examine ourselves in light of the gospel, whether individually or corporately. If we fail to do the hard and necessary work of self-examination and repentance, we’ll fall flat on our faces. There won’t be anything to sustain a truly Jesus-centered culture within our communities.

This point is arguably one of the authors’ strongest as they explain there really isn’t such a thing as true Christian community without the gospel and all it entails, for, “The gospel is the deepest foundation for community.”

They continue:

…any attempt to build community on something more than the grace of Christ becomes a subtle move away from grace, a move toward pseudo-community that only puffs up and fails to transform. If something other than the person and work of Jesus becomes the foundation for a group of believers, that “other thing,” whatever it is—economic level, social manners, music preferences, common life experiences—becomes what they use to differentiate themselves from others. And it immediately becomes a point of boasting, a way to feel justified. (Kindle location 933)

Consider this critique carefully. This isn’t meant only for the seeker church or the “progressive” church… it’s got those of us in theologically conservative churches in mind, too. Over the last few years, there’s been a renewal of concern over what it means to be a biblical church. And frequently you hear that a true church is “gospel-centered.” While this is unquestionably a good thing, there’s a danger in turning it into a new measuring stick; so it becomes about how many months our sermon series runs, how long the preacher speaks for, how many churches we’re planting… The things meant to serve the gospel wind up enslaving us.

Read Part Two here.

Read more from Aaron here.

Tags: Aaron Armstrong, Creature of the Word, Scripture

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