I've Been Thinking About This…

Charles Stone

• Half of all pastors act like a turtle with problems – they process pain and hurt alone. Became closed, guarded and protective. Wish I’d found a couple of men with whom I could share and have speak into my life – mentors.

Anthoney Trufant

• place a premium on being open and honest.
• invest in the stewardship of self
• Keep your family first.
• develop some holy friends
• you may be the key leader, but you’re not the sole leader
• take risk.
• learn that the first ‘no’ may not be the final ‘no when you propose something.
• learn that conflict is not an enemy, but an ally
• learn different styles of coping with conflict.
• enter your ministry with an exit strategy – don’t leave baggage behind.
• deal with your own baggage immediately. Otherwise it will come up at inconvenient times.

Andrew McQuitty

• Success in ministry is not defined by numbers & money
• focus on faithfulness not results.
• obey God, don’t work for Him. Otherwise, God becomes your PR agent – it’s His job to make you look good.

Jim Herrington
3 wrong steps:

• We need to stop seperating sacred from secular.
• We need to stop thinking that information transforms – only experience transforms.
• We need to stop condemning failure.

Cal Jernigan

• Have a mentor.

Dennis Keating

• Can’t be father to the world. Can’t ‘do it all’. Just because the ministry calls you, doesn’t mean God is calling.

George Cladis

• It’s about management
1. Self-management – loving God & loving your neighbor
2. Family & friendship relationship management
3. Calling management – know your gifts and those around you; what makes for good team management?

Mel Lawrenz

• move close to the office ASAP
• Read ‘Getting things done’
• work with worship tema more
• connect with other pastors locally
• be more selective in reading
• be more regular in days off – with family
• handle criticism more directly
• delegate more organizational leadership
• collect more stories

Dick Alexander
A gravelly voice and some tremendous honesty!

• Make absolutely sure your focus is on family; seek counselling when necessary; protect your marriage and children.

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Bruce Wesley

• do you want speed to reproduce or strength in generating leaders?
• Develop 2 bars of leadership – a speed bar & a strength bar.
• Have yearly increments to move speed people to strength.

Tammy Kelley

• Ask more questions; make fewer declarations
• good things can become intoxicating; intoxicating can become toxic
• live a life more ‘fool for Christ’ and less ‘impress’.

Jason Barr

• I wish I’d never compromised
• I hired people too fast; should have done more due diligence; wish I’d hired on chemistry more than credentials
• noone can teach to be good stewards better than lead pastor – Don’t delegate this.
• I would rather do things for people than with people; I wish I’d been a better shepherd. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Craig Strickland

• church plants tend to be a magnet for dysfunctional people
• I seriously underestimated the importance of generous giving
• It takes 3-5 years to change the DNA of the church

Matt Hannan

• Avoid unnecessary wars
• lead from the middle not the edge, even though the edge is attractional because it looks ‘edgy’
• Don’t think that spiritual leadership is distinct from strategic leadership
• God’s core agenda is ‘YOU’
• People who model false values instill false values in their disciples (if you teach that prayer is important without actually being a prayer warrier yourself, people will learn to say prayer is important without actually being prayer warriers themselves.)

Jeff Jones

• Wish I hadn’t tried to do it all. Missed out on a lot of things, so did my family.
• Wish I’d tried to do only the things no one else could do, instead.

Kevin Harney

• Having people keep sending money and prayers is fine, but not enough.
• Having committees that plan outreach is fine, but not enough.
• Organic Outreach is the target lifestyle.
• Elders should be held accountable for outreach themselves.
• Budget needs to reflect giving and outreach – what God’s call us to do.
• Train and equip all people – youth, men & women.

Steve Stroope

• Wish I’d guided the church to live that ‘family’ is the spiritual formation driver
• Church must remind, resource & equip the family to do it
• Developed kiosk & online to resource the family
• Ensure that no ministry unintentially left the parents out

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Blogging the SAGE conference at Praise Christian Fellowship. As during “The Nines” last Fall, the sound levels are bouncing back and forth a bit, but the quality of sharing is absolutely wonderful. Lots of great speakers – none of whom I recognise.

We don’t have a large crowd here – but those who are in on it are saying good things. One woman said, “This should be mandatory listening for everyone.”

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One of the remarkable things about humanity is that it is aware of itself and investigates itself. Not just an ego, but a full-on ‘Why does this part of me work? How would it be if I didn’t have that bit?’ The brain is a particular conundrum. How can we use our brains to hold information about our brains? It’s a bit like putting a box inside itself. Imagine being in a position to learn what data your brain held. Where would you put that knowledge? Inside your brain, of course … which means that not only do you now know about the thing inside your brain, but you know about knowing about the thing as well, which inevitably leads to knowing about knowing about the thing. Next …em… ‘thing’ you … um … ‘know’, you’re in an infinite loop, bane of software developers everywhere (and especially FORTRAN coders).

Maybe 10 years ago I came across this web page – a self-referential story titled, “This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself”, and a few years later tried to take this self-referential test.

Every once in a while I bump into a video that stands out from the vast sea of usual-ness. In the above vein, some 4 years ago on YouTube.com, ‘bramsvan’ from Community Christian Church uploaded a (not terribly good) cover of ‘DaVinci’s “Title of the Song” from their 2000 release CD called “The Life and Times of Mike Fanning” – a song about boy-bands. The song is self-referential – see it here.

Then at the beginning of the year, Charlie Brooker (who has a satirical news show in the UK on BBC 4 called ‘Newswipe’) put on a self-referential piece about how today’s broadcast news shows build each piece from a template. This meta-news piece was bumped up to YouTube.com in late January – you can see it here, but be aware that there are occasional outbursts of inappropriate language.

This was followed in March by a brilliant meta-drama – a satire on what goes into making an Academy Award movie.

And 2 days before that, this self-referential trailer appeared on Vimeo.com – North Point Church made this video for a series called “Sunday’s Coming” …

… which I’m guessing was about how stuck in a rut we can get in worship. Yesterday’s liturgical tradition has become today’s contemporary tradition. It rings almost painfully true for the contemporary worship that we see in large churches (and that many smaller churches are moving towards). And just like any music worship anywhere you go, there are many, many people who have dug down deep to provide wise criticism without having the faintest idea about why the video was put together – check out all the comments if you want to see sadness in action. Truly, no area of church is more criticized than worship, and nothing there more than the music.

Isn’t it also true, though, how we need to keep on changing? This last video shows us that already, even though we’ve only been doing ‘contemporary worship’ for 20 or 30 years in even the most progressive churches, we’ve got it down to a formula. If God wants us to grow (and He does), that means we have to change. Maybe it’s time to think of new and different ways to do worship – not just for the sake of, but for the reach.

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Evidently I like the books that are part of the Leadership Network Innovation Series. Dave & Jon Ferguson’s The Big Idea ¹ which I reviewed here and Larry Osborne’s Sticky Church ² reviewed here were both significant reads for me, and now Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon & Warren Bird’s A Multi-Site Church Roadtrip: Exploring the New Normal (Leadership Network Innovation Series) ³ dropped in wanting to be read and I’ve dog-eared many of the pages, just as I did their previous book, The Multi-Site Church Revolution ⁴.

The authors seem to enjoy drifting around the country visiting other multi-site churches – and they must have done it a lot in preparing this book. It’s a great scam! I only wish I’d thought of it first – but it’s always such a big deal for me to get organized for travel. However, I think they should take me with them for the next book.

‘Roadtrip’ is not an obvious book. Obvious would have been to write a chapter on each church visited, list the goods and bads of their implementation, then perhaps the history of the transition and a bunch of facts. And they do that, to a certain extent. But they also use each chapter to open up a sort of discussion on other areas of the multi-site challenges: technology, for instance (chapters 6 & 7) or international campuses in chapter 9. The end result is that they cover different approaches to multi-site – Do we want to open a new campus locally, in another state, in another country, on another continent, even on another world (the internet (not Mars (yet)))? Does the preaching happen live because the other campus has its own teacher? Or does the preacher drive from one campus to the next to preach? Or is a message transmitted by satellite or the internet or mailed or driven around? All these have their discussions. Then again, what triggers the church to open the new site? Is it a deliberate spin-off, or did the second site start as a church in its own right and merge in (and why)? How do you go about doing this? What are the hard-and-fast rules, and what are the guidelines? (See IPOD for instance, chapter 1.)

(As an aside: Not so sure about the (somewhat difficult to read) infographic on p. 17 that has 6 milestones of multi-site history; number 1 is the birth of the Church and number 5 is the publication of their previous book. Seems like the relative importance of things went adrift somewhere there – not sure I’d put my book on quite the same level as the birth of the Church!)

Their definition of ‘Multi-site’ is “one church meeting in multiple locations, sharing a common vision, budget, leadership and board” (p. 10).

• You don’t have to be a mega-church to go multi-site.
• 10% of all Protestant Christians in the US and Canada worship in a multi-site church. (This seems high to me, but I’m convinced that multi-site is a trend that God is using – read ‘Is God Dismantling Denominations?’ for more on that.)

I appreciated the summary facts about each church at the front of the chapter. As it happens, many of the churches they visited are the same ones that get me excited about church innovation, and so I get this extra low-down on them. Cool.

Other points of interest:

• What kind of madman launches multiple new campuses at the same time? I mean, why would it even cross your mind? (See chapter 12 for how well it worked.)
• What’s the difference between being a church with multiple sites and a church of multi-sites (See chapter 3.)
• Think a long-established liturgical church made up of parents and grandparents can’t go multi-site? Wrong. (See chapter 3.)
• Do not overlook the appendices. They’ve got some great summary information – resources, job descriptions and pitfalls to avoid.

There is one page in the book that I think is very wrong (sorry guys!), and I realize that the authors may have been more carried away with the idea than considering the ramifications: Chapter 6 has the story of the woman who lives in Texas but every Sunday turns to her old church (in Florida) on the internet for her time of worship. True, some weeks she invites friends and family over to watch with her. But we’re specifically told that she is not connecting to a local church. Usually when you move to a new town you put down new roots; you find a new church; you make new friends and enjoy and grow from their fellowship. It’s not all perfect, but it’s important. Sad to say, at this point the book lionizes the fact that this woman ‘and a growing community of people’ have used the internet to remove themselves from fellowship. This self-isolation – or clinging to the past – is emphatically NOT what we are called to do as Christians.

OK, flame off – I’ve just written about the only bit I disagree with. Not bad for 3 paragraphs of an entire book.

In summary and in the main, I found it a tremendously helpful book. Questions that have been surfacing as my church plays with the ideas involved in expansion – such as planting, moving to a second service or going multi-site – are finding answers here. And between it and its predecessor, The Multi-site Church Revolution, a good ‘roadmap’ of options and their costs has been laid out.

Give it a read – it’s a tremendous resource and documents the early days of what I am convinced is one of God’s next steps for His Church.

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Going through some old blogs in Bloglines, I bumped into one by Tony Morgan that pointed to a site that evaluates spiritual giftedness. That site starts with the passages in the New Testament that refer to spiritual gifts (Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12:1-31; 1 Corinthians 14:1-40; Ephesians 4:7-16; 1 Peter 4:7-11) and builds a list of those gifts, then asks a lot of questions (125 in all) designed to draw out your gifts. It’s all a bit Myers-Briggs-ish (not a bad thing – INTJ here three times in a row). I don’t see it as the complete be-all and end-all, because I think that neither Paul nor Peter was doing anything more than giving a list of examples of giftedness – those listed weren’t God’s full list; if they were, they’d all be listed every time.

However, it does give an indication of inclination to certain ministries based on the gifts it draws out. My church uses a list similar to this in the SHAPE class that we have everyone take when they become a member. So just for griggles and gins, I took it again. It only takes about 10-15 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, the areas that take no major physical effort were my high scores – Wisdom, Apostle, Leadership, Shepherd, Administration, Knowledge & Teaching. Mid-range were the more physical gifts – Missionary, Voluntary Poverty, Giving, Evangelism, Service, Hospitality & Helps (Service was dead center!), and the purely spiritual were mostly and pathetically waaay down at the bottom – although I was surprised that Prophecy, Exhortation and Faith fell above the physical gifts.

Give it a go – what are your high points? Spill the beans in the comments below.

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