Bandits No More

The Best Measure

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

What’s the best measure of effective ministry? What do we look for if we want to figure out whether effective ministry is happening or not?

Our first tendency is to look at the numbers. The bigger the numbers, the higher the effectiveness. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If I take over leadership of a church that has 100 in attendance and after a year there are 200 in attendance, I must be an effective leader, right? Or if I were a youth pastor and all my events were full of excited youth, surely it is a sign of effectiveness. These signs of effectiveness sure look attractive to me. But is my attraction to these bare signs of effectiveness right?

Suppose I am on a road trip. I manage to drive 650 miles a day. Have I been effective? Well, the numbers are there. High mileage, long hours, lots of gas burned. If my purpose is simply to stay on the road, then it looks like I’m being effective. But what if my purpose isn’t merely to be on the road but to arrive at a particular location? If I begin in Houston and intend to drive to Fort Worth and in the course of my journey drive 650 miles a day for a week and end up in Toronto, I may be busy, but I am anything but effective.

Back in my days of doing youth ministry I yearned for the big, exciting youth groups I saw other youth leaders creating. Part of it was that I really wanted to reach people for Christ. My desire for personal glory was also a part of it. I am blessed with a low-key personality that doesn’t lend itself to the extravagant excitement of some ministries. Since our numbers never got much higher than the mid 20s, how could I have ever accounted myself “effective?” Well, it depends on how and what you measure.

Early in my work in youth ministry (and carried over into later ministry roles) I decided that the best measure of effectiveness would be to see how my people were walking with Christ five years down the road. If I had hundreds brimming with excitement at one point and yet all had fallen by the wayside in five years, that’s not effectiveness.

Our main activities in my youth ministry years were bible study and prayer. I take joy in the fact that many of those youth are now, fifteen years later, still walking with Christ, several even in ministry of some sort.

When we think looking at numbers is the best way to measure effectiveness, we can come to the logical conclusion that the one we claim to follow was much less effective than we are. Just look at Jesus – at several points he had huge crowds following him. Sometimes they were so enthusiastic about him they were ready to make him king, then and there. But with his prickly, demanding personality, he managed repeatedly to run off the crowds, leaving only twelve shaky guys and a few women. I’m better than Jesus, aren’t I? I’ve never managed to run off so many people. I’ve never been so troublesome as to inspire the people around me to react in murderous hatred.

But what if numbers are only of intermediate value? Go back to my trip from Houston to Fort Worth. If I drive only 15 miles, I’ve missed my goal. But if I drive 280 miles (you can drive 280 miles from someplace in Houston and reach someplace in Fort Worth) but end up far from Fort Worth, I’ve also missed my goal.

Jesus was about what we call “life change.” He was out to seek and to save the lost. Sure he scattered his seed recklessly. Sometimes even the stony ground looked full of life. But it didn’t last there.

As I lead my church I’m looking for life change. Numbers are great, but they are easily deceptive. Having beautiful, useful, and well maintained buildings and grounds are useful. But they’re not the point. Making the budget without strain and paying our apportionments with ease would be nice, but if there’s no life change, we’re missing the point.

I want to see people fall in love with Jesus to such a degree that their relationship with Jesus becomes the center of their lives. I want to see people devoting their lives to Jesus’ kingdom and its purposes. I want to see people taking up Jesus’ mission as their own.

I don’t want people to only take up a Jesus life for a single instance. But if they never do it for a single instance, they’ll never do it for multiple instances. I want to see people take the first step – and then the next step and the next – with Jesus.

Posted in Discipleship, Local church, Ministry | Leave a comment

Avoiding the Sausage Factory

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

I like sausage. While I don’t like every kind of sausage I’ve ever tried, I like many of them. From what I’ve heard though, if I want to continue eating sausage I ought to avoid sausage factories. If I visited a sausage factory I’d see what goes into it – all the parts of the animal that people in our culture won’t buy any other way.

Paul addresses most of his epistles to “saints.” The saints in Rome, the saints in Corinth, the saints in Thessalonica, are the recipients of these letters. We think “saint” and “really holy, righteous person” comes to mind. Then we start reading these letters and we discern from Paul’s comments that these folks were not what we’d call “really holy, righteous people.” Yes, they had come to follow Jesus. Yes, they were church members and church leaders. But they didn’t get everything right. A fair number of them still looked like sinners.

We know the message of Jesus was holiness and righteousness. But we make some mistakes when we hear that message and try to instantiate it in our churches.

First, we sometimes thing that Jesus is telling us that being holy and righteous is the way to get in. That’s why I have people in my churches who ask, “Preacher, am I good enough to get in yet?” The answer is always, “No, but it doesn’t make any difference.” It’s not goodness that gets us in, it’s Jesus.

Second, we expect that righteousness and holiness from others. If we’re insiders of the church, assuming our own righteousness and holiness, we might exclude folks who just aren’t as good as we are. If we’re outsiders contemplating coming in, we might shy away or give up when we discover that the insiders (the folks who are already there) are a bunch of hypocrites, proclaimers of a righteousness and holiness they fail to embody.

An easy response would be to say that righteousness and holiness are completely irrelevant. Since we are saved entirely by Jesus, what we do doesn’t matter. Since what we do doesn’t matter we can do whatever we want. Problem is, that doesn’t look like Jesus (or the rest of the NT) either.

I have a few suggestions as we seek to protect people from the “sausage factory” of the church.

First. we need to be forthright about our sin. Sin is not just a matter of imperfection (we’re only human), not just a small thing. Sin is big enough that it brought Jesus into the world and to the cross. Our sin is never to be easily dismissed or excused.

Second, complete forgiveness is available through Jesus. We confess, he forgives. We repent, we find deliverance.

Third, as we experience the mercy of God found in Jesus, we learn to live lives of gratitude. We let our expression of gratitude crowd out our experience of sinfulness (I’m just a horrible worm, worthy of nothing but hell) and our status of saint (I’m holy and righteous) so that the people around us get the sense that what we are is due to Jesus.

Fourth, we don’t present the church as a utopia – a place for perfect people. There’s a sense in which the common image is true: church is like a hospital. A hospital is a place for healing of the sick; a church is a place of healing for sinners. No sick folk, no hospital; no sinners, no church.

Fifth, it’s usually wise to avoid the particulars when talking to the church as a whole. It’s not usually effective in our setting to shame people into repentance. More often that strategy repels people. So we admit upfront that we are sinners, that we are a place for healing and forgiveness, but observe a sort of spiritual HIPAA when in public.

Sixth, sometimes we have to deal with particulars. We have troublesome church members. We have sin addicts sometimes in prominent positions in the church. This is the heart of the sausage factory. In at least some cases it it is the job of the leader (or leaders) to just bear with people. We seek their deliverance form sin, their healing from its effects. But we don’t advertise the sin or what we’re doing about it.

What do you think? Have you found effective ways to handle the “sausage factory” like aspects of the discipleship process?

Posted in Discipleship, Leadership, Salvation | Leave a comment

Dangerous Places

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

What should we make of this story?

Apparently a school district in Indiana planned to hold its graduation ceremonies at a local church. I’m sure the church was thinking, “This is a way we can be generous and share with our community.” I’m sure the district was thinking something like, “This building seats more people than any of our venues, other than the football field, and since we can’t predict the weather, an indoor location would be perfect. Besides, the church is letting us use their space for free, so the price fits our budget.”

But as we see in the story, other people had other thoughts. One student thought ‘s/he would be “forced to submit to a religious environment that … will make me feel extremely uncomfortable and offended.”‘ A Jewish student ‘said s/he would not have attended the ceremony because s/he would “feel that the Cathedral is proselytizing its Christian beliefs … through its scriptures and symbols.”‘

Some of us might be inclined to respond, “But it’s only a church! How dangerous can a church be?” I agree with Mark Galli, the author of the piece in Christianity Today, that there is a good thing about these students being uncomfortable.

One the one hand, we need to relearn the power of our places. To do this, we’ll have to get beyond our buddy relationship with the American civil religion that sees a generic god underlying all religion and can find crosses and the Ten Commandments as mere “symbols,” and thus amenable to secular usage. While the god of civil religion is tame and fairly safe (as long as you’re an American), the real God, the Father of Jesus Christ, is dangerous. If one gets too close one just might become a believer, a follower of Jesus.

On the other hand, Christians need to recover a sense of the power of other places. As William Cavanaugh notes in his Myth of Religious Violence, the dividing line between “religions” and other socio-cultural phenomena is not as unambiguous as apologists for modern secularism would have us believe. Just as churches can be dangerous places for those who do not yet follow Jesus, temples of the other gods currently popular in our culture – Nike, Mammon, and Mars – can be dangerous for followers of Jesus.

Once we recognize the potential danger of these places, should we get engage these institutions through our court system? Bringing lawsuits has been the American way for several centuries now. I don’t think we ought to follow that strategy, however.

First, though our culture holds Nike, Mammon, Mars and their associates in high honor, it is mostly blind to the religious and devotional nature of their rites. Or to put it simply, we’d be laughed out of court. Given our Christian captivity to so many of these rites, we’d even have many of our fellow believers looking at us as if they need to call the men in white jackets to haul us away.

Second, Jesus has already declared that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him.” We also see that in his death and resurrection he has defeated all the principalities and powers. So toward these gods and their institutions we can have the same snarky attitude Isaiah exhibits toward those who make their own gods. More profoundly, however, we are called to go to their territory and rescue those who are now enslaved to those non-gods. A major way we do that is by publicly exhibiting a different lifestyle and allegiance to another kingdom.

A final consequence that comes to mind in this context is that Christians need to become more aware that the neutral institutions of our society – I think here primarily of our “public schools” – are rarely, if ever, neutral. In some communities, especially in small towns in the Bible Belt, there is still a veneer of Christian culture associated with the schools. But in the rest of the country, and in larger school systems, the point of the educational system is not merely a neutral and universally beneficial acquisition of “facts” and “skills,” but an enculturation into a particular way of living. Some Christians who recognize this withdraw and form their own schools. Others withdraw into home schools. Both can be effective ways of providing alternative enculturation (into the Kingdom of God). Of course, both strategies can be just plain withdrawal. When Christians pursue the strategy of keeping their kids within the educational structures of the dominant culture, they need to (a) stay aware of the power of enculturation into non-Christian ways of living, and (b) provide alternative enculturation that will enable young followers of Jesus to learn Kingdom living.

Posted in Church & State, Consumerism, Culture, Current events, Ecclesiology, Public Schools | Leave a comment

NOT the meaning of life

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

Of my many experiences at the meeting of the Texas Annual Conference last week, perhaps that most striking was Bishop Huie’s mention that the West Ohio Annual Conference was losing 42 positions for Elders this year. She didn’t share anything of the context, so I don’t know how retirements, church closings, mergers, consolidations, etc., come into the picture. I know nothing how this compares with trends there over the past decade. But 42 – that’s huge!

When Bishop Huie arrived in our conference (about five years ago) she observed that fewer than 50% of our congregations showed a single profession of faith during the previous year. “Profession of Faith” is church-speak for “a person who was not a practicing Christian or a member of any church became one.” Yes, it’s hard to imagine, given Jesus’ attitude on the matter, that so many churches would not be winning a single person to faith in a year.

This year we learned that we have improved. Now something like 63% of our congregations have had at least one profession of faith. We cheered the good news. But it’s only a start. Nothing was said of the reality that so many of our churches are dominated by older generations. When over half of your active, dedicated members are over 70 years old, where does that put you in ten years – even if you manage to add a new person by profession of faith each year?

The Texas Conference is awesome! The Texas Conference is great! The Texas Conference is the largest in the country (not true, though I’ve heard it several times)! Bad things – like losing openings for Elders – might happen in places like Ohio, but never here. Or so we seem to believe. But demographics alone ought to lead us to action. I see three actions we need to take now.

First, we need to get on our faces before God and pray. We need to confess our apathy, complacency, our love for playing church games. We need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all our people, all our congregations.

Second, we need to regain evangelistic passion. This will be hard, because it will be easily confused – by us an others – as stemming from a fear of institutional survival. “Our ship is sinking – come join us as we bail!” Not veyr attractive is it? As Leonard Sweet & Frank Viola urge, this will mean dealing with our JDD – Jesus Deficit Disorder.

Third, we need to plant churches. Here in the TAC we’ve been better at that these past five years. We’re still not at the Bishop’s goal of 10 new plants a year. She identified the two major impediments as a lack of people equipped to plant and a lack of churches who will “mother” the plants. Our congregation gets to mother a plant beginning this year, and I’m excited to be able to contribute. The harder barrier of church planting will be beginning to plant churches where “new churches aren’t needed,” that is, in locales where we “already have a United Methodist Church.” Sure, that church may not be growing our reaching anyone – though they did have one profession of faith last year – but if we only pour more money into it they will turn around, they will become a powerhouse for evangelism. I wish.

Posted in church growth, Texas Annual Conference, United Methodism | 1 Comment

The problem of technology

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

I read a fair number of books. When they grab me, I’ll apply myself and read them quickly. When they don’t, I’ll work more slowly. Albert Borgman’s Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology is one of the latter. I received it as a Christmas gift in 2008 (don’t you wish your presents were as good as mine!), and am still reading it.

In chapter 4, “Contingency and Grace,” Borgmann talks about our perception that our culture is unfriendly to the Christian faith, though he takes what we perceive as “unfriendliness” (or outright hostility) is better described as indifference. The root of this indifference is a culture closed off to grace, and the root of that closure to grace is our rejection of contingency. He says:

Grace is always undeserved and often unforethinkable, and a culture of transparency and control systematically reduces, if it does not occlude, the precinct of grace. A technical term for what lies beyond prediction and control is contingency. What we need is to recover then as a condition of receiving grace is the realm of significant contingency. (p. 65)

You can tell right away that Borgmann is one of those philosophers comfortable with neo-logisms – “unforethinkable.” At least I’ve never seen it before, though its meaning is fairly clear. We don’t like the unexpected. We want to be able to control and predict our world. We think we ought to be able to understand everything.

Christians are not immune to this attitude. In fact, I wonder if what we see in our broader culture isn’t a secularization of a Christian desire to eliminate contingency. The Christians who aspire to this may not look to science, technology and human control of all things, but they do look to God as the One who controls everything. If this is the way God operates then there is no contingency. Everything that happens has been determined by the active willing of God to so happen. There is nothing that happens that is not in accordance with God’s will. What our current society has done is take this desire for non-contingency and brought it fully into the human realm. We humans ought to know and understand everything. If we understand the initial conditions of the system, we ought to be able both to predict the future of the system and to bring about our desired state of affairs. A perfect Newtonian worldview.

Borgmann identifies this aversion to grace and contingency and its love of control with “modern technology.” (p. 66) I’m spurred by this to not think only of our common understanding of technology, that which deals with physics, chemistry and other physical sciences, but our social technology. My beef isn’t so much with computers, cell phones, and the like (at least not right now), but with Max Weber’s routinization of charisma and rationalization of social processes.

I agree with Borgmann: our culture’s infatuation with “transparency and control” has been an expression of closure to grace and the contingency that would make room for it. Inasmuch as I am an inhabitant of this culture, I share that concern. But my greater concern is that the church has completely bought into Weberian social technology, whether implicitly or explicitly, leading to the church disallowing contingency – and grace – in favor of command and control.

Some of our churches express our dedication to Weber with our command and control bureaucracies, our commitment to systems of rational administration, management and accountability. Other churches turn away from mid-twentieth century bureaucratic forms, embracing instead a pursuit of “leadership.” Books, videos, conferences and courses in this “leadership” have been multiplying over the past decade or so. Once upon a time pastors flocked to Evangelism or Prophecy conferences. Now we flock to Leadership conferences. We need to hear the latest digest of leadership “principles” that we can take home and apply to our churches. Once we master these principles, we will be able to assure the right results.

You may notice the problem with both these approaches, the bureaucratic (my own denomination’s favorite) and the cult of leadership. Who needs grace? Sure, we can look back on people who had charisma, the founders of our movements. They did awesome and amazing things. But now we have their “principles” and “systems” to go on. If we work the system, apply the principles, things will turn out right.

But I’m an anti-Weberian on this. I think our commitments to bureaucratic rationality and the cult of leadership are forms of institutional atheism. Who needs God, when we have the right methods, the right principles? I’d argue instead that the need in our churches is not a more efficient bureaucracy, a more effective system, or better crafted principles. While none of these are evil – or even bad – in themselves, they have become for us a substitute for the Holy Spirit. We will not be the church we want to be – or need to be – apart from a fresh filling and empowerment by the Spirit. I say this knowing full well that one of the problems of the Spirit is unpredictability. When the Spirit leads, we don’t know what will happen next. Our penchant for planning is marginalized. But I’d still rather have the Spirit.

Some will say, “That’s all very nice. But Weber was just describing the way things are. Organizations do start with charismatic leaders. When the next generation lacks the charisma of the founder, they rationalize and routinize what they see in the founder. That’s just the way it is.” Maybe so. Maybe what Weber says is an accurate description of the way organizations have worked. So what? Must they be that way? Must we reject grace in favor of a completely naturalized rationality? I’d rather not.

Posted in Albert Borgmann, church growth, Max Weber, Ministry, United Methodism | 1 Comment

Changing the Covenant

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

Some of the latest big news in the UMC is from the study committee that is suggesting that we do away with the “guaranteed appointment” for ordained Elders. It is “a promise the church can no longer keep.” For those who are not familiar with the current system, here’s how things are now (very much abbreviated). First, you spend tens of thousands of dollars and at least seven years getting college and seminary degrees. Second, you go through rounds of paper work, interviews, and psychological tests to be approved for ordination. Third, when you are ordained you agree to go anywhere within the conference that the bishop might send you. There are no promises regarding housing (in many places you’ll likely have a parsonage, that may or may not be up to official standards) or location. Currently each conference sets a minimum salary for pastors, so you’ll be paid at least that much. There is no guarantee that you’ll fit the place, that your family needs will be met (you’re better off not having a family if all you consider is the appointment system – just ask JW or FA). There’s no guarantee how long you’ll be there, though the standard appointment is for a year, and the trend is toward longer appointments. So as the “covenant” now stands, it’s something like, “Do what we tell you, and you’ll be guaranteed a job.” The alternative is something like, “Do what we tell you, and you might have a job.”

The commission has observed that some pastors are ineffective and mediocre. This is an accurate perception. (Of course, whether my definition and application of “ineffective” and “mediocre” matches any one else’s is where things start getting dicey.)

Some things that would clear the air before the “covenant” is changed:

Increase trust in the church. As it is, there is deep distrust between pastors and the church hierarchy, congregations and the hierarchy, and pastors and churches. This fundamental pathology is part of what is dragging us down. As long as we are fundamentally a top-down authoritarian system – which the current proposal regarding elders exacerbates – trust will continue to be lacking.
Find a shared vision for ministry and a shared theological vision. We have the Book of Discipline with our “official doctrine,” but this is “official” more than it is operational (to use George Lindbeck’s helpful terms), or “not to be taken literally and juridically” (in the Discipline’s language). We have Bishop Schnase’s 5 practices, but these are flexible and institutional enough that they can be interpreted so many ways that they allow too much wiggle room. We have our mission statement – “To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” but lacking a shared understanding of who Jesus is and what transformation he seeks, “disciple” remains a fuzzy, feel-good term for many. We have our marketing mantra, “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors,” but that is the gospel of inclusivism, not the gospel of Jesus.
We need to address the theological and ecclesial vision being inculcated in our seminaries. Is what they teach our future elders compatible with our vision for reaching people? If not, are we willing to hold them accountable, or do we bow before the gods of “academic freedom,” “theological pluralism,” and “we’ve always done it this way?”
Be open and honest about incentives and God-talk. When most pastors are responsible for raising families, they find themselves in a situation where it can be useful to have (a) salaries that enable them to care for their families, and (b) housing that fits their families. This sometimes happens. But sometimes it doesn’t. At least in some conferences there are some churches that pay larger salaries than others, and some that have different configurations of housing. Being appointed to a church with a larger salary (or a larger house) looks like an incentive to some people. Some people internalize the notion, “I have an incentive to do well in this appointment. If I do well (i.e., if I am effective) in this appointment this incentive will work for me.” Boy, that sounds pretty crass and materialistic, doesn’t it? That’s why we prefer to only talk about “God” and “calling” in this regard. Those things that look like incentives, really aren’t. In each and every case, whether you get huge raises with every move or move from small church to small church, you are pursuing the call of God. Doubtless. But the appearance of these “incentives” sure does skew perception and morale. Especially when the folks who run the system tend to consistently receive so many more “incentives” than those who don’t. If we could talk about these things openly, I think it’d help.

Posted in Ministry, United Methodism | 4 Comments

I’m Not Drawing Today

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

Today is “Draw Muhammad Day.” I won’t be taking part.

One response will be, “Of course you won’t. You can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler!” Well, yes, that is true. But even if I could, I wouldn’t be joining in.

Some people will be “drawing Muhammad” today to mock those who kill (or threaten to kill) people who draw Muhammad. They observe that on some occasions drawing a picture can drive crowds into murderous frenzies. Others are happy to draw the pictures simply to mock Islam. “We’re more Enlightened than you are. So there!”

While mocking is better than killing, I can’t see either as an appropriate way for followers of Jesus to relate to outsiders. My primary calling is to help people become followers of Jesus. In my experience the practice of humility and respect has produced more fruit than mockery, derision, and superiority. I can’t imagine many people responding, “Your mockery has enlightened me. I think I will turn my back on Muhammad and embrace your ways.”

So what’s the alternative? Rather than simply not drawing Muhammad, how about a “Pray for Muslims Day?”

Posted in Culture, Current events, Islam, Prayer | 3 Comments

Learning from North Point, part 9

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

(Picking up from an old series)

North Point’s fifth “Principle for Effective Ministry” is “Listen to Outsiders.” Pretty strange idea, isn’t it? After all, what can we expect outsiders to know? If we want to know what to do as a church and how to do it, we need to listen to the experts, the people who have been there all their lives.

But North Point has the audacious idea that their primary reason for existence is not to take care of insiders and keep them happy. Rather, their goal is to create environments where outsiders can come to faith in Jesus. They reason that if all their language is purely the language of insiders, the outsiders will not be able to follow along- if they even bother to show up.

By “listen to outsiders” they don’t mean “water down the Gospel to make it easier to swallow.” If they perceive in the culture of those they’re trying to reach a commitment to a vague spirituality (whether what Christian Smith calls “Moral Therapeutic Deism” or some variant of the Americanized Buddhism so common today), they’re not thinking about tossing Jesus out the window. “You know, outsiders really want vagueness. Tolerance is the thing. Different strokes for different folks.” Though some might interpret “listen to outsiders” as entailing a change in basic theological commitments, Andy Stanley and crew have nothing like that in mind.

Of course, that’s part of the problem of focusing so much on methods. While it would be surprising to find a book called 7 Practices of Effective Ministry that didn’t focus on method, methodology is not as neutral as we would like. If we just take the 7 Practices, we could lay them on top of just about any organization, religious or not. North Point, though not officially a Southern Baptist church, comes with the basic theology and ethos of that ecclesial tradition. Adapting their practices in an institution like the United Methodist Church – or in a single United Methodist congregation – would be more difficult because of our tendency to lack a shared doctrinal vision. We have folks in our pews who are convinced that we need to “listen to outsiders” and that doing so would leads us away from our narrowness of talking only about Jesus.

In Good to Great Jim Collins describes how the successful companies he studied were ruthlessly narrow-minded when it came to their core purpose and completely flexible when it came to the methods of fulfilling their purpose. Though I don’t recall Andy Stanley mentioning Collins in reference to this, the contexts certainly match. Our traditional UM churches, however, tend to go the other way around. We are ruthlessly narrow-minded when it comes to our methods (we’re Methodists) and completely flexible when it comes to our core purpose. While we have made some progress of late, I think of our official mission statement – to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – we still have a way to go when it comes to gaining a shared understanding of what we mean by “disciple.”

Since most of our churches are institutionally conservative, i.e., focused on doing what we’ve always done, and oriented around taking care of our current members, we can learn from North Point. One of the texts Stanley uses in his exposition is Jesus’ story of the shepherd who left the ninety nine sheep to find the one that was lost. Is it possible that in listening to outsiders and making moves to draw them in, make them comfortable enough to stick around and hear the Gospel, that we might lose some insiders who are unhappy we’re no longer catering to them? Sure. In fact, if we consider previous movements that were effective in reaching people (whether we think of Jesus, John Wesley, or others more contemporary), they always did things that made some insider decide to go another direction. If we are truly reaching people for Jesus, we won’t keep everyone. It’ll be hard, since some – if not most – of those who decide to go another way will be people we count as our friends.

North Point calls their evangelism strategy “Invest and Invite.” Ordinary church folks invest in the lives of friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers, and then invite them to one of North Point’s environments. Two things happen through this approach. First, outsiders are exposed to the Gospel – as lived out by church folks, and as articulated in the environments they visit. Second, those who are investing and inviting are sensitized to the questions and culture of their friends who are outsiders. Because they have listened to outsiders they know that churches have to do more than just engage in insider lingo to communicate with them.

One of the downsides of pastoring a traditional church is that I have plenty to keep me busy just spending time with church folks, limiting my exposure to outsiders. One reason I stay plugged in to Facebook is that it is a great way to stay in touch with outsiders. In our community even most of the outsiders I’m around are only outsiders from my congregation, not from the Christian faith. I’m not out to empty all the other churches by bringing their people to my church. In this kind of setting non-professional Christians can be much more effective in listening to outsiders.

I’m sensitive to outsiders on Sunday morning (“Sunday morning worship” is our main environment attended by outsiders). I want them to be able to grasp what we’re doing and saying. But here’s a twist. I also agree with Francis Chan when he says, “Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.” So what is it – do we make sense or not? Yes! We need to be clear enough in our communication that people can understand that they don’t understand – that the logic of following Jesus is profoundly different than the logic of the world. We gain the ability to help people clearly fail to understand by listening to them. And this realization of not understanding is a preliminary to true understanding.

Posted in church growth, Evangelism, North Point Church, Spirituality | 2 Comments

Rural Church

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

One of the books I’m reading now is Shannon O’Dell’s Transforming Church in Rural America. I figured that since I’m pastoring a church in rural America (ok, some folks describe our town as a metropolis – when compared to surrounding towns [take “town” very loosely] like Leesburg, Ebenezer & Pine) I ought to read this book.

Early on, O’Dell mentions what he calls the “Four Most Difficult Decisions for a Rural Pastor.” These are:

To pastor in rural America… with low incomes, low resources, and low expectations.
To reach the lost and unchurched. (Most people say they want to reach the lost… until they do and their church starts changing.
To equip the church with accurate and healthy structure… changing bylaws, constitutions, and church policy as necessary.
To remove “Holy Cows” to be more effective… such as pews, property, and people.

Of course, the first of these is not really relevant to my situation. It was not my “choice” that brought to rural America. It was the Cabinet’s choice. They said, “You are going,” so I went.

I am familiar with the difference between the small town rural realities and the bigger city realities. I’ve lived enough places in my life that I’m pretty flexible. Sure would be nice to have more resources, though. I think that – then I remember something Craig Groeschel said (I think it was Craig). He observed that creativity is driven by a lack of resources connected with a great vision. The block to this creativity tends to come from O’Dell’s #4. We’re a 150+ year old church. The place is teeming with cows. We’re not always sure what to do with creativity (unless it helps us do what we’ve always done).

Our county is full of sinners. While some of those sinners fill our churches, plenty more currently lack a real connection to a church. When we finally manage to bring in some non-church folks, helping them get past our oddness, we then need to make disciples of them. Unfortunately, the UMC has been more into making members than disciples for the past couple of generations. The denomination as a whole has shifted over to “disciple” language, but many local churches just figure that’s a new word for what they’ve always meant by “member.” Very few of us, whether old-timers or new-comers are really open to discipleship. We might just have to change our ways!

As to changing structures and systems… We could use more of that. Our leadership structures are mostly ok, but our discipleship structures are what they are because that’s what they’ve always been. If you don’t become a disciple by attending Sunday morning worship and a Sunday school class, well, there must be something wrong with you.

Holy Cows. I’ve already noted that we have plenty of them. It’s great to have a beautiful hundred year old sanctuary. But it can be crippling to ministry to have a hundred year old building (and a few other old buildings) that suck hundreds of thousands of dollars for upkeep. While a few seem to worship the historic sanctuary with its historic pipe organ and historic stained glass windows, I think those particular cows are less of an impediment than the lack of effective structures for discipleship.

We have a lot to learn.

Posted in Local church | 1 Comment

Avoiding Fame

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Richard Heyduck

Have you read the Miley Cyrus quote in the recent Christianity Today:

“My faith is very important to me. But I don’t necessarily define my faith by going to church every Sunday. Because now when I go to church, I feel like it’s a show.”

Perhaps you’re thinking something like, “Church sure has come a long way in the past generation. In the old days we’d go to church, sit quietly in our pews, listen to the organ music, stand up for the hymns, listen to a sermon, shake some hands, and then go home. Now they have stages, bands, lights and fancy electronics. It’s just a show.” That would certainly be one possible contextualization of the quote. If we want to get young folks like Miley Cyrus in our churches, so we would then reason, we need to get rid of the show, and get back to the basics. We need simple traditional worship, instead of the Show.

But in the original context (thanks to my wife for pointing this out), immediately after the quote, she adds, “There are always cameras outside.” With this addition we see that the Show she’s speaking of is not inside the church, but outside. The problem here (might be elsewhere) is not that worship has become a show, but that her fame and the way fame works in our culture ensure that there is a show wherever she goes in public. If I were the pastor of her church I would see this is a problem also: How do we engage in worship of Jesus when someone with so much more star power, by our reckoning at least, is in our midst, someone who generates more obvious adoration?

One solution is to stop acting on the fame of the people around us. If we become hardened, apathetic or indifferent to the fame of others, we might find ourselves in a place where we can worship and adore Jesus even if Miley Cyrus (or President Obama or any other famous people) are present.

That solution, however, won’t be much help to Miley Cyrus, at least not in the short term. Some few folks might succeed in turning from the allure of fame, but surely such a move will be a stretch for the multitudes, especially for those who enjoy it so much. The other solution would be for Miley Cyrus and others to avoid the affliction of fame on their side. Given our way of doing things, sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?

When we consider the benefits of fame – the adoring crowds, the plentiful money – why would anyone want to avoid fame? I can imagine that the Christian, the follower of Jesus, might want to avoid fame so she or he would not be isolated from life in the Body of Christ. If salvation is only going to heaven when we die (or, as some put it, “Pie in the Sky, by and by), then we can get by without the Body of Christ. But when we read the New Testament, we see that life together as worshipers, followers, and lovers of Jesus, able to stand each other because we’ve been reconciled through his blood, is part of salvation itself. Church – taken as the life of the saints lived together here and now – is part of what the bible means by salvation. Therefore, when we have a fame system, we not only hurt the church by the possible substitution of idols for Jesus, but we also keep people away – or build fences to keep ourselves away.

Posted in Culture, Spirituality, Worship | Leave a comment