I've Been Thinking About This…

If you’re tracking me on Bloglines or some other blogreader, I’m splitting this blog up into 3 pieces:

• All my Christian, church and faith-related entries will go here;
• posts related to software design and development, hardware and other technology will go here, and
• other stuff into a catchall here.

New blog entries will still be announced via twitter & facebook.

Several reasons, but the precipitator was that this blog has been around for about 3 years and I’ve messed with it so much it was starting to do some very weird things – pieces of admin pages going walkabout; cache acting strangely; stuff like that. So I started fresh, exported everything to the appropriate new blog, and away we go…

Happy reading!

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Here are the supporting Scriptures from the message on ‘A Father’s Heart’, June 20, 2010. The audio message will be posted here: A Father’s Heart

… and the slides are here:

Download (PPT, 255.5KB)

Further readings on ‘A Father’s Heart’:

Want to know what your teenage kids are up against? This is an eye-opener:

… and here’s another …

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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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And finally, thoughts on chapter 5 as promised:

(v 1-4) Shepherds: Peter is an elder, a witness and Heaven-bound; as such, he appeals to his fellow elders in churches that will read this letter. They are to shepherd the churches entrusted to them tenderly, so that when Jesus appears to them they will be rewarded. (You get the sense here that Peter is expecting the return of Christ from the clouds, rather than an appearance at death; not that the end result is different.)

(v 5-7) Sheep #1: listen humbly to those in charge. (Here Peter quotes Job 22:29 – as does James 4:6.) Being humble now also brings reward later – in this case you will be exalted. Similarly, He cares for YOU, so cast your cares on HIM.

[A side note – how interesting and consistent God’s method is: pray for patience and get the chance to exercise it (gack!); pray for wisdom with time management or humility likewise brings the opportunity. But the end result of gaining humility is to be exalted. What is the like result for patience and margin?]

(v 8-9) Sheep #2 (and presumably shepherds as well now): “Be sober-minded” – just as alcohol allows the drinker to make foolish decisions, in the same way avoid foolish choices in daily life – think before you act (indeed, ACT rather than REACT); be thoughtful and considerate. Be aware that the devil wants to bring you down – to devour you (or your witness – how many times in recent decades have we seen men with great witness brought down because they overlooked these words?). Resist him. All your suffering is shared by others. (Other Scriptures of note here: Jam 4:7; 1 Cor 10:13.)

(v 10-11) Back to suffering: At the end of suffering, all is more than restored – you are not just healed, you are confirmed (i.e., what you stood for was true), strengthened and established by the One who has all power for all time.

(v 12-14) Closing: Peter’s Greek in this letter was apparently far above the ability of a Galilean fisherman. Silvanus (or Silas), who also traveled with Paul was a Greek scholar though, and Peter here credits him with the writing down of this epistle.

“She who is at Babylon”: The Greek has “The elect one in Babylon”. Babylon was probably a code name for Rome. The KJV has ‘the church in Babylon’.

Mark: we also know him as John Mark, author of the Gospel of Mark; he traveled with Paul for a while (Acts 12:25), had a breakup (Acts 15:38-39) but later Paul referred to him as a trusted companion (2 Tim 4:11). Peter and Mark may have had something else in common: many think that Mk 14:51-52 refers to John Mark. If so, they both ran off on the night Jesus was betrayed.

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