...to everyday life

Planning: Ins and Outs, Ups and Downs

I've been working on a presentation for the Board tonight regarding our future: capital improvements, staffing, funding, etc. Stuff that didn't make it into our strategic ministry plan (I'll be sharing our top three goals from that plan for this year in my message on the last weekend of September).

Here are some reminders and insights from the process:

• I'm way too impatient. I want to move yesterday on everything. I don't want to pray about it. I don't want to trust God that he can move in big ways without our help, our money or our plans. But the fact that God doesn't just plop the money down and give me a list of his priorities is a gift. It makes me fall on my knees and depend more on him.
• Putting it down on "paper" and out of my head (1) is the catalyst to recognizing and calling out my impatience, prayerlessness and lack of faith, (2) makes it obvious that everything can't be done at once and (3) gets the ball rolling in the right direction leading to prayer and discernment.

So, what kinds of things am I thinking about and will I be presenting on tonight?

• We're currently working with a company on sound, video and lighting challenges we're facing at both campuses. Getting down to what really needs to be done and how to pay for it will be challenging.
• I'm deeply concerned (even troubled) about several building issues including (1) the impossibility of reading our Radio Drive sign when driving by (new signs are extremely expensive and the size is highly restricted by the city); (2) the broken concrete by the front doors; and (3) the first impression of the half driveway as you enter (no, we didn't build it like that...it use to be a full one in phase one and we couldn't afford to eliminate it in phase 2 or 3 without sacrificing other priorities).
• We've been understaffed for a couple of years and it's hard to plan additional staff in this economy and without more growth (we grew 3% in the ministry year that just ended). I have too many direct reports since we did not rehire an executive pastor, but streamlining that in a way that makes sense and doesn't put current staff over the edge is much harder than you might think. 

So those are some of the issues the Governing Board will look at tonight. Any thoughts?

The Importance of Campus Ministries (This is for anyone who has children of any age)

Many of you have heard me talk about this before, but I can't stress it enough. The key to a college student's spiritual walk in college is directly tied to their participation in a campus ministry like Campus Crusade, InterVarsity or Navigators or in a good church. In my experience with students, the campus ministry is the "gateway" to a good church in college.

If your kids are in college, do all you can to get them involved. I know, it may be impossible to force it at this point if they don't do it on their own, but it might be worth nagging about, calling a vibrant ministry on campus and asking them to target your child, offering financial incentives or disincentives to your child...whatever is not sin and will work for YOUR child is worth trying.

If your child was involved in our student ministries, chances are they will seek it out for themselves, but they may need a nudge. One of ours knew how important it was, heard Tim and his parents (us) talk about it all the time and fully intended to join, but school was busy and starting new things is intimidating, so he put it off. With some nudging and nagging and praying and a phone call to the campus ministry, he got involved and is a leader in that ministry today.

The other side of all this is that after you've done your part and exhausted your options, you do have to let it go and hand it over to God. Keep praying, but stressing out about it won't help anyone.

But in my experience, parents let go on this way too soon. Sadly, some let it go as early as junior high. If you required your kids to go to school and to work and to get good grades but did not very strongly urge or "require" that they go to church or student ministries of some kind, repent now. Yes, there are exceptions to this, that's why I make it a habit not to judge any persons situation (I'm not walking in their shoes), but chances are you're not one of those exceptions. Repent now before it's too late to make a difference. As long as they are your dependent, it's never too late to start "requiring" that they also cultivate this value that far surpasses good grades, a great career and a good work ethic in importance.

A Remarkable Greeter

I experienced a little deja vu this past weekend. Lois and I visited one of the campuses of The Chapel, a fou-campus multi-site church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. An older man, Alex, greeted us as we came in. He asked a simple question as we entered, "Are you new to The Chapel?" I told him we were visiting relatives close by and had heard about their church through my niece. He proceeded to give us the history of the place, a guided tour, introduced us to the campus pastor, and gave us every brochure they had. 

A few things stood out about Alex:

• He didn't fit the younger demographic of the church.
• He explained that he's the Megyver of the church. He can fix most things, and he knows technology since he started into computing in 1964. 
• He was a leader in the Lutheran church that was going under, and it's his signature on the deed they gave to The Chapel when they took over leadership four years ago.
• He knew we were new because he stands at that door for every service every weekend. 
• He was excited about his church!

Keith (our Hudson Campus Pastor) was talking to a group of leaders recently, and he said my wife's name came up several times. Seems a lot of people who came when we meeting at the school were deeply impacted by her warm welcome and were amazed when she remembered their name the second time they came. She's not that good with names, she was simply there every week and worked hard and intentionally at memorizing names. Seems Dan Berglund's name came up too. He was always at the door welcoming people, wearing an orange jump suit in the winter, making sure no one slipped on the ice.

Alex's campus is growing. They have three services in their 200 seat auditorium and have plans for expansion. I can tell you from our experience and the stories we heard all the time, our greeters have made a huge difference in our growth.

It's a different kind of experience at the Woodbury campus now because of our size, but a helpful (and not overly friendly) greeter still makes an important difference. A personal touch in a larger campus is noticed. We get those kind of comments on the cards from first-time guests all the time. And for Hudson, the impact can be even bigger. 

Can I put out a challenge, though? I think we could do even better if we had a few people who were there every week so that they could become more familiar with the faces and names of our first-time guests...people who saw this as a crucial ministry where they can make a significant impact. Yes, we need a lot of people who will work once per month on a rotation, but we only need a few that will be there every week. Are you one of those people?

Book Highlights: Focus

Focus: The Top Ten Things People Want and Need from You and Your Church is the third book based on REVEAL research. The gist of the book is to look at what people want from their church and what they actually need for spiritual growth and vitality. Then they do the same thing for what people want and need from their senior pastor. The idea is to help church ministries and pastors prioritize.

Top Highlights:

• Based on their research what people want most and need most match. People's top want is spiritual guidance and that's their top need. 
• Spiritual guidance = helps me develop a personal relationship with Christ; challenges me to grow and take next steps; provides a clear pathway that helps guide my spiritual growth; church leaders model and consistently reinforce how to grow spiritually; helps me understand the Bible in greater depth.
• Belonging (not meaning ownership but affiliation, like with a favorite sports team) is the second most powerful driver for satisfaction and needs to be prioritized by churches, even though it is not a spiritual growth driver, otherwise they won't stay around for spiritual guidance.
• Although "encourages me to take responsibility for my own spiritual growth" didn't factor for satisfaction, it is one of the most important needs and therefore needs to be creatively prioritized.
• People want preaching and vision casting from their senior pastor but most need spiritual challenge for growth. No match.
• The match comes when you look at what people want out of preaching/vision casting: Bible learning, modeling spiritual growth and challenge to grow and take next steps.
• One of the huge surprises: for senior pastors, the role of leading the church had four times the impact on satisfaction with the church's role in spiritual growth compared to the role of teaching/preaching. Even the best sermon doesn't have nearly the spiritual impact as do the day-to-day decisions a senior pastor makes about how to lead a church--specifically the decisions that deliver spiritual guidance through the church.
• We catalyze their spiritual growth by helping them understand the Bible in greater depth, by challenging them to apply Scriptures with specific next steps and by modeling how we are taking those steps ourselves.

Book Highlights: Deliberate Simplicity

I've been following Christ the King Community Church in Washington state for a few years now. Dave Browning, their pastor, has written his manifesto for how they do church in Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church Does More by Doing Less. We've been following a similar philosophy of ministry ever since I came to Five Oaks (way before it was popular), but I learned a lot from Browning. Having generally followed this approach for years, I'm more aware than ever of some down sides that we're currently addressing. Browning doesn't cover the down sides, but he articulates simplicity as well as anybody. (For most of you reading this post, just read the "top highlights.")

Top Highlights:

• There is no growth without change, no change without loss, and no loss without pain. (12)
• …when you have something important to do, keep the process simple. The more complexity in the system, the more likely that implementation will fail. (27)
• …Meyer’s Law: It is a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple. (32)
• New believers can learn enough in just a few days to keep them growing for the rest of their lives. If you are taught to read the Word, pray, be in community, and reach out to others, you have the basic equipment to make the journey. (42) 
• …the apostle Paul would go into a pagan community, preach Christ, then appoint elders from among the converts before moving on to a new community…evidently the basic information needed for leadership…could be conveyed in a short period of time.
  
• …discipleship was defined as a relationship, not a program…Once you get pointed in the right direction, time is on your side. (42)
• The greatest sin of the church today is not any sin of commission or sin of omission but the sin of no mission. (69)
• When I was a kid, the solution…to rectify the discrepancy between how we lived our life on Sunday at church and how we lived the rest of the week was to act just as strangely Monday through Saturday as we did on Sunday. The solution I’ve come to as an adult is just opposite: be the same person on Sunday that you are Monday through Saturday. It seems to be working out a lot better. (94)
• While there are a limited number of programs that a Deliberately Simple church may initiate, there are an unlimited number of ministries that individuals may initiate. While corporate programs are discouraged, individual ministries are encouraged. (136)
  

More Highlights:

• While I am committed to a different approach to ministry…different does not necessarily mean better (p. 11).
• What if this church were more like a movement than a ministry? (15) 
• Less is more, and more is better. (17) 
• …if you participate in a Deliberately Simple church, you will most likely meet in a rented auditorium, sit on a stackable, chair, sing along with projected lyrics and a rock band, and hear conversational teaching by a bivocational pastor in blue jeans witting on a stool. (18) 
• …a “boots on the ground” approach to the church’s mission. We believe that if we can get God’s people to simply love God and love people, the church cannot be stopped. (30) 
• Jim Collins: good to great companies made much use of ‘stop doing” lists.
• Worship is the way to stay centered. Small groups is the way to stay connected. Outreach is the way to stay concerned. (44)
• At Christ the King we advocate ten plus ten—ten minutes a day in prayer, and ten minutes a day in the Word. (54)
• …we think big but act small. We keep asking, “What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” We try to have just enough to facilitate our mission. Just enough money. Just enough time. Just enough leaders. Just enough space. Just enough advertising. (62)
• Most of the worship centers at CTK have begun with an investment of less than five thousand dollars. (54)
• Henry Trumbull…once said, “Unless a man is ready to work for the salvation of others, it may be questioned whether or not he himself is saved.” (70)
• (J.I. Packer) “To seek pleasure, comfort, and happiness is to guarantee that you will miss them all. …become heart realities only as by-products that come from focusing on something else, something perceived as valuable, invigorating, and commanding. The seeds of happiness, it has been truly said, grow most strongly in the soil of service. (71)
• Throughout the years, we have found that two kinds of people fit especially well I a Deliberately Simple church: lost people with ruin and wreckage in their lives, and saved people who have a heart to reach out to lost people. (72)
• It’s time for us to quit standing at the barn doorway, inviting the crops to come in. (74)
• We include “those who are about to come” in our constituency instead of just those who are already here. (76)
• …we want our energy to go into experiencing and expressing the grace of God, not into impression management. (94)
• Bill Gore, founder of…Gore-Tex, is committed to multility [sic] for his workforce. He limits the size of his plants to not more than 150 employees (a size he feels is optimum for a sense of family). To insure this size, he limits the parking lot to 150 cars. He knows it’s time to build a new plant when employees start parking in the grass. (133)
• Our strategy is to multiply groups by multiplying leaders. We have come to the conclusion that we are not in the church growth business. We are not in the church planting business. We are not in the multisite business. We are in the leader deployment business. (192)
• Our process for multiplying leaders is IDTS: identify, deploy, train, support. Deploy first, then train. (192)
• The dream for CTK Community Church is to provide an opportunity for pastorpreneurial leaders to “plug and play.” That is, if you align with the mission, vision, values, beliefs, and priorities of CTK, then you can engage immediately with us in the work. It’s that simple.

 

 

Eagle Brook's Investment

One of the things I love about Eagle Brook Church is that they are investing in helping other churches become more and more effective in Christ's mission. They have two staff people dedicated exclusively to this endeavor. Dale Peterson, executive director of the Eagle Brook Association, will help any way he can if you just ask. Director Penny Isaac-Nelson is the same. So I asked Dale to come and experience Five Oaks and give us an honest evaluation.

Dale came this last weekend and then several of us took him out to lunch to hear what he had to say. He used a new tool Eagle Brook is developing, so we got a very detailed analysis. But I'd summarize his comments in three points (just like every good sermon, right):

• Very positive on all fronts. From first impressions to bathrooms to congregational friendliness and engagement in the service to smells (yes, he commented on how we smelled) to music. His assessment is that he could observe no big fixes needed from his visit and he was very encouraging about everything he saw and experienced.
• Keep tweaking. And he gave us some good ideas for doing evaluation on the weekends, some tweaks to music and the message, and a bunch of other good ideas.
• Think about the future. Dale got us thinking about the future and about reaching more people in ways we hadn't thought about for a while. It was stretching, and (for me) a needed kick in the pants. 

Dale's desire to see the church reach people for Christ and disciple them is contagious. And I'm so thankful for the work he and Penny are doing.

Things are Better Now

One thing I've never liked about "old people" when I was young was the way they were always comparing their day with my day and saying my day was worse than their day...that things are worse today and getting worser. :-)

Now that I'm "old people" I haven't changed my perspective. I think things are better now on almost every front, especially spiritually. Way better! I just have to think back to life in the 1970's to thank God we came out of that decade. What a waste. (Aside: Ever been to Woodbury Days? We thought things like that were a thing of the past in the 1970's. Even small towns couldn't get anybody to show up for anything but sports. People stayed home in droves and just watched TV.)

A college friend and I were talking about this last spring. He agreed with me. He told me of attending chapel with his daughter who is in college and being moved to tears as the student body worshiped passionately together. He said, "We didn't do that when we were in school" (the same school his daughter now attends). He was right.

I had the weekend off from preaching so Lois and I checked out a church that meets at Fridley High School on Sunday. The church is called Substance. We know some people who go there. It's about three years old and running well over 1200 in attendance by my calculation. A sea of young adult faces. Passionate worship and mission. (I learned some stuff there that I'll bring home to Five Oaks.) That didn't happen when I was in my 20's. And there are Substance-like churches popping up all over the place.

And now here's some data to support my point from the MMI blog.

...some of Baylor’s research findings really fly in the face of what we’re hearing in most polls coming out of the Christian community. Here is one of the declarations of this book:

The percentage of Americans that belong to a local congregation is actually INCREASING in the country. In fact, church membership is much, much higher in 2008 than it was, even in revolutionary times.

Stark shares research done for the book “The Churching of America, 1776-1990,” which went through an elaborate study to actually see what church membership has looked like throughout American history. Here’s what they found:

% of Americans Who Belong to a Local Congregation
1776—17%
1850—34%
1906—51%
1926—56%
1980—62%
2005—69%

Stark says that the Puritans were actually a very small minority of the people who settled in the new world.  European church attendance was dismal, and many settlers brought their religious habits with them.  Thus, only 17% were connected with the church in the early years of our country.

Church attendance isn't really the most important sign of spiritual vitality, but I don't think most of us would have guessed this about our country's history.

In any event, I'd never trade today for yesterday, and I'm so hopeful when I see the passion of our younger generations.

Here's one last thought: A lot of young adults are traveling from our end of town to Fridley. Some of them grew up in our church. Can we start something here that captures the vitality, spirit and youth of Substance? Possibly a Sunday evening venue at the Woodbury campus?

Crisis Man (or Woman)

Jim Elliot, murdered at twenty-three by the people he was trying to reach in Central America, wrote this prayer at the age of twenty-one:

Lord, make me a crisis man. let me not be a milepost on a single road, but make me a fork that people must turn one way or another in facing Christ in me.

Drifting

"Unless we are diligent to constantly raise our awareness for seeing people the way that God sees them, we will drift through our days and settle for letting broken people stay broken and lost people stay lost." (Bill Hybels)

Big Day and Memo this Weekend

It's an official Big Day as we launch our Memo2theNextPresident.com series. Link to the site and check it out. Invite some friends. There will be extra treats, a "campaign" theme in the Commons, "campaign" music in the service and some other fun stuff happening this weekend. Don't miss it. Invite your policy wonk friends to come and see how the Bible applies to leadership from the president to the little league coach.