Archives for May 29, 2009
In my Google News feed this morning, an article from an Illinois paper caught my eye: "How to choose a church -- Four suggestions for seekers." The piece is written by an outreach pastor and is apparently part of a recurring "Clergy Views" series.
Here are the pastor's criteria—in condensed form—for a church worth plugging into:
- Integrity. "I would stay away from any church whose members claim to be perfect, just as I would stay away from a church where people's lives are not regularly being changed by the power of Jesus Christ."
- Doctrine. "What they believe will determine what kind of church they are."
- Friendliness. "If in a couple weeks, no one has made any effort to become your friend, move on."
- The right fit. "Churches are like blue jeans. Some fit some kinds of people, others don't. You have to find the kind that fits you."
Continue reading "Pastor Tells Seekers How to Pick a Church"...
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Archives for May 27, 2009
What Do Young Adults Think of Church?
A survey by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
Our new resource this week is Outreach to Young Adults. In light of that topic, I went and found the above video, which was produced by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
This 15-minute piece features a wide sample of interviews with young adults who either have had trouble connecting with the churches they've gone to or understand the obstacles faced by their peers. Midway through, they show a list of the top nine things their interviewees were looking for in churches:
- Safe community
- Authenticity
- Mentorship
- Passionate leaders
- Interactive environment
- Involvement
- Relevant engagement
- Intellectual challenge
- Technology and Internet presence
Continue reading "What Do Young Adults Think of Church?"...
Archives for May 22, 2009
I tend not to pay much attention to sensationalistic titles. The last thing we need, I figure, is another alarmist manifesto on how bad the world is becoming. And that's what I thought David Olson's The American Church in Crisis was before I took a closer look. Boy, was I mistaken.
Through fairly extensive research, Olson charts the life cycle of churches. He identifies common denominators between growing churches as well as similarities among dying churches. He explores when in its lifetime a church is the most evangelistic, when it becomes the most introspective, and when it begins to decline.
Olson also takes time to address changing sociological trends in American culture that present challenges for the church, including the shifts from Christian to post-Christian society and from modern to postmodern worldviews, and changing ethnic demographics.
Continue reading "Book Corner: Planting for the Future"...
Archives for May 20, 2009
Our friends over at Leadership have teamed up with the folks behind the Catalyst conferences to start a new digital magazine for ministry leaders, Catalyst Leadership. The debut 31-page issue includes articles from respected voices like Francis Chan, Andy Crouch, and Andy Stanley.
Browsing through it myself, I was impressed by the slick interface. Of course, in spite of the great paper-rustling effect, it's not exactly like holding a copy of Leadership journal in your hands. But it can also do things a paper magazine can't—my favorite feature, for instance, is the video embedding. Watch an excerpt from a Francis Chan sermon and then, on the same page, read some questions for reflection. There's a lot of great, free content here, and the whole thing just looks really nice. Check it out here.
Archives for May 18, 2009
BlogSpotting: Kevin DeYoung on False Apologies
When we repent for others and not ourselves.
Pastor and writer Kevin DeYoung caught my attention this morning with his blog post on false apologies—more specifically, apologies for the sins of others. He cites a 1940 article by C.S. Lewis that criticized the younger English generation of that time for its so-called apologies over the nation's past conduct.
Says Lewis:
When a man over forty tries to repent the sins of England and to love her enemies, he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up to certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be mortified without a struggle. But an educated man who is now in his twenties usually has no such sentiment to mortify.
Lewis thought that the twenty-somethings had their own mistakes to repent of, but instead they were opting to express, in the form of a national apology, their disdain for certain attitudes that they had never shared. That's not a "costly" thing to do, and not much of an apology.
Continue reading "BlogSpotting: Kevin DeYoung on False Apologies"...
Archives for May 15, 2009
I recently spoke to a church staff member who had been working with youth full-time for 12 years. Yet in his dozen years of service, he had only attended one Youth Specialties conference—that was all the training he ever received. I couldn't help but think how much he and the thousands of youth he worked with over the years could have benefited from additional training at conferences.
During tough economic times, many churches are looking at cutting all travel for training and events, but that may not be the wisest decision. Why?
1. The church is about people caring for people, so your most important resource is people! They need to be trained and equipped to not only care, but guard and protect. They need to know how to identify young leaders and raise them up. They need to develop an eye for gifting and calling as well as those on the margins. Investing in people is one of the best investments you can make.
Continue reading "4 Reasons Not to Cut Conferences"...
Archives for May 14, 2009
Some expressions of ancient-future worship are easy to identify. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship lists a few of the trend's more eyebrow-raising practices.
Pentecostal churches following the liturgical calendar. Episcopalians rocking at a U2 Eucharist. Baptists draping the sanctuary cross in purple for Lent. Bible churches celebrating weekly communion. Young adults raised on praise bands now chanting the Psalms.
Basically, ancient-future worship involves the melding of contemporary forms of worship with ancient ones. But according to the late Robert E. Webber (who coined the term "ancient future") it is far more than a paradox of style. By connecting us to the early church, ancient-future worship allows us to taste, as Webber wrote, the "communion of the fullness of the body of Christ" while rooting us in God's story and mission in the world.
Continue reading "Explainer: Ancient-Future Worship"...
Archives for May 11, 2009
The UnSuggester. It isn't new, but a few months ago, I stumbled across this entertaining feature at LibraryThing, a website where people can list the books they've read and connect with other readers. The UnSuggester is a search engine where you enter a book, theoretically one that you own or have read, and are given a list of books that are least likely to be right for you.
The results are based on which books are missing from the collections of LibraryThing users who have the book you give. It doesn't always seem to work, and I'm not sure how scientific it is, but it makes for a fun game, seeing which book tops the list of "unsuggestions" for a particular title. Here are some of the better pairs that I found:
My Life by Bill Clinton ≠ Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper
Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen ≠ Dune by Frank Herbert
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton ≠ Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella
Paradise Lost by John Milton ≠ Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters' Guide by Kay Gardiner
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer ≠ The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Give it a try. Can you generate any better pairs than these?
Archives for May 8, 2009
NOTE: This post is adapted from the book Missional Renaissance. In it, McNeal argues that missional churches will shift from program development to people development.
In order to help people grow, we're going to need a new scorecard that celebrates investments in people, not just programs, and cheers breakthroughs in people's lives, not just organizational achievement. We need a scorecard that supports a people development culture.
To pull off this new scorecard will require a retooling, a reallocation of every resource the church and church leaders employ. It can be helpful for us to think through this grid of resources: prayer, people (both leaders and your ministry constituency), time, finances, facilities, and technology. In each of these areas, we can and should identify specific results in people's lives that would signal genuine progress for them.
Below are some benchmarks to track your ministry constituency. These suggestions are just ideas to prime the pump of your imagination as you cultivate a people development culture.
Continue reading "A People Scorecard for Your Church"...
Archives for May 6, 2009
A couple weeks ago, we talked here about reasons you'll want to leave a ministry position but shouldn't. Today we're publishing a condensed version of an article, excerpted from When It's Time to Leave, that takes the opposite approach: when you should leave, or at least consider it. If you want to see the full version of this piece, and several related articles, download our training tool here.
1. Incompatibility.
Good church, good pastor, but a bad fit. The congregation needs a form of pastoral leadership that the sitting pastor does not possess. Take, for example, the pastor who is entrepreneurial by instinct (read "visionary" or "passionate for growth"). The congregation, on the other hand, seeks a pause in the outward look. They want to build their sense of community and concentrate on spiritual development for a while (not always an inappropriate decision). Both pastor and congregation develop a suspicion of the other's agenda, and no amount of mutual reflection brings about convergence.
2. Immobility.
The congregation has become trapped in an ecclesiastical whirlpool—lots of programmatic motion but little sense of direction. By subtle control, some dominant church members quietly (or not so quietly) stymie every pastoral initiative. Fresh leadership is shrewdly neutralized. There is an inescapable sense that the congregation is a closed community that plays church as a way of meeting the social needs of its constituents.
Continue reading "8 Reasons You Might Need to Leave"...
Archives for May 4, 2009
Do you feel isolated in your ministry? Ken Fong, pastor and a member of our Ask the Experts panel, reflects on his blog about how easy it is for pastors to feel alone, or just dazed by the position's "continuous ball of concerns, meetings and messages."
He compares the pastor's situation to the story of a captured soldier in the Vietnam War who is thrown into solitary confinement. Although the officer refuses to talk at first, three years of isolation and monotony breaks him completely.
Fong acknowledges that the experiences of a pastor and a prisoner of war are on completely different scales. And of course, no one is intentionally inflicting this damage on a pastor. But being a leader gives your life a different rhythm and different set of challenges, and it's just hard for many congregants to relate.
Continue reading "BlogSpotting: A Pastor Fighting Loneliness"...
Archives for May 1, 2009
Book Corner: Tour Guides for the Journey of Faith
A look at Richard Foster's Longing for God.
I have appreciated the ministry of Richard Foster since I read Celebration of Discipline for the first time in college. What sets him apart from others who write about spirituality is that he consistently resists reducing the Christian life to a formula or one-size-fits-all experience. He has drunk deeply from the wells of Christian heritage. But most importantly, he has sampled the waters from a diversity of Christian traditions. And he finds something of value in them all.
Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotion (IVP, 2009) illustrates Foster's commitment to learning from the broad testimony of Christian experience. With co-author Gayle D. Beebe, Foster explores seven major approaches to spiritual formation throughout history. Since the first century, the authors explain, Christians have understood the process and goal of the life of faith as:
- The Right Ordering of Our Love for God
- The Spiritual Life as Journey
- The Recovery of Knowledge of God Lost in the Fall
- Intimacy with Jesus Christ
- The Right Ordering of Our Experiences of God
- Action and Contemplation
- Divine Ascent
Continue reading "Book Corner: Tour Guides for the Journey of Faith"...
