...to everyday life

Signs of a Shrink-wrapped Life

Here's something I had to cut from my message for the same of time and focus. It's adapted from Paul David Tripp. Five signs of a shrink-wrapped life:

1 - Here and now. My life and eyes are focused solely on the hear and now. So it’s "an impatient kingdom that wants what it wants and wants it now." But you were designed to live with eternity in view. Yes, here and now is important, but this has to do with limiting our sight.

C.S. Lewis wrote that if you look back at history, the people that had the greatest impact on this age were people who thought most of the next age...people with eternity on their minds. The apostles, the reformers, those who abolished the slave trade, those who started hospitals of mercy all over the world left their mark in this life because their eyes were focused beyond this life. He then says this:

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.

2 - Me and mine. Of course God’s vision for my life begins right here at home, with my friends and family. But it also calls me to care for things and people outside of the borders of my tiny life. It calls me to have a world vision. It calls my heart to break over the things that break the heart of God. It calls me to invest in taking the message of the gospel and the demonstration of the kingdom beyond my Jerusalem and to Samaria and then to Judea and to the world.

3 - Wants and needs. Life dominated by personal wants and needs. Nothing wrong with desiring joy and happiness or even some nice things, but the shrink-wrapped life is most committed to get as much of my desires satisfied as possible. And my desires and wants and needs trump all else.

4 - Physical and material. Limited to the physical and material. We are physical people created to enjoy a physical world. But this is about being dominated by “what the hands can touch [rather] than [by] what the heart can embrace.”

5 - Entitlements and rights. Fighting for what I’m entitled to and on my rights. This is what drives you. Wanting to be served rather than to serve.

Paul David Tripp Quote

Here's the quote from my message with a little extra I didn't read in my message:

Sin is functionally atheistic and anti-social. Because it reduces my focus to me, it blinds me both to God and to others. And as a sinner, I may participate in formal religion and conduct relationships with others, but only to the degree that they fit with the purposes of my solitary kingdom. When I do this, there is no real room for worship of God and love for others in my functional life plan. Worship and love, wherever they exist in my life, get shrunk to the size of what I think I need and what I have determined I want. Whatever religion or community exists in my life, what I am really worshipping is me. So I will sing praise to God’s faithfulness on Sunday, yet question his goodness on Tuesday when he doesn’t deliver what I think I need. I will say I love you one day, yet lash out at you in anger on another because somehow you have gotten in the way of my plan. What looks like God-contoured living is often, upon closer inspection, a shrink-wrapped existence. (The Quest for More: Living for something bigger than you, p. 90)

What Kind of Boat is Five Oaks?

Rick Warren recently asked this question regarding Saddleback. Here's what he wrote in an email to his congregation (I'm not his mailing list). What do you think?

We're not a Sailboat that is blown every direction by the winds of culture. There's a lot in pop culture that we believe is wrong, even evil.  But we're not an angry Battleship either. We don't expect unbelievers to act like believers since they don't have the Holy Spirit inside yet.  Saddleback is a AIRCRAFT CARRIER.  We're a large platform for launching your mission in the world.  When you successfully return, you get refueled and head out again!

Halftime

Here's the link I talked about in my message: Halftime.org.

Have you achieved success—only to find that something is missing? If so, you may be ready to begin the most exciting journey of your life—the journey from success to significance. It’s commonly called Halftime.

Halftime is a season of life that offers the opportunity to look back on what you’ve accomplished, understand who you are, and then redirect your time and talent for an even more purposeful second half.

You are not alone. More than 12,000 people turn 50 each day in America, and a Harvard-Met Life study shows that more than half of these individuals want more meaning and significance in the second half.

We can help. Over the past decade, the Halftime^® organization has become the leading authority in this space. We focus our efforts on individuals just like you—financially independent marketplace leaders with a deep desire for a second half rich in eternal significance.

 

Essentials Multiplied

The reason I think Discipleship Essentials has such long-term potential goes beyond the material we're covering. I think the content is vitally important. Our chapter on Worship (and the holiness of God), for example, is one of the most critical lessons any follower of Christ can begin to learn.

Covering these topics, memorizing Scripture, the reading...all of these are catalysts for growth. Doing them in the context of small groups of three or four (no more, no less) is essential. But the greatest impact will come as everyone who is participating goes out and engages two or three more people and leads their own 25-week group. And then does it again. And again. And so on.

Leading others through the same material is where explosive growth begins for any disciple. And the more people go through this in our church and beyond, the greater depth and dedication to Christ we'll see in our small groups, evangelistic outreach and compassion work locally and around the world. I don't expect to start seeing momentum on this for two or three years, but when we do, I can't wait to see what will happen.

Fine China for Starving Children

"How can we multiply what we're doing if we haven't figured out yet how to get it right." Those are the words of one of my favorite pastors from one of the largest churches in America when he and his team sat around a table with the team from Community Christian Church to learn how to do multi-site. This is the church that put excellence on the radar screen for churches. The excellence of their services is so high, you can't help but marvel. Yet the senior pastor felt they hadn't yet grown up.

It reminds me of the realization I came to a couple of years ago. I would often talk about multiplying our church somewhere out there in the future. This is a high biblical value. What were we waiting for? Well, we needed to be fully staffed. We had a lot to learn. We hadn't figured it out yet. Sure, we would multiply...when we grew up.

Excellence is important. But sometimes it gets in the way of ministry. Yes, it's not excellence per se; it's perfectionism that gets in the way. But most of us can't really tell the difference. I know I had a blind spot on this and I saw it in one of the churches that came to the Hitchhiker's weekend. Several of them were struggling with how they could keep their value of excellence and multiply at the same time. That's not a bad desire or question, but as they talked I suspected something more than excellence driving their questions.

Reality is that if you multiply you have to give up your dreams of rock stardom in the kingdom. You have to hold things more lightly. You can't have a superstar band at every location or church plant. You have to believe that God can work through less than professional musicians and vocalists and teachers.

You can wait until you've got it together. You can wait for that day your services run like clockwork and you have a multi-million dollar monthly budget so that you can launch a new site with a paid band and full staff of pastors. But how many churches ever reach that level of "stardom?" There are a handful in the Twin Cities. If you wait for that day, 99 times out of a 100, it won't come!

That pastor (one of my heroes) got over his perspective, and their church multiplied several times and their sites are achieving excellence (in the good way we all should). But as long as we persist on perfectionism (on "getting it right"), it's like having a boatload of food and refusing to feed starving children because you can't find enough fine china to serve it on.

Our world needs more healthy churches everywhere doing the work of the kingdom--demonstrating the kingdom through acts of compassion and proclaiming the message of God's grace. Something is deeply wrong when we fail to do so because we can't afford to offer it unless we serve it on fine china or with the perfect ambiance.

Top 10 Observations from Hitchhiking

David Gafford and I spent a couple of days getting a behind the scenes look at Community Christian Church, a multi-site and church planting church with nine campuses and several affiliated plants. Their Hitchhiker's Guide to Multi-site event started with Leadership Community (this is one of the main reasons we went) and then we saw about five campuses between the two of us. We were there with about a dozen other churches (about 50 folks). CCC puts one of these on about four times per year.

Here are my top 10 observations:

1. Leadership is hard, but you can make it fun. CCC knows how to have fun and modeled it well for us.
2. No better way to train leaders than through apprenticeship. CCC drives home having apprentices at every level. CCC has leadership residencies where folks come to apprentice with a pastor for a year. The only cost to the church is the time of the leader. Some of thesse residents become campus pastors or church planters. If CCC had to pay for this, their reproduction would slow down to a crawl.
3. If you don't write things down and develop policies, it will come back to bite you. CCC is notorious for not having policies and procedures, and I think it's catching up to them. On the other hand, their apprenticeship model is second to none.
4. Policies can get in the way of kingdom work and a movement of God. That's the flip side of the last point. Part of the genius of CCC is that they don't have a bunch of policies and procedures. I believe policies are essential, but don't let them determine ministry. Flexible, adaptable, nimble, simple are all key words I will be using. 
5. Constantly innovate. Example: With their ninth campus they've found a way to save money on rental and provide a great environment by setting up those tents/fenses n the gym in the picture above. 
6. Every church that is on the go runs into some financial problems that result in a test and an opportunity. CCC had to do some layoffs this year for the first time ever. It tortured their senior pastor and embarrassed him (as he shared at Leadership Community). Yet it has provided an opportunity to analyze and improve. Over time the tendency is to get "fat." I'm absolutely convinced that "lean" is good for the kingdom. 
7. Some people's definition of excellence get in the way of kingdom work. CCC doesn't let that happen. I'll do a whole post on this one.
8. It's not about multi-site; it's about multiplication.
9. Big asks get big results. When CCC plants a church in another city, it's typical for several families in the church to pull up stakes, find new jobs and homes and move with church planter! This is typical. 
10. You can sometimes learn as much from people's mistakes as from their successes. The cool thing about this hitchhiking experience is that CCC isn't waiting until they get it all right to do it (they never will) and they're very open about what's going well and what's not. No pretension.
11. [Bonus Obersvation] Great leaders don't hold on to things too tightly. I see this in Dave Ferguson. I need to learn this big time. That's the theme that keeps running through my head on this vacation.

Relevance Conference (Eagle Brook) - Session Three

“Recapture Your Courage” - Bob Merritt

• Leaders battle fear and insecurities, as does everyone on the planet.
• “I have battled fear and insecurity all my life. And reaching goals doesn’t free me of fear. It only means the expectations are now higher.”
• The difference isn’t fear but the willingness to jump.
• Source of Fear: People. Abraham afraid of Egyptian officials. Elijah afraid of Jezebel. Peter afraid of servant girl. David afraid of Saul.
• Hire staff very carefully.
• “Churches attract a lot of weirdos. I’m not talking about the hurting... I'm talking about people who are just nutty and no amount of prayer will change them. ...They’re omnipresent... They’ll pull you off mission.” Have to set boundaries to survive them.
• Some people think their purpose in life is to straighten you out.
• Source of Fear: The demands of this job. The expectation for excellence keeps going up  (not mean perfection).
• We’re competing with home entertainment centers, kids sports, cabins, golf... Weekend services have to be excellent.
• All other ministries take their cue form the worship service.
• Two or three mediocre weekends in a row can take weeks to overcome so invitors feel comfortable again.
• Areas for immediate improvement: (1) Lengthy or awkward transitions...musicians rehearse transitions; (2) Announcements: long, boring announcements will kill a service...can’t have nervous or choppy announcements...written out, rehearsed and never more than three minutes or three in total...announcer has to make a warm connection with the congregation; (3) Music: Do whatever it takes to get the right people...put people on the stage for the benefit of the people out there, not the person on the stage; (4) Message: Very few people decide to follow Christ and get life transformed through the music, it happens through proclamation of the word
• Making messages better: (1) Make prep first priority of the week; (2) Involve your team - ask for input; (3) Insist on story and humor every week - people love to laugh; (4) Labor over every phrase; (5) Read constantly; (6) Share the teaching load.
• Sweat the details. If senior leaders don’t hold the line on excellence, it has a trickle down effect.
• Start with what’s broken and needs attention. What’s a dysfunction or barrier?
• Value incremental change. Nothing good happen overnight. No major breakthroughs or silver bullets. There is no one great program. It’s the small things every day that leads to the big things.

Relevance Conference (Eagle Brook) - Session Two

"Refill Your Tank" - Amy Anderson

• 3 Basic Project Models: (1) from scratch; (2) hamburger helper; (3) hot pockets
• Examples of each (you had to be there): All very good.
• Creative Process: (1) Message Plan from Bob (6 - 9 months); (2) Prioritize (not all series are created equal; inreach and outreach); (3) Pass the info on; (4) Creative Team looks at details and messages to after best opportunities; (5) Produce the project (if short term, use “hot pockets” but weeks out can do from scratch or hamburger helper).
• Sometimes you have to stop doing some things to focus on the best opportunities. Example: When Eagle Brook stopped doing different styles of services this last year to focus and launch new campus.

Relevance Conference (Eagle Brook) - Session One

About ten of us, staff and leaders, are at Eagle Brook for their one-day Relevance conference. Great opening sketch (very funny) and worship music.

Bob Merritt - "Recapture Your Mission"

• In ministry, sometimes feels like we’re standing in the middle of a swamp, wondering if it’s really
• With a little bit of faith and a little bit of action, miracles still happen. (Matt. 17:6 - Mustard seed faith.)
• Have to take a tiny step of faith... Story about losing keys in a swamp, praying and taking a step of faith to look...
• There are times when the clarity you need will only come through prayer and fasting.
• God speaks to leaders in ways different from everyone else...lots of responsibility and sometimes don’t want it.
• Story: Recapturing their mission at Eagle Brook...Car dealer story...antenna was up for real people with real needs...
• Learning #1: Leadership 101 - What’s the problem? Am I willing to own up? How will I involve key leaders? What is the strategic plan to address the problem?
• Learning #2: People love a compelling cause. People want to be stirred and hate to be bored.
• Learning #3: Alignment is powerful. Focus the whole congregation in every way possible.
• Learning #4: Risk is required. No guarantee it would work. You know it’s a God-sized risk if failure will hurt badly.
• What if they had ignored the problem of stagnant growth and done business as usual?