I've Been Thinking About This…

I think this is clever marketing. In Japan, although newspapers are more widely subscribed to than in the US, the publishers can see an inevitable decline as the next generation moves up. They also observe that the next generation is crazy about manga – a stylized form of cartoon.

Wired Magazine on 'Manga News'

Putting the two together, they are appealing to young potential readers by setting the news into manga – real news in cartoon form. Talk about adjusting your approach to meet the culture!

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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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I’m becoming convinced that God has started to dismantle denominations. They served a purpose at one time – they fostered unity among a congregation and between like-minded congregations, but more than that, they helped to make concrete those aspects of faith that were essential. Formularizing faith has an advantage when people need to understand what their faith is all about – doing so comes at the risk of worshipping the formula rather than the faith. When we get too passionate about KJV versus NASB versus NIV, or about choir versus worship team – then we’ve lost the point of it all.

Again:

Tradition and Institutionalization are the enemies of Creativity; their weapons are comfort and safety – and they foster sloth, conformity, acquisition and control.… and you can quote me on that.

What seems to be taking the place of the relative permanence of denominations are the multisite churches. These

• spread the Gospel and they have a focused approach – a unity – that is stable for a while. They can be dispersed across one or more states – even countries.
• are innovative, creative and malleable – something that denominations cannot be.
• are sustaining tremendous growth because they are young, dynamic and driven.
• often have a very charismatic leader at the helm, who provides energy and vision.

Any single multisite church will die off or dissipate after a few decades as the leader slows down, moves on or passes away; its footprint can be picked up by another multisite, or by some completely new form of church that God may already be moving into place.

Another way that God seems to be working today is in combining efforts across congregations. Traditionally, churches that are already established have been at odds with a new church coming to town. They resent the potential loss of congregants, and I’m sorry to say that the minister is usually leading the way in this thought process. But we are called to unity, not jealousy…

So it was refreshing to see this tweet from Geoff Surratt in late Jaunuary –

Heard through Twitter that NewSpring is coming to Charleston. Glad to hear it, we can use the help reaching the lost in the Low Country.

(@GeoffSurratt is a pastor in a large multistate multisite church called Seacoast based in Charleston, SC; @PerryNoble is the lead pastor of rapidly-growing NewSpring based out of Anderson, SC). This is out of the ordinary – even though it shouldn’t be. We are all in the Body of Christ; we have the same mission in Matt 28; we were all saved by the same Savior.

Different churches reach different people. They’re in different parts of town or the state; they have different leaders who have different skills in reaching out, in speaking, in connecting to others. One church might be blue-collar, another mostly white-collar. One church loves a liturgical service, another a contemporary one.

Could it be – just possibly – that God wants to treat churches as He does people? That he has given them different gifts with the specific intention that those gifts be used to compliment each other?

• A church in a poor part of town provides the opportunity for a (financially) wealthier church to come beside it and receive Grace through sharing finances and also hard work – and thereby to recognize that financial and social privilege is not always the boon that the world makes it out to be (sometimes it can be a terrible impediment).
• A church in India is in a tremendous position to do good for all those around it – it’s at ‘ground zero’, so to speak. It’s poor financially, but what it can buy (food, clothes, buildings) it can obtain locally at a very low cost compared to an American church. A church in the US can’t easily help physically, but it can afford to send money and perhaps a few people to give support and guidance to the fledgling church. The effect on the Indian church could be enormous, and the backwash is pure Grace.

(Interestingly, it’s the multisite church leaders that seem to be setting the pace here – we rarely if ever hear of leaders of denominations traveling overseas to work on ground-setting for church planting. Yet Pete Wilson ( @PeteWilson ), the lead pastor of CrossPoint Church in Nashville, TN is in India as I write this; Perry Noble (@PerryNoble) was in Kenya last year.)

So I see this as part of God’s way forward for us. The missionary part we’ve been doing for a while – but the connection of multiple disparate churches in the same town – that’s so rare it can be thought of as new, and I see that aspect growing in the coming decade.

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Congratulations to @NewSpring church, on their 10th birthday, where @perrynoble is the lead pastor. He Twittered this today:

• Hey @NewSpring…10 years ago today there were 115 people who gathered for our first worship service! We had NO IDEA that God would do…
• …All that HE has done! And…the best is yet to come! Can’t wait until tomorrow!!!

Perry & Lucretia Noble

I passed the tweets on to my small group, and Pastor Ryan replied with this question – “What will we be shaking our heads at in disbelief at what God has done 10 years from now?!”

That got me thinking…

1. The rapture?
2. That there are now 1,043 people in our small group?

…or perhaps…

3. That our church (Praise Christian Fellowship, in Barkhamsted, CT) now has an average of 1,043 attendees, 85% of whom are striving to go deeper with the Lord, and who invited the other 15% so they can step into eternity also?
4. That we’ve run out of chairs 5 times over because members keep inviting friends?
5. That we have so many new believers that we have to rethink the way we disciple?
6. That, as we look back at 2010, we’ll be amazed at how ignorant, naïve, weak and foolish we were – but we stepped up to the mark anyway, took the risk and lived for Jesus – and it led to the hardest, most exciting and most glorious life-changing decade of our lives, totally dedicated to and utterly vindicated by Christ?

… or perhaps …

7. We’ll be shaking our heads about how life seems to be getting fuller and fuller, and that we can’t wait to see what He has next in His plan.

The best is yet to come. Always! Can’t wait.

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I was watching the pre-show about THE NINES the other day, and watching the viewer counter. At one point it rose to 310 simultaneous viewers. Not bad as an indicator of an event that only began to be publicized 6 weeks earlier! Here’s some other info:

• The schedule assumes 9 hours of transmission – there’s 8.62 hours of raw footage already. I must say I’m a little surprised, since there are some 75 speakers, and who ever heard of anybody that ever got up into a pulpit to speak for less than the allotted time! My guess would have been for 75*9/60 = 11.25 hours – but they’ve got the files.
• Some 7,000 people have signed up to watch. And if I’m any indication, that only includes the signer-uppers, not all the additional people who are going to show up by invitation to watch.
• There will be some live cut-ins at the top and bottom of each hour – sounds like the Catalyst conference is going to do some advertising then.
• There is no schedule for the day yet – they may push one out during the day. This is a bit disappointing – while I want to find new people to listen to, I’d also like to know when people I’ve heard of (but never actually heard) will be on.
• It will be pushed at streaming quality (500 Kbps), not at satellite quality for most people.
• Recordings will be posted after the conference.

I’ll probably be blogging the conference here at Praise Christian Fellowship in CT – let me know in the comments if you’d like to join us.

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