Month: November 2009

  • Set the 2010 Agenda

    2010-church-agendaIn 6 weeks it will be 2010. And as many pastors climb into the pulpit on January 3rd, 2010 they will give the annual State of the church message, as well as a road map of the 2010 church agenda.

    Lots of churches do this. The first weekend in January is perfect for it as Christmas is in the rear view mirror, people are naturally looking at plans for the year… and most importantly the pastor has had a few days of R&R. I love this practice.

    My beef is that too many pastors give a State of our church message as opposed to a State of the church in our town message.

    Set Your Agenda on Local Matters

    Read Revelation 2-3 from the perspective of the church in your community. You will see that Jesus did not judge those churches by their local individual meetings. He judged the church by a collection of churches in a city. Jesus was looking forward prophetically. He knew that before he came back we would be fractured into hundreds of thousands of groups… and yet his prophesy was tied to a community, not a local church. How can you deny that? I hope this drastically changes how church leaders look at their role. Likewise, I hope they set an agenda for their church body that is reflective of Scripture and not what they know within their denomination or theological tradition. Scripture is always right!

    Maybe this changes how we look at our role as a pastor in the community?

    • Our role may be to call local churches to come together for a common purpose.
    • Our role may be to call one another back to our first love.
    • Our role may be to ask the body of believers in our town to seek justice, speaking out against injustice to the point of change.
    • Our role may be to beg the church back to a period of societal reformation.
    • Our role may be to implore the local church to put the protest back in protestant.
    • Our role may be to remind churches that we are called to reach lost people, not put on the best show in town.
    • Our role may be to sound the alarm that the best way to reach the lost is minister to their needs, not entertain them.

    Phrases from Revelation 2-3 to meditate on as you set your churches 2010 agenda. First love. Perseverance. Rich in poverty. Faithful to the point of death. Overcome. Service. Hold on to what you have until I come. You have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Dressed in white, for they are worthy. You have kept my word and not denied my name. Endure patiently. I am coming soon. Buy from me gold refined by fire. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. Be earnest.

    What if, on January 3rd 2010, your church delivered a new kind of message? What if you called a meeting with some like-minded pastors in your community and set a common agenda for what the church will do in your town? I’m not talking about 100 things you will do… I’m talking baby steps. Here are 3 things we will do as “the church of our town.” And then on the first Sunday in January your agenda for 2010 includes a couple of things for what happens within your four walls… but also includes a few things that WE as the body of Christ in our town are doing together to be the Gospel to our town?

    Now there is an agenda worth rallying around! I’d give to that. I’d stick around for that.

    That creates new energy. Well, in me at least.

  • New TJOSM Article Coming Soon

    social-media-theology-convergence

    I have an article in the upcoming Winter 2009 edition of The Journal of Student Ministries. As you can tell by the title, the article discusses the convergence of social media and theology. I’m stoked about how the article turned out. It’s such an important topic! I’m also excited to publish my first article in the journal.

    This year, I’ve had my first piece in a book and now a piece in a magazine. 2009 has kicked butt!

  • Empire State of Mind

    This song makes me smile. I’ll be hood forever.

  • 3 Things I Love About My Community Group

    When Stephen asked us to host a small group at our house, one week after attending Harbor Mid-City for the first time, we begrudgingly agreed. In fact, when he told us that Harbor was a church consisting of a few community groups… we were skeptical.

    My faith in small groups had been shaken. I was pretty close to making the statement public that I’d felt for a while… “Small groups don’t work.” Most of my adult life I had either lead a teen small group or adult small group and they had always functioned but never “worked” quite like the books on small groups said they would. We had always met, done some sort of Bible Study, prayed for one another, shared food and some laughs– and that was it. The community thing never happened. The caring for one another or feeling connected… it never happened. Those groups were functional and great, but left me longing for that small group experience everyone talked about in the books.

    I wondered if small groups were a myth!

    Then I met these people. I don’t know how else to explain it but our group just gelled and it’s been a great group from our first meeting. Here’s a few things that I love about having the group at our house each Monday night:

    1. We keep the agenda in check. The agenda is that we’re in community together. There is likely a church agenda. Probably that we’d talk about the Sunday sermon or that we’d pray for one another. And sometimes those agendas converge while other times they don’t. Our group has done everything from adopting a refuge family to watching Monday Night Football. Most often we get together and talk about the past weeks message and pray for one another. We’ve had incredibly deep conversations and we’ve had a chili cook-off. I actually think the magical component that has made our group work is keeping the community agenda the only important agenda while keeping all the other agendas in check.
    2. We’re game for “one another.“ The core people of this group hasn’t changed that much in the last 12 months. In that time we’ve welcomed probably 25 different people who’ve come and gone. That really is how small groups go. Heck, that’s how churches roll! I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but this group has really taken care of one another.
    3. We don’t take ourselves very seriously. Last Monday, we spent about 10 minutes joking about the name of the restaurant we’re having lunch at on Sunday, Pho King. (Pho is a Vietnamese soup meal, pronounced “fu,” exactly like the first half of the F word.) We talk about serious things. We have serious moments. But laughter and hilarity are always within reach.

    Each Monday, on my way home, I think to myself… “I’m glad it’s Monday.” This little group has been a testament that small groups can work.

  • The Youth Ministry Gap

    mind_the_gapAfter 18 months of working at Youth Specialties and interacting with youth workers around the United States (and everywhere else) it’s finally sunken in: There are two different things called “youth ministry” with a major gap in the middle.

    Professional vocational youth ministry: When I talk about youth ministry this is often my default. These are youth ministries and youth ministry leaders who have formal education, continued training, experience, and live their whole lives thinking about youth ministry. When you talk to them about youth ministry they think of models, books, authors, speakers, ministry ideas, successful programs, historical viewpoints, on and on.

    This youth ministry is pretty sophisticated. Like any profession people fall into schools of thought. They have models for doing youth ministry. They have personally written and can defend philosophies of youth ministry. They run programs which implement their well thought out and defended philosophy of ministry. They train volunteers to be proteges for their school of thought. They have opinions about whether a certain models is getting stronger or dying.

    For the 20% or so of youth workers in America in this category those nuances matter to them. They are on the leading edge of thinking about Youth Ministry 3.0.

    My Church Youth Ministry: They just want to know how to minister to the kids in their church. When they e-mail me or call our customer service line they don’t want to talk philosophy or are even aware that there are different ways of doing youth ministry. They are calling because they have 15 seventh graders in their Sunday School class and they need a curriculum that will work for them. When you ask them about what they are trying to do with the group… you’ll hear the dead air or the exhale and then they’ll say, “We’re Methodist, what works for Methodists seventh graders?”

    They don’t know or care about philosophies of ministry. They don’t know or care about ministry models. They haven’t heard of Saddleback or Willow Creek. They go to First United Methodist Church of Middletown– that’s it. They may know that some churches have full-time youth workers but they don’t really care. They have a full-time job outside the church. They have a kid in high school. And the pastor thought they were pretty loving towards teens and asked them to minister to their kids friends. They give of themselves to invest in the kids in their church and that’s amazingly awesome.

    ChasmFor the 80% or so of youth workers in America who fit this category, youth ministry is pretty matter-of-fact. There are kids who show up on Sunday morning or Wednesday night and they do what they can to minister to them.

    Minding the gap: There are not big steps in between the two groups of youth workers. It’s a gap with a chasm, not a ladder to the next or even a bridge.

    It is literally two different things we call youth ministry in America. They all care about the kids in their church. One group is purely interested in the kids in their church. While the other also cares a lot about the greater profession of youth ministry.

  • Dogs Welcome Home a Soldier

    Even if you aren’t a dog person, this video is rad.

    HT to Mark

  • Confronting Segregation on Sunday Morning

    church-segregation

    Sunday morning’s sermon at Harbor stirred in me the desire for the church to be a place of reconciliation.

    Stephen reflected on Revelation 7:9-12 in which people of every tribe, tongue, and nation will worship Jesus on His throne in Heaven and asked us to consider if we would attempt to do the same on earth? We live in a melting pot commununity. Literally, within 5 miles of our church are people of many tribes, tongues, and nations. The question brought forth was, will we intentionally worship together as a community or will we allow a church culture to prevail which prefers to seperate on Sunday mornings along racial lines?

    I was reminded of this exchange, in 1963, between Martin Luther King and the one-time president of Western Michigan University, Mr. Miller:

    Miller: Don’t you feel that integration can only be started and realized in the Christian church, not in schools or by other means? This would be a means of seeing just who are true Christians.

    King: As a preacher, I would certainly have to agree with this. I must admit that I have gone through those moments when I was greatly disappointed with the church and what it has done in this period of social change. We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I’m not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we’ve so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn’t start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.

    The truth is, 46 years later, not much has changed. Churches are still largely segregated in America. You could argue, as this CNN article points out, that we prefer our Sunday’s segregated.

    • There are major, separate, evangelical movements within the white, black, Hispanic, and Asian communities. There are relatively few places where those churches intersect. I will lovingly say that 5% of churches are truly mixed. But I am probably rounding up.
    • Within my own culture we tend to hold our personal preferences above all else. We are fine with other ethnicity coming to our churches so long as we don’t have to give up our style of worship or preaching. We hold our worship styles as canonical!
    • White males dominate the leadership landscape within American evangelicalism. Look at most conference line-ups or take a walk around a Christian bookstore or look at the top 20 Christian albums and you will see white male dominance. Are white males the only spiritual leaders? I don’t think so.
    • Open a phone book and you will likely see, in most communities, a white, black, Hispanic, and Asian version of the same church. 99% same doctrine, but we prefer to form different churches rather than deal with intentionally segregating. It’s not just a white church issue… it’s evangelicalism as a whole not dealing with this issue!

    Something about that is anti-Revelation 7, isn’t it?

    A few years ago I was at a leadership retreat in which we were asked to bring up our dreams for the congregation. The small Michigan town we lived in has a vibrant Hispanic population and a historic black community dating back to the Underground Railroad. I said that one of my dreams for the church was that there wouldn’t be three congregations in town separated by race (but not doctrine) but that we would figure our a way to have one church. I was laughed at and mocked for weeks. “We just aren’t ready for that.”

    And by “that” I suppose they meant dealing with their racist tendencies for the sake of the Gospel.

    In America, lines of segregation are alive and well. We all know it. People use their positions of power to invent new “legal” ways to segregate people all the time. But what are we willing to do about it?

    Want to see segregation alive and well in America? Head to a school board meeting when they talk about re-districting. Or head to a planning commision meeting when they talk about building an apartment complex. You will see the dominant culture take up arms so that “they” don’t allow “them” in their school or neighborhoods. Apply some nouns to those conversations and you are right back to Brown vs. Board of Education.

    It is amazing to me that no one I know would be upset– or even notice– if they worked with people of another race (or gender.) It wouldn’t even be an issue in the workplace. For the most part it wouldn’t be an issue in our own neighborhood.  Even in our own families race is not much of an issue. Six days per week our society has integrated. It’s not perfect but we’ve come a long way.

    And yet on Sunday morning… race (and gender) are major issues! This must change and we all know it. The question for leaders today is simply, “What are you going to do about it?”

    I am proud to call Stephen my pastor. He stood up on Sunday morning, not to cheerlead the efforts our church has made in the last two years, but to remind us that we have a long way to go. I hope the small successes we see at Harbor are just the beginning of a wider movement of reconciliation on Sunday mornings for the sake of the Gospel. First in our community, but also in America.

    Some questions:
    How do I need to be confronted on this issue. This is a “first me, than lead forward” deal.
    How does that reflect how I/we relate to Scripture?
    How does that limit the effectiveness of the Gospel in the community you/I live in?
    What are action items you/I will take to confront segregation in your/my church community?

  • Find Rest, Oh My Soul

    My sleep patterns have been seriously jacked up since coming back from Cincinnati. Last night I was up super late– 7:15 PM. Yesterday, while in church listening to Stephen preach one of his best messages ever, an emotion came over me. I realized something and it sent chills down my spine. It’s not just me that is struggling to find rest right now. It’s everyone I know.

    We are all off-kilter on rest. Even when some of us rest, we are still working or thinking about work or dreaming up things that result in work. Even in our rest, we are chasing after kids. On and on. In our rest, we are not really resting at all.

    That’s why this week I am praying this Psalm as a prayer for myself, my family, and my friends. I pray that we find rest:

    Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
    my hope comes from him.He alone is my rock and my salvation;
    he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.

    My salvation and my honor depend on God ;
    he is my mighty rock, my refuge.

    Trust in him at all times, O people;
    pour out your hearts to him,
    for God is our refuge.
    Selah

    Psalm 62:5-8

  • Women’s Soccer Gone Wild

    Dang! Thankfully, the Mountain West Conference took care of this. I can’t believe the referees only gave her a yellow card for this. My guess is that her soccer career just ended.

  • Fork Lift Driver Fail



    Something tells me this guy is looking for a new job.     The news story reported that he was actually only slightly injured. And those boxes… all vodka.