Ahead of the curve

Two things have happened this week that demonstrate that our little Romeo is far ahead of most churches curve. The really cool thing is not people in the church saying, "Hey, this is working." (While that is happening, these things are even more encouraging) This stuff comes from people who are outside of our church:

1. I exchanged brief emails with my former pastor, Ray Pritchard, in the past week. I responded to a blog post where he asked pastors for how they plan their message series "I think you and your pastor are on the cutting edge of church leadership. Far too many churches operate as a "kingdom of kingdoms"
   where each staff member leads his own kingdom and the senior pastor is the
   "king of kings." We would never say it that way but that’s how most churches operate. But there is a huge
   new wave today of churches where the staff works together as a team to
   coordinate all the ministries in the same direction."
2. This morning I read on Tim Schmoyer’s post about his experiences in looking for a new job at a church. He reports that while most church have a vision, they have no idea how to accomplish it. They only want to do church the way they know how. And overall are only interested in past successes and not new ones. Why is that encouraging to us? Well… that ain’t us!