Music, Traditions and Change

Yesterday I opened a discussion of traditions and music and told you about the changes we made in this area and why.  I told you how we approached the difficulty of resistance when we did so, and today I’d like to wrap up the discussion…

Please understand that we didn’t make our changes over night or in a vacuum.  It all began with a concerted effort to grow our church spiritually not numerically.  I would imagine that if we just tried flipping a switch and went from totally traditional one week, and then totally contemporary the next, there wouldn’t have been anything but chaos as a result.  In addition, our music evolved slowly for a number of reasons such as a lack of people willing to participate; a general lack of talent available in a small congregation, but as time passed, these things changed  With each new success, more people wanted to be part of a winning team, you might say.

Music was not the only tradition that was either done away with or modified, but of course it was the most obvious.  I must mention here once again that when I speak of our traditions, I am referring only to the way we did things, not to the message of Scripture or to any Scriptural imperative. As time went on, something else started to change…

It used to be that baptisms were so infrequent that when there was one, nobody had any idea of what to do, and each time the wheel had to be reinvented… or so it seemed.  People might actually complain that church got out late that day! Baptisms became much more frequent, and pretty soon, everyone involved in the worship service knew exactly what to do:  Oh, there’s a baptism today, great!  Things go almost like clockwork because the results of the things that had been done, beginning with spiritual growth began to pay off in souls won for Jesus Christ.  To be sure, I’m not suggesting that improvements can’t still be made, that process never should stop, but a dramatic shift had taken place.

The time came when we had, instead of an empty auditorium, a need to go to two services, and the day may well come soon when we need either a third service or a new place to meet: God’s will be done!

The funny thing that comes to me in looking back is that I really don’t hear complaints much any more.  I can understand somebody being skeptical about changes at first, but when the harvest starts to come in, the skeptics are gone.  Oh, I’m sure that some day something else will change and it will take a time for a buy-in from certain quarters, but when you are in a place where God is working in your midst, TWWADI doesn’t seem to count for very much.

One Week Later

I would imagine that most of us have various impressions of the last week’s news relating to the events in Boston.  Violence, terror, confusion, outrage, sadness, mourning all fit the bill, but of course there are other things as well.

Praise for the first responders, the bravery of so many of those who put their lives on the line to protect the good citizens of the Boston area, and of course heavy concern for those who were killed or injured and their families.  There were many saddening tales of injuries, loss and grief…

There have been a great number of tributes paid, tales told, news reported and images of all kinds that I wouldn’t even attempt to add to those.  For me, there are certainly many questions that still need an answer: How could this happen?  How did these guys expect to get away with their crimes?  Are there more involved?  All of these are on my mind after a week that shocked us all.

I was struck late last week by the many comments from friends and acquaintances of the perpetrators saying that, particularly the younger of the two was such a nice guy, how nobody could have imagined him capable of such acts.   I heard an “expert” who pointed out that whenever there is a horrible crime of violence, the people who knew the murderer or attacker always say these things, and the expert said that they are simply speaking from emotion and didn’t understand the signs involved in such things.  Maybe the gentleman is correct, but this thought stuck with me:

Suppose those people are right; suppose that this guy was the last one that any reasonable person would have suspected to carry out such an outrageous act of violence upon innocent people… what happened?

Looking at this question from a Christian Biblical point of view, I’m struck by something that a “profession” in security might not take into consideration, and that is the fact that there is a difference between “evil” and “Evil.”  The former is a word that we might use to describe a very bad action: “That was an evil thing to do.”  The latter, however is an active, searching and driving force that is seeking to turn otherwise decent people into monsters.  It is in fact the spiritual enemy of the Christian.  It seeks to corrupt, destroy and foul anybody who lets it into their lives, and it is something that we must take very seriously.

I am normally one of the last people to over-spiritualize things, please understand that.  However, the Bible teaches us that we are on the front lines of a spiritual war, and we must take that seriously.

 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:12

It is incumbent upon us to protect our young from opening themselves to Evil; to take up the sword that is God’s Word to oppose it, and to be fervent prayer warriors for Jesus Christ, to boldly pray not just for safety from evil, which is the approach that our civil authorities must take, but rather to pray boldly for the utter destruction of that Evil which has plagued this world for so many centuries, and to pray boldly that the cross of will triumph over sin and death in the hearts of the people.

Basic Communication

As we continue on with our look at church growth, I think it would be beneficial to review some basics of elementary communication to see if there is an application to growing a church, and of course I mean growing first in the sense of spiritual growth and then its natural result, growing in numbers. As an undergraduate, over 30 years ago, I studied communication, and the one thing that I can remember, perhaps more than any other thing that my professors taught was that the first rule of communication was to know your audience. Certainly you wouldn’t speak to your grandmother the way you might speak to your college-age friends.  You wouldn’t address the President the way you’d address the guys on your bowling team, and you wouldn’t make a presentation to an audience of college professors in the same way you would to a group of elderly women.

This is actually more of an issue in churches than you might think, particularly when a congregation is diverse, for not all Peoples and backgrounds have the same frames of reference.  When I started this blog, my idea was to comment of frames of reference that people have, and how they affect our view of the things around us.  For example, when I have been teaching in church to a group of people who are mostly in their 50′s and 60′s, I might use as an example a cultural reference to a TV show, commercial or song from the 1960′s.  If I used that same example to a group of people in their 20′s or 300′s, they would probably have no clue what I was talking about, and if I mentioned Lady Gaga to the older group, they would be clueless, as I am.  (Just a name I heard on the radio this morning)

I have been strongly criticized in some comments on this series of posts because I have used some modern terms that come out of the world of communication such as “vision statement” and “rollout.” It seems that when some Christians see these terms used, they assume that I must be running some of a scam, entirely disregarding the message of Scripture and putting together a phony kind of church that is built on tricks and entertainment, containing no spiritual truth… You might ask why I used these terms to describe what went on instead of more traditional Biblical terms meaning the same thing.  For example, I could have said that we ‘proclaimed our vision of the Body of Christ as exhortations to the flock to repent from their wicked ways and follow the Lord with faithfulness.’  I didn’t put it that way because who understand that other than preachers, seminary professors and old school Christians who only read King James?  They are not my (here’s another one from communication) “Target audience.”  Why are these fine folks not my target audience?  Simple: They already know it all, and wouldn’t even consider what I am saying here!

Here are a couple of examples from the Bible:  First, Jesus frequently used analogies relating to agriculture to communicate His message to the people.  He did that because he was speaking to people who lived in first century Judea and the areas surrounding it who lived in an agrarian economy where the major production was in grapes used for wine-making, wheat used for bread making, fishing and the raising of sheep for food and wool.  Do you suppose He would have used the same examples if the area was one that raised tomatoes and artichokes?  Of course not; who would have understood all that sheep stuff?  When we teach those passages today, we must explain it to modern-day Americans; Jesus didn’t have that problem because his audience knew exactly what He was talking about.

Consider the apostle Paul.  Did he present the message in the same terms to Greeks as he did to Jews in Judea?  Of course not; the Greeks didn’t know much of anything of the Jewish Scriptures.  When Paul spoke to the Athenians on Mars Hill did he present the gospel like he had presented it everywhere else?  No, he knew his audience! Consider the synoptic gospels: Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience, Mark to a Roman audience and Luke to a Greek audience.  They all present the same exact message, but they do it in different ways…

In a nutshell, church growth comes down to one problem that leads to other problems which are really a subset of the first one: That main problem is how do we get our current congregations mature enough spiritually so that we can shift out target audience away from them and on to the lost who so desperately need to hear about Jesus Christ? If you are perceptive, you might realize that I just restated my TWWADI post to reach a different audience!

I have already described what we did to accomplish this.  Our approach was in Vision rollout phases 1 and 2.  First, in phase 1 we pointed them to the Great Commission and got their attention.  In phase 2 we actively stepped up our educational efforts to teach them Scriptural application in daily life.  The next step in the process was to shift the target audience for everyone from selfish things to reaching out to the lost, and that discussion begins tomorrow.

Stranger in a Strange Town

 

For the past few days I’ve been here in our Nation’s Capital, and what a different place it is!  This isn’t the slow-paced Midwest I’ve become used to, no, this place is big city.  The traffic is horrific, the streets are crowded and there are people everywhere who are in a big hurry to be somewhere else.  When you talk to them, they seem to have a whole different point of view on things.  Everywhere I’ve been has a long list of rules, people to enforce them and people following the rules without complaint; nothing like what I’m used to!

The weather is chilly, these good folks think it’s cold, the cherry blossoms are just starting to pop out, and the traffic, did I mention the traffic?

As different as things seem at first, there are some things that feel more like home.  For instance, there are many people in this area who are brothers or sisters in Christ.  It really doesn’t make any difference what the local culture is when you come across one of these, for they are like running into a family member you haven’t seen in a long time, and the funny thing is that you can tell who they are.  Maybe it’s something in their look or their walk, I’m not sure.  Even I who can’t really see very well can tell…

How good and pleasant it is
    when God’s people live together in unity!

Psalm 133:1

We may not always agree on what goes on in this place, but we are united in the things of God, and those are the things that count.

 

Vision Rollout: Phase Two

The first phase of our introduction of our church’s Vision Statement was in our last post, and it included a little bit of showmanship to get the people to focus on something that had never before happened in our church: Leadership.  We got their attention by producing immediate results they could see and touch by redecorating and repairing the church building.  This was a good thing to do, and it succeeded, but it was a minor thing because it was lacking in eternal results.  Phase 2 was the important part, for this phase was designed to begin the process of spiritual growth in the people by teaching them the Word of God in a way that they had not experienced previously.

Before I get into those particulars, it might be helpful to mention that while our phase 1 portion wasn’t something that contained eternal significance directly, it did contain a vital element that no Christian leader should overlook in our culture: It resulted in the people giving the leaders “permission” to take them to the next step.  This was not by vote or referendum, it’s much more subtle than that.  People will follow your leadership to the extent that you have some kind of a “position”.  If you are the pastor, they will respect your position as pastor for a time.  If you produce, they will allow to to lead them some more; if you don’t then sooner or later they will stop following you and you will become irrelevant, or worse, a joke.  The leadership of our church had not produced in their capacity as pastor or elder for a very long time; the place was more like a social club than a real church; sorry, but it’s true.  To run out and announce a vision statement and tell everybody that starting now we mean business might have amused people, but it wouldn/t inspire them to take us seriously.  By simply fixing the place up and giving it a whole new look, the people allowed themselves to give the next and much more significant part a chance, thus I say we gained “permission” to lead.  It wasn’t in a literal sense, but it was real.

The plan was to change the way our preaching was done so that it would be paired with our Adult Sunday School and driven by the class content.  Our class would center on books of the New Testament that have a lot to say about discipleship, the church and living as a follower of Christ: In short, we were teaching discipleship.

We ran into a problem.  Our Sr. Minister was an old school preacher who was going to do things his way; and he was preaching sermons that were essentially the same ones he preached in the early 1970′s.  The way that I like to describe this is that they were so filled with grace that it was hard to discern truth.  With that said, the gentleman is a wonderful guy and has an awesome heart for the Lord, but this wasn’t enough.  In class, however, we were pretty much on fire! Of course, you can guess what resulted.  The third of our adults who attended class were saying things like, “Wow, I never saw that before” and “this is amazing, I didn’t ever get it before” and so on.  I was teaching it, and I focused the lessons from Colossians, Philippians, 1 Peter, and 1 Timothy on self, traditions, service, and the church and took it to a high school level instead of the typical Sunday school 8th grade level.  During this time, as a change of pace, I also worked in topical studies on Messianic prophecy, the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24-25) and Biblical Covenant.  We also did a special weekend workshop on Antichrist. Note, that Messianic prophecy, Olivet Discourse and Antichrist increased the number of people who attended because of the fascination people seem to have on these kinds of topics, so you can say that we increased the number of people who attended class, and increased therefore the number of people who might be challenged to seriously follow Christ. Again, this was by deliberate strategy. This went from the fall of 2009 through the first part of 2011.

At the same time, we introduced something entirely different.  We called it Bible “U”.  Bible “U” was a class taught on Sunday night that was at an undergraduate college level.  You had to buy a textbook, there were homework assignments and midterm and final.  We ran Bible “U” for a year and a half and it was a great success, but maybe not in quite the way you’d expect.  You see, the purposes of Bible “U” were twofold.  First, our entire leadership team attended.  This was a chance to train them to be leaders.  Second, it was to identify who the next generation of leaders would be, and our of this has come an awesome group of leaders!

Going to Bible “U” was something that required spending money, being inconvenienced and a commitment to finish what you start… and in the process, you could also learn some “big boy” applied theology.  This was incredibly important to us because we were a church of little Bible scholars who could quote chapter and verse on most anything, but who had no concept of application of chapter and verse.  Learning Bible facts is all well and good for a Bible trivia game, but the Word of God is not trivia!  Application into real life is what changes lives for Christ.

I hope you are still with me in this post, because the end game in all of this education, growing up and training was relational small groups.  Bible “U” gave us our small group leaders.

Relational Learning

Everything I mentioned for phase 2 has been classroom learning.  Now, let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with classroom learning, but it isn’t really effective “discipleship” either.

Consider how Jesus interacted with His disciples.  They had relationships on a personal level.  They ate together, travelled together, talked together, sat around the campfire together and Jesus taught them in a relational way; they could see Him putting His teachings into practice. They built relationships of trust together, they built relationships of accountability to gether…

This is quite difficult to do in a classroom where people don’t want to speak up or talk about private things.  How do you hold people personally accountable in a classroom without humiliation or embarrassment?  You really don’t, but in a small group setting like Jesus had with His disciples, these things begin to happen naturally as the people get to know one another on a personal level.

This was the real goal.

Just try to picture what it would have been like to witness Jesus entering Jerusalem in Triumph; can you?  Just picture it, the great King of Heaven riding into the city, people line His route and they shout:

Hosanna to the Son of David.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest!

And there He is; riding a donkey!

That is hardly the way a “normal” king would ride into His new capital…

…but Jesus is no “normal” King!  His Kingdom is not of this world, He was entering the city not to conquer Rome but to conquer sin and death.  The people were excited, the city was alive with anticipation, and the enemies of Jesus were no doubt quaking in their boots.  Even though He was King of a heavenly kingdom, Jesus entered God’s city nevertheless, and the picture is even more important than it would have been if He rode a mighty steed with thousands of troops behind Him, for if that were His mission that day, it might well have been yet another great occasion that history has all but forgotten.

Truthfully, history has often tried to forget Jesus and His arrival in Jerusalem that day, but it just can’t, for the impact of what He would do there that week is with us still, two thousand years later.  Jesus, the Great King was victorious in Jerusalem, even though it looked like He wasn’t.  He was all-powerful, even though it didn’t look that way with Him riding a donkey.  He utterly destroyed His Enemy there, even though it looked at first like the Enemy carried the battle.

In all honesty, Jesus completely confounded His critics and foes, for He was meek and mild, so different from the world of men; He didn’t play their game. He had a different agenda, and by that agenda you and I have hope all of these centuries later.  My hope is that we all will take time this week to pause in awe of all that Jesus did for us in Jerusalem so long ago…

So What is “Church Growth” Anyway?

I’d say that one of the most misunderstood terms these days is “Church Growth.”  I hadn’t even posted on the subject and I got the question about what I mean by the term:  Is it the number of people or the maturity of the people?

Plenty of Christians will say that the number of people who attend a particular church is irrelevant as long as they are growing in the faith.  I happen to think there is a point to be made there, but it also misses something very important: If the members of a given church are “mature” in their faith and in their walk with Christ, that should cause the number attending to increase…

How is that, you ask?  Simple!  To be a mature follower of Christ means that you will begin doing the things that Jesus did.  If you do the things Jesus did, and Jesus was bringing the Gospel to the world, then you should be too. If you are taking the Gospel to the world around your neighborhood, shouldn’t there be fruit?

It is my view that a church cannot grow numerically until it’s leaders and congregation grow enough spiritually to do the things that cause church growth.  Therefore, in these posts, I hope that we can understand the meaning of “church growth” to be both in the growth of the people there spiritually and resulting in a growth in numbers.

While we’re at it, I’ll give you what I mean by “spiritual growth” as well.  When I say “spiritual growth” or “grow spiritually” I mean the growth of the people in their understanding of the teachings and application of Scripture in their daily lives such that they bear Biblical fruit as a result.  To put it another way, I mean that the people are becoming true disciples of Jesus Christ, understanding that a “disciple” is someone who knows what the Master knows, as revealed in the Bible, and who does what the Master does.  Jesus, the Master, when He was on the earth took the truth of God’s Word to the people around Him to make disciples, who in turn would do the same, with the result of more and more people coming to a mature knowledge of Christ. When this is not happening in the church, you can easily tell because there is no numerical growth.

You  might think that this is an over simplification, and maybe it is, but is surely a significant indicator as you will see in future posts on this subject. One thing is certain; there are a lot of numbers mentoned in the book of Acts!

Pray with Boldness

How often do we pray with boldness?  No, I mean with real boldness…?

Do we ask God for big things, as opposed to routine things?  Do we ask God to take the battle right to the enemy, or to win great victories for His church?

Are our prayers full of the request that His will be done and are they self-less?

For most of us, when we pray our prayers tend to center on what we want and they often don’t really go all that far, but those aren’t really the kinds of prayers you see in the Bible, for there, prayers tend to be directed towards God’s purposes and they seek great deeds.

Save me, O God, by your name;
    vindicate me by your might.
 Hear my prayer, O God;
    listen to the words of my mouth.

Psalm 54:1-2

Here are words of boldness, of purpose and words asking for great victories.  If you go on to read the verses that follow, you might at first think that requests are being made for selfish reasons when the speaker is asking for his enemies to be taken care of, but when we remember that the speaker is David and that his enemies are also God’s enemies and that they are in opposition to God’s purpose, it becomes clear that he is asking God to sustain him while advancing God’s purpose; and he isn’t meek and mild about the request; he is confident in his position.

We, too as Christians should be confident in our position with God when we pray, always remembering that God’s purpose is the central force that is important.

There is nothing on this earth that concerns the devil more than a believer in prayer, for it is at that time that the power of God is made manifest.  A believer at prayer, praying bold prayers for God’s will and purpose is like a catalyst that sets free the power of Victory in battle!

God’s Shelter

 

Where do we find shelter?

In modern life, people seek shelter and refuge in many places, for instance many seek it in money and possessions.  Others might seek it in a relationship with a loved one, while others might seek it in their careers or professions… Some might even try to find refuge in drugs or drink.

None of these can really protect us from much, for the things of men will perish after a season.  In spite of this grim reality, shelter and refuge are available for anyone who seeks them; we need only to seek them in the right place.

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
    will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
    my God, in whom I trust.”

Psalm 91:1-2

Do we seek the shelter of God?

Will we dwell in His ways, walk His path and do His will? I’d have to say this is an important question, for in our answer lies our destiny.  If we answer “no” there will be no place to take refuge, but if we answer “yes” our security is assured now and for ever.

Have a great weekend!

 

Very often a picture is better than text, so here’s a picture and no text… well almost no text.

Have a great weekend!