More Places to Read My Stuff!

“I think Austin might just be the US city furthest along the missional road.” Alan Hirsch, author of The Forgotten Ways

If my rantings about TV, Church and growing up aren’t enough for you, don’t worry, there’s other places to find me on the web.

I’ve been given the privilege of helping out the guys over at PlantR.  PlantR is an Austin-Area church planting network, made up of great guys risking everything to create new missional communities.  On the blog, you’ll hear about opportunities to live missionally and show Christ’s love to Austin.

Check out the blog at www.plantr.org, or follow on Twitter @austinplantr.  Keep your eyes peeled for the first ever PlantR podcast later this month.

Tags: Austin, church planting, plantr

6 Ingredients for Passing on Culture

Recently, I took part in a corporate training event for new hires.  The intentionality of the process got me thinking about the desperate need churches have for passing on their culture.

The systems that most churches use seem outdated at best and confused at worst.  Some churches practice a confirmation system while others have a new members class.  You might learn the creeds, the denominational history, the leadership structure and sign a covenant that says you will be in a small group.

In other words, these systems might give you some new information, but they do little to inspire new members to embrace the new way of life unique to that community.

Try this on for a process of onboarding:

1.  Make it hard to come.  You can’t teach culture in a few hours on Sunday afternoon.  How about a retreat, maybe you should even charge.  You want people to take this seriously.

2.  Make it exciting! Your church should be like nowhere else, and have the ability to change the world.  People should be pumped up by that.

3.  Tell the great stories of your church.  How was it founded?  What are some landmark moments?  These should become the stuff of legend.

4.  Teach a new way of being together and living in the world.  Save the big theology and ecclesiology for Sunday.  Teach about what makes the Christian way of life completely different from anything they’ve ever experienced.  How do Christians approach money, sex, conflict and violence? How do we love each other and our neighbors?

5.  Leave with a new set of tools.  Having become a part of your church, they should now have methods for growing closer to God, serving with their church and loving their neighbors.  It may seem regimented to teach people how to read their Bible or how to speak kindly.  However, Christians are to live differently, which doesn’t come naturally.  Equip for that.

6.  Follow up.  Each person should leave with a mentor they will be hearing from soon.  Each established member in your church should know it’s their job to follow up, too.

What do you think?  How would an intentional onboarding process change your church?

Tags: membership classes, onboarding

Being a Christian is Not License to Be a Jerk

In my retail gig, my culturally Jewish manager recently encountered a person who identified himself as a Youth Pastor for a well known parachurch organization.  The pastor wanted a discount that he did not qualify for, and rudely nagged his salesperson, until the manager was called in.

The pastor continuing to be push, became belligerent and insulting.  The manager calmingly told him no, but was so bothered by the man’s behavior, he added that he was surprised that a person with the title of “pastor” could be so rude.  The pastor’s response was “I have to be intense in my job.  It’s the only way to keep kids off drugs.”

There are so many problems with this, like the unloving way the pastor treated a non-christian, or a philosophy of ministry that shows that a pastor’s role is to keep kids of drugs.  It’s simpler than that:

There’s no way that following Jesus gives you license to be a jerk.

This is my struggle with two large and influential segments of Christian thought.

1) Christendom-Minded Christians.  Theses are the people that believe the church’s role is to enforce their morality.  Not satisfied with teaching and baptize in the name of Jesus, they create bumper stickers, picket abortion clinics and strip clubs, and become overly involved in politics.  Their righteous intentions lose ground and inevitably create an “us versus them” mentality. This is the first step to becoming a jerk.

2) Grumpy Calvinists, and Mean Spirited Liberals.  Calvinism, often appealing to heady thinkers with rigorous personal standards, can easily become an Us vs. Them religion.  When concepts like especially the Limited Atonement and Predestination become more central than grace, theology creates excuses to be mean to outsiders.  Liberals do this too, with their constant jabs at those who do not rally to their causes. They can be more known for who they are against than the good they want to see done in the world.

Jesus wasn’t a push over, and he wasn’t nice to everybody.  But he did love the world enough to die for it. He poured his life into cultural outsiders, and called the insiders to account for not living up to their beliefs.  Jesus wasn’t a jerk.

While there is much good to be done in developing our theology or making social change, here is an easy question to help us approach our thoughts and actions: Will doing this make me a jerk?

Camp Review

I’m back in Austin after a great week with the crew from Wildside at Daybreak Camp in northern California.  It was great to be in the mountains, hang out with old friends and make some new ones, and talk about our Shepherd.

The theme of the camp was Epic, and it is modeled after the book Hinds Feet on High Places.  Each morning, the campers would visit an “altar,” where I shared a portion of the allegory, and they had a time of prayer and reflection.  In the evening, they revisited a changed altar, and I shared about some corresponding topics from scripture.  (That’s me speaking in the “Valley of Humiliation.”)

We talked about pride, loneliness, peacemaking, giving up your burdens, dying to self, and being a new creation.  May sound heavy for middle schoolers, but the kids handled it well.

Props to the directors for an incredibly imaginative Camp, and letting me be a small part of it.

Three Inspiring Church Planting Stories (And Two Big Questions)

This past month I read three church planting books.  One of my goals in life is to be involved in planting new churches that reach those who established churches cannot.

Launch by Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas tells the story of the launch of Journey Church of the City in New York.  The book is short, sweet, and aims at being intensely practical.  Searcy comes out of the Purpose Driven world and unashamedly presents a Saddleback-esque style of planting.  It’s all about launching big, or gathering a crowd for Sunday services.  The book gives step by step instructions on everything from finding a meeting place to raising funds.

Exponential is written by Dave and Jon Ferguson, the two brothers who lead Chicago’s Community Christian Church and the New Thing Network.  Two things stand out: 1) They say “anyone can do it!” again and again, and leave you excited about what God can do through you and your friends. 2) It describes the culture of apprenticeship that has allowed CCC to explode into a multi-site and church planting movement.  Every single position within the church is backed up with an apprentice, ready to take the reins at a moments notice.  This is necessary for any church interested in sending out people to plant new churches.

Church in the Making by Ben Arment is a totally different animal.  I often found myself cheering and turning the pages as quickly as I could.  He plays up his own failures and brags about other’s successes. Arment’s goal is to help Church planters really be prepared and understand what makes a church plant succeed.  What I found most important was his deep emphasis on cultivation of relationships before launch.  This encourages me that the time and relationships I am building now can have eternal significance.

As much as I enjoyed all three books, I find myself asking two questions:

1) Could there a simpler way? The financial and leadership burdens needed to plant churches as these books present does not seem reproducible.

2) Who will it really reach? Often, new churches just shift Christians away from existing churches.  When I look at my friends and neighbors, many of who are cynical dechurched types or frankly just don’t care about spirituality, I’m not sure they’d get up on Sunday morning to check it out.

Tags: Ben Arment, Church in the Making, church planting, Dave Ferguson, Exponential, Jon Ferguson, Kerrick Thomas, Launch, Nelson Searcy