Great Work

If we're going to do great work, it means that some people aren't going to like it. And if the people who don't like it don't have an impact on what happens to the work after it's complete, the only recourse of someone doing great work is to ignore their opinion. -Seth Godin

This quote points out something very important if we are going to do great things for God and the work that He has for us.  The fact of that matter is a lot of people didn't like Jesus.  Even when He was healing people and delivering them from their various afflictions, many of the religious leaders told Him that He shouldn't be healing because it didn't fit their schedule of not doing work on the sabbath.

If we are to do great work for God, we must come to the decision that it is His will and opinion of us that matters and no someone else's.  As the apostles asked whether they should obey "God or men", so we need to ask ourselves the same question. If you are striving to do a work for God and are receiving flak about it, or if you feel God leading you to do a work for Him and are concerned about what others may think, you only need to think of two things.  Is God telling you to do it?  Does it line up with the Bible?

When everything is said and done, we stand before God as our judge.  He is the one that has called us.  He is the one that empowers us.  He is the one that redeemed us for the work we are doing!

Are you watching or doing?

A while back, my middle daughter misbehaved and as her punishment she was not allowed to go outside and play with her older sister.  While the oldest girl went outside and played, she went and got her chair and sat next to the sliding glass doors that face our backyard and watched her older sister play outside.  From my wife's report, she watched with great delight, and was even excited about what was going on outside, even though she wasn't really participating.

Seems crazy, but that's what we do quite a lot.  We get really excited when we see someone else working hard and accomplishing great things for the Lord, even though we aren't.  I read  awhile back that we can get the same feelings of accomplishment simply watching someone else do something, even though we don't do it ourselves.  The worse part is, that it can actually decrease our motivation and desire to accomplish something because we already have that feeling of accomplishment.

This is called living vicariously.  It is the act of feeling as if you are experiencing or taking part in someone else's life.  I don't want to live this way.  To just celebrate what others are doing for God and never doing anything myself.  I hope that you don't either.  Let's make sure that we aren't just watching, but that we are doing!

Homogenous

-adj. - the same in structure, quality, etc.;similar, identical.

If this describes our normal attendees of our church services, we are probably in trouble. Why is this?  Well for one thing, it doesn't describe Jesus' ministry other than him not being a respecter of persons.  Secondly, it probably means that there are no sinners attending our services.  No new people visiting.

In short, it probably means we aren't making much of an impact in our community.  Unless everyone in your community looks and acts just like you.  I have seen very few, if any, communities that this accurately describes.

Sinful people will mess up maybe what we are normally used to in church.  They may speak at inappropriate times.  They may wear clothes that we aren't used to.  Sometimes, they may use words we don't use.  Contrary to what some would have us believe, it is not disrespect to, dishonor of , or disinterest in God's laws or holiness.   Most of the time, they simply don't know.  Other times they may expose something silly that we do for no other reason than someone we knew did it before us.  Sometimes tradition is great, other times it just gets in the way of what needs to be done to reach a lost and dying world.

2 Cor. 4:3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:

Work on mixing things up. Keep in mind that I am not in any way condoning sin. It should have no part in the leadership or membership of a church.  But if everyone looks, talks, and acts like you that darkens the doors of  your church, does the crowd look like who Jesus preached to, or the Pharisees?

Speaking of Change- Example

Change sometimes is easy and sometimes is hard.  I thought I would give an example from our local church of one change that we made, the reasons behind it, and the results of the change.

A few years back, we decided that we would switch from songbooks to displaying the songs on a screen.  At the time, the church was still meeting in the second floor of our home, and although we had a decent size space to work with, a projection screen was definitely out of the question.  Instead we opted for a flat screen TV mounted on the wall.  This had two immediate, apparent benefits.
  The first benefit came from the fact that we often sing songs that aren't in the songbooks that we used, frequently adding new songs to the stack that we used.  Originally, we would just print out some copies and hand out.  That worked fine for a song or two or five but then the extra copies started to get out of hand.  Maybe for a hyper organized person it would have worked out fine.  They could have kept filing cabinet, with folders for each song, collected the copies after service and refiled them.  But, it would have been a big hassle. So needless to say, copies got mixed up, thrown around, etc.  With displaying the songs on a screen, all that was  required for a new song to be added, was to just type it into the computer.
  The second was that new people weren't troubled with trying to find the right page in the songbook, and then actually follow the song in the sheet music.  Yeah, you know what I am talking about, skipping from this line, to that line, then back up to this spot, and then down to that one.  I have heard a lot of these songs from birth, have musical training and some of the songs I have trouble following the train of thought in the songbook, so imagine how confusing it must be for someone who is new to church, never having heard the songs before.  With the screen we are able to put the words up for everyone to read, in the order that they go.  No skipping around to different parts of the page, or different pages.
  In addition to these anticipated benefits, switching to a display brought other useful benefits as well:

1. Cutting clutter - we no longer had stray sheets with words to songs on them floating around, we also didn't have to worry about trying to keep the songbooks picked up and stored in the proper place.  The church had a less cluttered look.
2. Additional opportunities - we are able to not only display the songs, but scripture and also any other graphics or videos that may be beneficial to the service.
3. Decreased destruction - our church has a proportionally high number of children(comparable to others in our org.) and anyone who has been around children and songbooks know that they do not mesh very well.  Try as a parent might it seems you can't keep kids away from them.  When kids get around songbooks damage almost always happens, whether slight or major.
4. Decreased distraction - as mentioned above high number of kids.  The parents found it much easier to a)follow the songs because they didn't have to juggle a songbook and a kid, b)follow the scriptures because of the same lack of juggling. Also, they didn't have to worry about guarding the songbooks from the kids.
5. Increased ease of worship - our congregants don't have to search for a place to lay the songbook down when they want to clap to the song, raise their hands in worship, etc.  They are freer.

 Hopefully, we can all see how this would be helpful not only to our regular attenders, but especially to NEW people, which should be a major concern of ours.  If a new person is trying to fumble through the songbook, fighting their kid to keep them from tearing the songbook up, or trying to thumb through a book they've never read(the Bible) to find the book of Amos(what this book has multiple books inside?) chapter 2 verse 4(hopefully we are seeing how confusing this might be to a newcomer).  By displaying all of the needed information in front of them, we are making their time at church less confusing and more beneficial.  Yes hopefully, their kids will learn how to behave in church and they will decide to begin reading and studying the Bible, but all of that comes in time.  We want to make their first visits as smooth as possible so that they will come back.

Maybe you might have a few objections in your mind.  Your church isn't a large church.  See above, we were meeting in a house, with fewer than 10 regular attenders at the time we made the switch.  We made the  switch to help facilitate growth, not because we were already big.  Secondly, maybe you don't have a large proportion of kids in your church. The fact of the matter is, if a church does not have any kids, ever, eventually it will cease to exist.  We have to plan to have kids in our churches and work to win them.  It is better to be prepared in advance, than to try to play catch up later on, or possibly even lose new people because our church is not kid friendly.

No this is not a perfect solution for every church. But the challenge is for you to think of what ways might you do things differently to make it easier for new people to come and stay at your local church. We found one way that works for us.  What can work for you?

As an aside, we use Easyslides projection software.  It has a couple of benefits.  One, it is free.  Two, it is user friendly.  Three, it works well for our churches flow of worship.  Out of the several different softwares I have looked at, this one is the easiest to transition between the different parts of songs without having everything formally planned before the service.  Many other softwares want to know in what order you want all the verses, chorus, etc.  This one transitions between the different parts with the push of a button.

Also, as we sing a number of contemporary songs we have a CCLI license to comply with the copyright law.

We were also able to donate the few songbooks we had to a new mission in our region.  So our old books didn't go to waste.

The Future

Past performance is no guarantee of future success. -Seth Godin

Ultimately, what happened in the past, is just that, in the past.  If your church experienced a lot of growth, good finances, great spiritual moves in the past, that is great.  But the question is, where are you now? What is happening now that is great?  We all have wonderful things that have occurred in the past, but that is not now and it is definitely not the future.  That is why we have to look to the present and the future and see what God wants us to do NOW.
  If the children of Israel had continued to wander in the wilderness after the 40 yr. mark they could have said, this is what God told us to do, "stay in the wilderness."   But they would have been missing the mark.  Yes that is what God had told them to do, in the past.  And it worked for them to fulfill God's will in the past.
  If the disciples had continued to just stay in Jerusalem after receiving the Holy Ghost, they could have said Jesus told us to tarry here.  But they would have been ignoring His desire for them at the current time to "go to all the world."
  Both the children of Israel and disciples received blessings from the Lord in staying where they were at.  The Israelites received manna, water, their clothes didn't wear out.  The disciples received the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.  But then came time for them to move on from their past direction from God and dwell in the direction that He had for them for the present and future.
   We have to have fresh vision and inspiration to see success in our day and in the future.  We cannot rely on the past victories to carry us on to victory in the future.  Do you have the anointing, inspiration, and divine direction for today? If not I encourage you to seek God for that fresh anointing today.

Who to please?

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."-Bill Cosby

Bill hit things on the head with this one.  If we are going to be successful winning souls to Christ and changing the world around us, we simply are not going to be able the please everybody.  

For one, sinners may not be happy.  If you are reaching people far from Christ, you are going to be disrupting other peoples' lives.  You may be hurting their business(think alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and the list goes on), you may be disrupting their "social life"(no more illicit sexual relationships),  and they may be feeling convicted over their own sin(which causes the fight or flight response).  That's not news right?  

If you are really going full out for God, you may find just as much fight against you from other Christians!  Now this is crazy and should never be the case, but it is true.  If you hold to the standard of holiness the Bible calls us to, people may say that you are being judgmental and legalistic.  However, if you ascribe to reach everyone there will be those that have a problem with you because you are not, "doing things the way they should be done."  This usually comes about if you are doing things out of the tradition or culture of what "they" are used to.  It makes them feel uncomfortable, so how could it be from God?

The question then is, why are we doing this for ? Is it about you or me?  No, it is about fulfilling God will so that as many people that CAN accept Jesus WILL.  So what if I don't like someone's preaching style, singing style, their choice of cloths?  As long as nothing is un-biblical about it and they are reaching people for Christ, it might be best for me to keep quiet because I might learn a thing or two from them.  And, for the record when I say un-biblical, I mean unless I can literally show them in the Bible that is wrong.  

Acts 5:29

   Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.

Who are you busy trying to please?

Who benefits?

   The title of this post is a quote from Karl Marx.  I know what you're thinking, addressing issues of Christianity using the words of a man whose ideas started a movement called communism that in most of its forms has striven to co-opt Christianity at best(Three Self Church - China) to North Korea (click on North Korea on map) where being a Christian often means being sent to a concentration camp or killed, at worst.
  But Marx nailed what we should be worried about.  Who is benefiting from what we do? Communists try to convince the masses that they(the masses) will benefit if communism reigns.  As history points out, that is a lie.  Those that benefit in communism increasingly are those at the top of the food chain.  So, when we say what we do is for others' benefit are we speaking the truth?
  Being focused on the benefit of others when it comes to the gospel, means that we have to deny ourselves many times. It means getting dirty, being tired and inconvenienced.  It means serving others when we would rather be taking a nap.  We all know, deep down inside what it means.
  Jesus' focus was the benefit of others.  The whole purpose He came to this earth was for our benefit.  So that you and I could have forgiveness and freedom from our sins.  He is our example.  We are to be as He was on this earth.  We read of times when He sought rest but felt the need of the people .
  So think about it for a minute. Who is benefiting from your church/ministry? Be honest. I'll answer for myself first by saying, "not enough of those on the outside."  Now it's your turn.  You don't have to tell me, or comment on here for the world to see.  But you do need to answer it for yourself.

Speaking of change

If you knew that twice as many people would show up at your church service, would you be willing to change the service times?

Principles, not methods

   Very few businesses operate in the same fashion that they did fifty or one hundred years ago.  The reason is that times change.  A few are the same as they were ten or twenty years in the past.  The reality is that most successful businesses are constantly changing because the world around us is constantly changing.  Their principles may be the same, but their operations and methods have changed so that they can be more productive and efficient in the business they conduct. How can we let the business world be more effective at reaching people than we are?
   If you are reading this, chances are you are in the same business I am. Namely, reaching hurting and lost people for Christ.  Also, if you are reading this, you have already changed your methods of being able to reach people for Christ. If you came here through a link on Facebook, you are leveraging that technology to stay in touch with and reach out to others in a manner way beyond what you could have 5 or 10 years ago.
  Being open to finding new ways to reach others for Christ is one step. Sometimes, we don't have to completely change our methods but merely enhance them or maybe do a little remodeling. People have been striving to reach people for Christ more efficiently for many years.  Hopefully, you have have as well.  I guess the practical way of looking at it is, if I have the same amount of resources(time, energy, money) what way can I have an impact upon the most people? Or how can I have the maximum impact?  Allow yourself to be challenged by God every day to open your eyes to something new.

Change for the sake of change

  Changing just to be changing is probably worse than no change at all.  What this blog is dedicated to is purposeful and meaningful change.  Changing from one thing to another, simply to not be doing the same thing, but seeing no different results will just wear you out and confuse you. We have got to optimize our personal and church ministries.  That means keeping some things the same, while changing those things that don't work. Have you changed any in the past five years?  How? 

Afraid?

   Are you afraid to do things you've never done? Of course, we all are.  Why?  Because we like security.  But what is security really?  The status quo? What makes us feel secure about the status quo? I think it is because it is what others have done before us and what we have been doing for a long time.
   Too often, we continue in the path we are in, whether it is right or wrong, even when we are not satisfied with the results we are getting because we are too afraid of what stepping outside our comfort box would cause to happen.  Doing what is safe and secure(to us) will not result in lasting church growth, just as it never results in lasting growth in the business world.  People and circumstances in the world around us change, and we must change to meet them at their point of need. If we don't, we risk losing them for all eternity.
   We're not talking here about changing doctrine or morals(unless they are unbiblical). What I mean is that we must change our methods sometimes to those different than what we have been using. Paul said " I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."  Are we willing to lay aside our personal preferences to reach people for Christ?
   The litmus test is this: we have all heard the old tired cliche, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So the question is two part.  One, are you satisfied with your results? More importantly, is He satisfied with your results?
   

I want our church to grow

      All of us want this for our churches don't we? We want to see growth. I personally, want to see great growth, and I hope you do as well. If we honestly examine our history, I daresay many of us are less than satisfied with our growth.  
    At my local church, we have been blessed to have a good increase in our attendance in the past year over the year previous to that. A 50% increase to be exact! We thank the Lord for this, but even at this our total attendance would just amount to a large Sunday School class at many churches. Even this year, I believe we are on track for another 50% increase, but there are many out there that are not being reached by our church and the message of Christ, so I am not satisfied with the growth. I am thankful for what we have seen, but I feel that God has more for us.
       As a pastor, I must face the following:

  When you want something you've never had, then you have to do something you've never done. - John Maxwell,The Difference Maker

      If our church want to reach more people in our community, it is sometimes going to involve us doing things we haven't done before. If we want to see the phenomenal growth seen in the Bible it is going to take some more. It definitely takes the Spirit. The Jesus tells us, "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him." But we can also do things to be more effective at reaching the lost. God uses the Spirit to draw those to Him, and He uses cultural situations to His advantage. Paul found where large groups of people were and went there and reached them. He found women washing clothes by a river, philosophers gathered together, and oftentimes went to the Jewish synagogues until he was kicked out.
       If we are going to reach people, we have to reach them where they are. If we want to reach more people at our local church, we are going to have to be willing to step outside our comfort zone, and do things we haven't done before. All through the Bible, people were called by God to do things they hadn't done before to see the results that God wanted to bring about.
   Are we willing?

Church ... a business?

Oftentimes, we fail to learn valuable lessons from others, because we feel what they are doing, has no bearing on what we are trying to accomplish. This is especially true among us Christians, whether it be laity or ministers. I mean why would we pay attention to how a successful, secular person or company achieves success? After all, we are spiritual and they are not! Because that is what the Bible does.

Let's look at one story for an example. Luke 18:1-8

 The above link references the story of the widow and the unjust judge. Here the judge admits that he doesn't fear God or man, but is going to give in to the widow's plea just so she won't wear him out. Jesus then explains how this story applies to increase our understanding of God.

 This is one very quick example, but for many more, just read the parables in the Bible. The Bible is full of examples of how we can receive spiritual lessons from the secular, physical world. I challenge you to look at the world around you and ask God to open your eyes to what you are missing that could be used for His purposes.

Is there not a cause?

Over the past number of years, my reading has lead me to various books, blogs, and articles covering a wide variety of topics. Many times I come across concepts in other fields that are widely applicable in the church arena. The topics addressed here will range anywhere from business and marketing to public speaking and serving others, depending on where my reading and thinking take me. My purpose in this is to share those gleanings with anyone who would care to expand their horizons and perhaps learn something that could help their church or ministry.