Is this it? …the church… is this it? Is the church a group of “Christians” that gets together once…twice… maybe three times a week? If we together compose the body of Christ… does the body of Christ function only a couple times a week? Is the church something where we join together in song, prayer, communion, education, and fellowship–only a couple times though out the week?
For some reason I feel that like there is more to “church” than what Christendom has made it. We serve a God who is active in the “now.” Why is it that we don’t find many “rules” for church? We can’t seem to find how frequent or how consistent a church meets. Does “church” have to be once a week? Can it be daily? Can it be monthly? Can it function even sporadically as more of a lifestyle rather than a “club?”
Can church be more than what we’ve made it, or is this it?
Last Friday my church (Grace Community Chapel) hosted a teleconference called “Lead Like Jesus.”
The conference was great, I created a pdf of my notes.
What was not in the notes was the seminar concluded with everyone getting a shoe shining cloth and cleaning each other’s shoes. I never realized how much pride I had until I realized how uncomfortable this made me. Just think for a moment, and challenge yourself. Think of someone who you serve or should be serving (i.e. your boss, a friend, a person at your church, mainly anyone), and go up to them and just say, “I’d like to clean your shoes” and get down on your knees and do it. Chances are, you won’t do it. Honestly, I wouldn’t have done it at this conference if I wasn’t pressured to do it… but I feel the pressure was necessary because it was the first step in breaking my pride.
The first step in ministry is service. Just think how useful we could be to God if we could just get past ourselves and clean other’s shoes.
Every month at MBU religion students have their “Ministerial Alliance” meeting. These are some of the notes from today:
Lecture on Evangelism by Curtis McClain
1850-1925 we find a church who is moving away from their dependence on God and focusing on the “lost.”
1960 we see a methodology that is much “church oriented.” The question becomes, “How do I get people in the church?” Replacing a good Christian life and it’s representative and putting a 8 page fold of paper in it’s place.
1950 – Neo-Evangelicals said “lets do things that draw enough people so that the mainline denominations will want to be around them, and then they can maybe draw them back to the gospel.” But in order to get the masses, the Gospel was reduced. The Neo-evangelical moved so far toward the other denominations that they became ineffective.
1960s people had a “come and see” mentality. Everything has become about bring people in the church and creating our services for non-Christians to come in and hear the Gospel. “Church growth” is associated with “spiritual growth.” People see the Gospel as sales.
Where did the emergent church come into this?
- The church growth movement is “modernism.” The church growth movement (emergent church or modernism) has a couple problems–it asks, “what is it that the world wants?” The emergent church saw that the church wasn’t reaching it’s culture, “so they changed the drug from heroin to crack.”
- The purpose isn’t to pick on the emergent church, it’s more of a problem with the North American church. “We’re trying to just put on a better show for people to ‘come and see.’”
Institutional Church : North American Style : a breakdown of the types of Christians in the church:
- Mature Christians
- Youth Christians
- Immature Christians (Baby Christians)
- Unregenerate Christians (Dead Christians)
Average everyday north American institutional church
Out of 250 there would be:
- 1 mature Christian (may or may not be the pastor)
- 200 dead people
- 14 baby Christians
- He gave some other numbers I didn’t get (that’s why it doesn’t add up to 250)
“The reason the North American Church has the most non-growing church in the world because God doesn’t want more churches like the ones that we already have.”
“If we keep trying to do things the same way, we’ll continue to have the same problems.”
“By making everything ‘come and see’ we are cheating the Gospel. We need a Gospel that changes lives. The Gospel says ‘go tell.’”
“If the church doesn’t have any mature Christians, how is it possible to disciple mature Christians?”
“People need to be baptized on the outside and the inside (by the Holy Spirit).”
We need to allow the Gospel to change us. Evangelism is something that springs out of the heart of a true lover of Christ. Our hearts need to be burdened when people don’t know Him and are destined for damnation, and our hearts need to be filled with unspeakable joy when people come to know Him.
- “Is it possible that the joy of the Lord is our salvation?”
- “You need to have a the life changing Gospel in order to share a Gospel that is life changing.”
- “Measuring baptisms and attendances is not the measure of the Bible.
- Jeremiah preached for 40 years, and for 35 years he preached the same sermon. No converts. It produced, “nothing” but two books of the Bible.
I’m trying to figure out this culture and “get out of the box.” The church is no longer seen as relevant, and we are doing the same thing that we’ve been doing for decades… yet, the culture hasn’t been the same for decades. Lately I’ve been questioning if the “weekly worship service” is something that is a doctrinal truth or just a tradition that the church has had for years.
Check out what this church did for a week… some churches would throw a fit if the pastor wanted to do this… but I strongly believe this is the first step in the right direction.
Lately my mind has really been focused on understanding this world and this culture. Today’s culture is strange. I don’t have any answers for how to minister to this culture–but I believe the first step in effectly ministering is to first understand the world.
This morning I watched these videos on YouTube. I thought it was an interesting observation about our culture:
Their use to be a day when churches needed a professional graphic design artist in order to make their promotion material, worship slides, and sermon slides look professional and current. CreativeMyK is by far the BEST resource I’ve found for churches wanting to give the graphics design aspect of their church a face lift.
Allow me to state that this isn’t strictly for the “graphic newbie church,” this is also an amazing resource for the church that already has a powerful graphics department. All the material can be download in the format that it was originally made (i.e. PhotoShop = .psd file etc). Check it out–it’s a trip that will not be wasted:
CreativeMyK
P.S. Another great resource for ideas and sometimes good photos for stock InterFaceLift.
My previous post mentioned that I had my worship team watch these videos. They’re a good resource for trying to get your team to listen to each other and not "over play."
Worship Band Workshop by Paul Baloche
Worship Band Workshop Part 2 by Paul Baloche
With my first post I must begin by recommending the most useful tool I have found for planning services–Planning Center Online. This tool powerful and easy to use. I lead worship at two churches (one on Sunday mornings and our church plant on Saturday nights). This involves, two different teams, two different services, and two different pastors. This is has changed my 12-16 hour planning process for services to 6-8 hours (and sometimes as little as 4 hours).
What can it do? Allow me to list a few features:
1. It creates pdfs for your cord charts. It also can be configured to generate the same chord chart in any desired key.
2. You can create a schedule for your worship team (i.e. who’s planing and what they are playing/singing). It then sends each person an e-mail with an "Accept" or "Decline." When they click accept/decline an e-mail is sent to you telling you that the person has confirmed or declined the request for the week.
3. It allows for uploads and link attachments. For example: I wanted my team to watch Paul Baloche’s "Worship Band Workshop" both "part 1" and "part 2." I found it on YouTube, and then attached a link. I sent an e-mail to my team and asked them to watch it. All they had to do is click the link and it’ll take them to the video.
4. Planning Center allows the leader to attach mp3s to the plans. This is useful when introducing a new song so that everyone on your team has listened to the song before coming to practice. There is an option in Planning Center to allow for downloads of the mp3 or just to allow the users to listen. For example: I wrote a song that our team was going to do on in a Sunday service. I did a recording of just me and my guitar and put it up on Planning Center. I set the permissions to download (because I owned the song) so that my team could put it on a CD, computer, or whatever in order to learn the song well.
These are just a few things that Planning Center allows you to do. You can check it out with a free subscription… but the free subscription doesn’t allow the users to do much. In order to get a deeper idea of how powerful this tool is, I’d recommend watching the tutorials. Planning Center Online