On his nationally syndicated radio program Dave Ramsey recently announced a national event called Town Hall for Hope. NewSong will be partnering with Dave by hosting a local, live airing of this event in Cumming. This will be an awesome opportunity to help bring a message of hope to our community in these uncertain economic times. Our point men on this at NewSong are Chuck Braddock (who teaches Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University for us) and our Share leader, Justin Woelk.
On April 23 at 8:00 p.m., thousands of churches will be joining us in hosting the live town hall via a simulcast web stream. Dave will be answering questions from people across the nation via video, phone, twitter, facebook and more as we learn more about what’s happening with the economy, how we got here, and where we’re going. The Town Hall for Hope is free to attend and, which makes it a great outreach event for the church. I’m hoping our members will invite their friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors to come. You can learn more at http://www.townhallforhope.com/.
In times like these, the Church has an enormous opportunity to provide hope to a world that is searching for it. It’s an honor to partner with Dave Ramsey for this event, and we can’t wait to see how God uses it to transform lives!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Testimony
Yesterday in my sermon I shared a piece of my personal testimony. I was surprised at the emotion that I had to choke back when I began telling it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at that, but after so many years you'd think I could tell it without having to blink back tears.
At any rate, since I don't actually write it down very often, here's what I said...
My “met Christ” story actually has several chapters. I don’t know exactly when I first came to realize God was real – it just dawned on me as a little boy; at some point, even though I wasn’t leading what you’d call a wild life in the 2nd grade, I said a prayer and knew God heard me. Then, in the summer after the 8th grade I went to a youth retreat in Biloxi, MS, and had an amazing encounter with Christ. A girl sitting across from me in the darkened room at the retreat that night told me months later without knowing what had happened inside me that she looked up as we were praying and saw a bright light directly behind me. Still later, in my mid-thirties, I had climbed up the ladder of success and had begun to enjoy its spoils but then it dawned on me that there had to be more to life than making a lot of money, living in a nice house and having a great family. And so I turned to the Bible and sought deeper meaning in life and God met me again, radically reorienting not only my life, but the lives of those I love most.
God is good...
At any rate, since I don't actually write it down very often, here's what I said...
My “met Christ” story actually has several chapters. I don’t know exactly when I first came to realize God was real – it just dawned on me as a little boy; at some point, even though I wasn’t leading what you’d call a wild life in the 2nd grade, I said a prayer and knew God heard me. Then, in the summer after the 8th grade I went to a youth retreat in Biloxi, MS, and had an amazing encounter with Christ. A girl sitting across from me in the darkened room at the retreat that night told me months later without knowing what had happened inside me that she looked up as we were praying and saw a bright light directly behind me. Still later, in my mid-thirties, I had climbed up the ladder of success and had begun to enjoy its spoils but then it dawned on me that there had to be more to life than making a lot of money, living in a nice house and having a great family. And so I turned to the Bible and sought deeper meaning in life and God met me again, radically reorienting not only my life, but the lives of those I love most.
God is good...
It's Him, Not Us
I read my last lengthy post again this morning (at least someone is reading my blog!). When I did I realized someone might read it and think "I" or "we" were taking credit or boasting about how smart we are to figure things out about our mission. In truth, it really was, and is, all God. If anything we were way too slow on the uptake to follow - whether through disobedience, pride, ignorance, or some combination of the three.
God used great authors, our own people, prayer, our circumstances, and more to guide us. I'm grateful to him for that.
It's him, not us.
Soli Deo Gloria
(Glory to God alone)
God used great authors, our own people, prayer, our circumstances, and more to guide us. I'm grateful to him for that.
It's him, not us.
Soli Deo Gloria
(Glory to God alone)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
God's Mission for NewSong II
How did NewSong go from chasing after “lead chickens” (see the post “God’s Mission for NewSong I) to being a church that is gaining clarity for its unique calling and mission? That’s what I’ll tell in Part Two of our “mission story.”
In October 2003 NewSong moved across the street from Forsyth Central High School and we felt as though the sky was the limit. After 3 ½ years we finally had our own place to worship without setting up and taking down all our equipment each week. We had brand new leased worship center that seated over 225, classroom space, a kitchen, real nurseries and a space for our youth. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We were averaging about 160 a week in attendance when we moved in. We fully expected to shoot past the 200 threshold very quickly in our new “digs.” We were surprised to discover just the opposite occurred however. We finished the next full year (2004) averaging 156 a week. By the end of 2005 we had dropped to 148. We ended 2006 at 146, and by the end of 2007 we had slipped to an average weekly attendance of 138. I remember being totally discouraged at the end of 2007. In the previous 18 months we had lost our youth pastor (Lee), our worship leader (Allen), and our children’s director (Tidwell). We had also lost other key leaders and seen ministries fold. God seemed to be winnowing us down. That December (2007) we lost still another youth pastor (Sanders). Things looked grim. But God was already moving.
During 2007 I began teaching an adult Sunday School class using books from Dallas Willard and John Ortberg to guide the class. Willard has written several books and is probably best known for a somewhat difficult read called The Divine Conspiracy. It was actually another of his books titled The Spirit of the Disciplines that helped me see something really important though. In the back of that book there is an appendix, which is also the first chapter of a subsequent book titled The Great Omission. The “great omission” Willard refers to is stems from what he views as an “historical drift” since Jesus commissioned the first disciples to “go and make disciples.” This great omission is actually two-fold. Instead of making converts to a particular faith and practice, Willard contends that somewhere along the way we began simply enrolling people on a church roll with no repentance, and no real change in their lives. They just added Jesus to their lives but nothing else changed. The second part of the omission is that instead of enrolling these “converts” as students or apprentices to Jesus who intend to progressively reorder their lives in order to follow him; there is no change in subsequent behavior either. According to Willard what that means is that our churches are filled with what he calls “undiscipled disciples.” He says much, much more, but he finally concludes that most problems in churches today can be explained by the fact that our churches are filled with people who have not yet decided to follow Jesus!” Ouch!
Willard wasn’t picking on individual Christians in his critique though. He says that it really isn’t their fault. The real culprit is the church. Most churches, he contends, allow this “easy-believism.” Furthermore, most churches don’t have a process in place to help people move from being new believers to mature disciples.
This is when my ears perked up. I was convicted by that thought. We certainly didn’t have a process to do this in place at NewSong. Our mission statement at the time (“borrowed from Northpoint) was “Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.” But the question was, “How?” The answer certainly was not to ask them to come to church once a week, make them feel guilty, and then work them to death with busyness at church.
Once I saw this I began to really pray about our mission statement. It didn’t describe who we were or what we were doing (or not doing). In time God impressed three things on my heart as being important to Him and important to us at NewSong. He gave me three words/concepts: “Kingdom Relationships” (with God and others), “Spiritual Formation” (becoming students of Jesus Christ), and “Missional Focus” (looking outward to serve).
Fast forward a few more months and I stumbled across yet another book (actually my daughter Amy suggested I read it) called Simple Church. When I read that book I felt as though authors Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger had read my mind. As I read the stories of Pastor Rush and his ministry schizophrenia and as I compared notes with “First Church” and “Cross Church” I began to realize that they were describing something very important, and something very real to us at NewSong.
I asked our Board of Elders if we could read the book together and they agreed (we have a wonderful Board of Elders at my church!). From July to September 2007 we used the book as a guide to craft a new mission statement – one that was built around a three-step process for making disciples: “Love God, Grow to be like Jesus, Share with the world.” Eleven words which we often shorten to only three: "Love, grow, and share." Not surprisingly, our new mission statement reflected what God had given me a few months earlier, “Kingdom Relationship” (Love God), “Spiritual Formation” (Grow to be like Jesus), and “Missional Focus” (Share with the world). We now had the mission statement that I believe God intended us to have to fulfill our unique calling to the world. We now had a process in place to make disciples, our “product,” if you will. What’s more, it is our unique process for fulfilling the unique calling God has given us.
It was a great moment. We announced the new mission to the church with great fanfare. We changed our website and letterhead and business cards to reflect the new mission statement. We plastered it on the wall in our worship center. More importantly, people began to “own it.” Almost immediately we began to grow. We saw a bump in attendance of about a dozen people a week in the fourth quarter of 2007. As we began 2008 we gained a few more attenders. We also got a brand new youth pastor and saw an influx of younger families (“twenty-somethings”).
By Easter, 2008 the Elders felt we had gained enough momentum to start a second service. Almost overnight we added another 10 or so to our worship attendance, and the spiritual momentum was growing. In June we hired a new worship leader and in July we hired a children’s director. People were getting excited, we had a focus, and our mission was finally being grasped and understood.
By the time one year had rolled around with our new mission it began to be apparent that we hadn't gone far enough or deep enough in adopting the new mission. Instead of focusing, clarifying and aligning ourselves through the lens of our new mission and process we had simply gotten excited about it and then dropped down on top of what we were already doing. Why? Perhaps we were tired or lazy. Maybe the time wasn’t right, or maybe we just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
And so by the fall of 2008 we had begun to drift again. After an initial burst of momentum, we began to lose our momentum and coast. We lost our focus. But things were about to change again.
During this fourth quarter God impressed upon me that we were really dropping the ball when it came to evangelism. Two incidents stand out in particular. A church member who was attending a Christian college used our church as a case study for a paper and she us asked for some statistics from the church. When we pulled them out for her we realized our congregation was made up of practically 100% transfer growth (Christians either switching churches locally, or else moving into the area as Christians and choosing to affiliate with us). The second incident was more convicting. A pastor friend of mine subtly (and not so subtly!) challenged me about the issue of reaching nonbelievers for Christ. I remember getting exasperated with him in a restaurant one day and saying something along the lines of, “We’re just not the kind of church that reaches new people!" I practically choked on the words as I spoke them. God chastened me about my poor leadership at NewSong with regards to evangelism. Reaching people who don’t know the Lord isn’t an option; it must be a priority for us because it is a priority for Him.
As I did my planning for the coming year through the holiday season at the end of 2008 it became clear to me that we needed four strategic ministry priorities for 2009: 1) Evangelism. 2) Involvement (more connecting and growing), 3) Facilities, and 4) Empowering Leadership. I announced these priorities our my annual “State of the Church” sermon which I give every year on the first Sunday of the New Year. I used the image of an open door that God had opened that no one could close (Rev. 3:3-8). It took us eight years to figure it out, but God wants us to reach the lost. God wants us to get involved in the process of discipleship, God wants us to take seriously the challenge of building His church at NewSong, and God wants us to start empowering one another in our leadership. We can no longer function, leadership-wise, like we did when we started with me being a bottleneck to our growth because I was still leading the church as I always have from the beginning.
Thankfully, God already knew we needed to make these changes and was preparing for it all along, especially the leadership piece. During 2008 God brought us a new youth pastor (January), Worship Leader (June) and Children’s Director (July). In December God sent us the person who is now the staff volunteer leading our Grow ministry. For the first time ever we have someone leading discipleship at NewSong. I'm embarassed to admit that, but honestly, I think that for whatever reason, we've only now gotten the right person for the job.
What an answer to prayer. In one year God provided someone to take ownership and lead all five of the main areas we now have at NewSong: Love, Grow, Share, Students and Children.
We also expanded our facilities at the beginning of this year, taking in and remodeling the dance studio next door to us. This gave us much-needed growing room.
In January 2009 our Board of Elders also approved giving our youth pastor additional responsibilities as an “Assistant to the Pastor.” Momentum has begun to build in our staff and we have begun to gel as a unit. We meet as a staff on a weekly basis. With these other leaders now in place to lead the five areas, their vision and leadership has begun to complement my own and has allowed us to have more intentional focus in each area. This has allowed us to examine what we’re doing and to formulate ways to go about accomplishing our mission.
Today
And that brings us up to the present moment (March, 2009). Our staff and Elders are now reading the Simple Church book, some for the first time, and others are re-reading it. We’re reading it this time with emphasis on focusing, clarifying, and aligning our mission and ministries. We have also recently come up with a set of leader guidelines to help us underscore what is important to us in terms of leadership at NewSong (character, competency and calling). We want to get the right leaders on the bus at NewSong and get them in the right seats.
I’m also very excited about a retreat we have coming up in May where both our Elders and our Staff will be together for the first time ever in this kind of setting. The goal for this retreat (in my mind) is synchronization so that all our leaders have a shared understanding of our church’s values, priorities, goals and objectives. It’s very important for us to have the same assumptions about what constitutes a “win” for NewSong. In fact I believe it is essential if we are going to accomplish what God wants us to accomplish.
In the meantime, God continues to reveal things to us in our weekly staff meetings. In recent weeks I believe he has shown us the following in our Love, Grow, and Share areas.
In October 2003 NewSong moved across the street from Forsyth Central High School and we felt as though the sky was the limit. After 3 ½ years we finally had our own place to worship without setting up and taking down all our equipment each week. We had brand new leased worship center that seated over 225, classroom space, a kitchen, real nurseries and a space for our youth. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We were averaging about 160 a week in attendance when we moved in. We fully expected to shoot past the 200 threshold very quickly in our new “digs.” We were surprised to discover just the opposite occurred however. We finished the next full year (2004) averaging 156 a week. By the end of 2005 we had dropped to 148. We ended 2006 at 146, and by the end of 2007 we had slipped to an average weekly attendance of 138. I remember being totally discouraged at the end of 2007. In the previous 18 months we had lost our youth pastor (Lee), our worship leader (Allen), and our children’s director (Tidwell). We had also lost other key leaders and seen ministries fold. God seemed to be winnowing us down. That December (2007) we lost still another youth pastor (Sanders). Things looked grim. But God was already moving.
During 2007 I began teaching an adult Sunday School class using books from Dallas Willard and John Ortberg to guide the class. Willard has written several books and is probably best known for a somewhat difficult read called The Divine Conspiracy. It was actually another of his books titled The Spirit of the Disciplines that helped me see something really important though. In the back of that book there is an appendix, which is also the first chapter of a subsequent book titled The Great Omission. The “great omission” Willard refers to is stems from what he views as an “historical drift” since Jesus commissioned the first disciples to “go and make disciples.” This great omission is actually two-fold. Instead of making converts to a particular faith and practice, Willard contends that somewhere along the way we began simply enrolling people on a church roll with no repentance, and no real change in their lives. They just added Jesus to their lives but nothing else changed. The second part of the omission is that instead of enrolling these “converts” as students or apprentices to Jesus who intend to progressively reorder their lives in order to follow him; there is no change in subsequent behavior either. According to Willard what that means is that our churches are filled with what he calls “undiscipled disciples.” He says much, much more, but he finally concludes that most problems in churches today can be explained by the fact that our churches are filled with people who have not yet decided to follow Jesus!” Ouch!
Willard wasn’t picking on individual Christians in his critique though. He says that it really isn’t their fault. The real culprit is the church. Most churches, he contends, allow this “easy-believism.” Furthermore, most churches don’t have a process in place to help people move from being new believers to mature disciples.
This is when my ears perked up. I was convicted by that thought. We certainly didn’t have a process to do this in place at NewSong. Our mission statement at the time (“borrowed from Northpoint) was “Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.” But the question was, “How?” The answer certainly was not to ask them to come to church once a week, make them feel guilty, and then work them to death with busyness at church.
Once I saw this I began to really pray about our mission statement. It didn’t describe who we were or what we were doing (or not doing). In time God impressed three things on my heart as being important to Him and important to us at NewSong. He gave me three words/concepts: “Kingdom Relationships” (with God and others), “Spiritual Formation” (becoming students of Jesus Christ), and “Missional Focus” (looking outward to serve).
Fast forward a few more months and I stumbled across yet another book (actually my daughter Amy suggested I read it) called Simple Church. When I read that book I felt as though authors Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger had read my mind. As I read the stories of Pastor Rush and his ministry schizophrenia and as I compared notes with “First Church” and “Cross Church” I began to realize that they were describing something very important, and something very real to us at NewSong.
I asked our Board of Elders if we could read the book together and they agreed (we have a wonderful Board of Elders at my church!). From July to September 2007 we used the book as a guide to craft a new mission statement – one that was built around a three-step process for making disciples: “Love God, Grow to be like Jesus, Share with the world.” Eleven words which we often shorten to only three: "Love, grow, and share." Not surprisingly, our new mission statement reflected what God had given me a few months earlier, “Kingdom Relationship” (Love God), “Spiritual Formation” (Grow to be like Jesus), and “Missional Focus” (Share with the world). We now had the mission statement that I believe God intended us to have to fulfill our unique calling to the world. We now had a process in place to make disciples, our “product,” if you will. What’s more, it is our unique process for fulfilling the unique calling God has given us.
It was a great moment. We announced the new mission to the church with great fanfare. We changed our website and letterhead and business cards to reflect the new mission statement. We plastered it on the wall in our worship center. More importantly, people began to “own it.” Almost immediately we began to grow. We saw a bump in attendance of about a dozen people a week in the fourth quarter of 2007. As we began 2008 we gained a few more attenders. We also got a brand new youth pastor and saw an influx of younger families (“twenty-somethings”).
By Easter, 2008 the Elders felt we had gained enough momentum to start a second service. Almost overnight we added another 10 or so to our worship attendance, and the spiritual momentum was growing. In June we hired a new worship leader and in July we hired a children’s director. People were getting excited, we had a focus, and our mission was finally being grasped and understood.
By the time one year had rolled around with our new mission it began to be apparent that we hadn't gone far enough or deep enough in adopting the new mission. Instead of focusing, clarifying and aligning ourselves through the lens of our new mission and process we had simply gotten excited about it and then dropped down on top of what we were already doing. Why? Perhaps we were tired or lazy. Maybe the time wasn’t right, or maybe we just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
And so by the fall of 2008 we had begun to drift again. After an initial burst of momentum, we began to lose our momentum and coast. We lost our focus. But things were about to change again.
During this fourth quarter God impressed upon me that we were really dropping the ball when it came to evangelism. Two incidents stand out in particular. A church member who was attending a Christian college used our church as a case study for a paper and she us asked for some statistics from the church. When we pulled them out for her we realized our congregation was made up of practically 100% transfer growth (Christians either switching churches locally, or else moving into the area as Christians and choosing to affiliate with us). The second incident was more convicting. A pastor friend of mine subtly (and not so subtly!) challenged me about the issue of reaching nonbelievers for Christ. I remember getting exasperated with him in a restaurant one day and saying something along the lines of, “We’re just not the kind of church that reaches new people!" I practically choked on the words as I spoke them. God chastened me about my poor leadership at NewSong with regards to evangelism. Reaching people who don’t know the Lord isn’t an option; it must be a priority for us because it is a priority for Him.
As I did my planning for the coming year through the holiday season at the end of 2008 it became clear to me that we needed four strategic ministry priorities for 2009: 1) Evangelism. 2) Involvement (more connecting and growing), 3) Facilities, and 4) Empowering Leadership. I announced these priorities our my annual “State of the Church” sermon which I give every year on the first Sunday of the New Year. I used the image of an open door that God had opened that no one could close (Rev. 3:3-8). It took us eight years to figure it out, but God wants us to reach the lost. God wants us to get involved in the process of discipleship, God wants us to take seriously the challenge of building His church at NewSong, and God wants us to start empowering one another in our leadership. We can no longer function, leadership-wise, like we did when we started with me being a bottleneck to our growth because I was still leading the church as I always have from the beginning.
Thankfully, God already knew we needed to make these changes and was preparing for it all along, especially the leadership piece. During 2008 God brought us a new youth pastor (January), Worship Leader (June) and Children’s Director (July). In December God sent us the person who is now the staff volunteer leading our Grow ministry. For the first time ever we have someone leading discipleship at NewSong. I'm embarassed to admit that, but honestly, I think that for whatever reason, we've only now gotten the right person for the job.
What an answer to prayer. In one year God provided someone to take ownership and lead all five of the main areas we now have at NewSong: Love, Grow, Share, Students and Children.
We also expanded our facilities at the beginning of this year, taking in and remodeling the dance studio next door to us. This gave us much-needed growing room.
In January 2009 our Board of Elders also approved giving our youth pastor additional responsibilities as an “Assistant to the Pastor.” Momentum has begun to build in our staff and we have begun to gel as a unit. We meet as a staff on a weekly basis. With these other leaders now in place to lead the five areas, their vision and leadership has begun to complement my own and has allowed us to have more intentional focus in each area. This has allowed us to examine what we’re doing and to formulate ways to go about accomplishing our mission.
Today
And that brings us up to the present moment (March, 2009). Our staff and Elders are now reading the Simple Church book, some for the first time, and others are re-reading it. We’re reading it this time with emphasis on focusing, clarifying, and aligning our mission and ministries. We have also recently come up with a set of leader guidelines to help us underscore what is important to us in terms of leadership at NewSong (character, competency and calling). We want to get the right leaders on the bus at NewSong and get them in the right seats.
I’m also very excited about a retreat we have coming up in May where both our Elders and our Staff will be together for the first time ever in this kind of setting. The goal for this retreat (in my mind) is synchronization so that all our leaders have a shared understanding of our church’s values, priorities, goals and objectives. It’s very important for us to have the same assumptions about what constitutes a “win” for NewSong. In fact I believe it is essential if we are going to accomplish what God wants us to accomplish.
In the meantime, God continues to reveal things to us in our weekly staff meetings. In recent weeks I believe he has shown us the following in our Love, Grow, and Share areas.
Love
Through discussion, prayer, and our current series on evangelism we have come to see that our worship services have been geared too much for “us” and not enough for people who don’t know Christ. We believe worship should be viewed as the “front door” to our church since that is typically the first place a visitor encounters us. We are under deep conviction that our services should be planned and executed with the nonbeliever in mind. Since it is our desire (and God’s!) to lead new people to Christ and we are not looking for transfer growth, our facilities, bulletins, media, music, and teaching should intentionally be “nonbeliever friendly." We want our members to feel comfortable inviting others to our church and make sure that once they get them here we present the gospel clearly.
A "win" for us in worship has been clarified as people bringing friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors to church and having those people have a non-distracting, intelligible worship experience that would encourage them to commit to, and then go deeper in, a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Grow
We agree that we would really like to see our members get jump-started in the Love, grow, share process. Thus we have come up with our NextSteps classes. We've taught one Love class and will be teaching it again in April. In May we'll teach our first Grow class.
We have also established what GROW stands for:
• G: giving (of time and talents to others and God)
• R: relating to others (Connecting)
• O: oneness with God (Prayer)
• W: word of God (Bible Study)
A “win” for us in Grow would be for our members to get moving through the love, grow, share classes and to be be involved in a small group that meets regularly for prayer, Bible-study, accountability and prayer. We would like to our members growing in their own faith and reproducing other disciples.
Share
We have also had some clarification of what “Share” means at NewSong. We formerly divided Share into “ministry” (service within the church) and “mission” (service beyond our walls). Ministry was what we did for “us,” and mission was what we did for “others.” What we’ve come to see through our new evangelistic lens is that all serving should ultimately be evangelistic. Even if we’re doing something mundane or internal like ushering, greeting, sound, or bringing refreshments, we should understand ourselves to be serving Jesus and doing it in such a way that lost people encounter him. We have also come to understand Share as more of a lifestyle instead of just something you do on Sunday morning or when you go on a mission trip somewhere. Can you serve coffee or sweep a floor for Jesus so people will come to know him? Can you speak to your waitress at Waffle House or the person in line next to you at Wal-Mart so that they can see Jesus? We believe you can.
A “win” for us in Share would be to see everyone adopt this lifestyle and begin praying for nonbelievers, interacting with them, and then looking to start spiritual conversations with them with the goal being to share the most important thing anyone can ever know or understand; that God loves them.
God is definitely pouring out his vision for us at NewSong. My prayer is that He keeps it up, and that we keep on obeying Him and trusting Him.
It's late again...until next time...
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Categories (a brief excursis)
Experimentation has shown that the two different sides, or hemispheres, of the brain are responsible for different manners of thinking. The following table illustrates the differences between left-brain and right-brain thinking:
I’m not sure if this is “real” science or just pop psychology, but it makes sense to me because it helps me order my world. You see, I am a systematizer – an organizer to the “nth degree.” I’m extremely “left-brained” (see above). Starting this blog has jump-started my “systematizing” motor. The need to organize, analyze, and discover why things are the way they are consumes me. There is so much to learn, so much to say, so much to figure out, and so much to put into a framework or system that can be analyzed, used to make predictions of future behavior, and help make accurate assessments and good choices.
Of course I’m in good company with this. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was the tutor of the young Alexander the Great, was the greatest systematizer of all time. Aristotle's ambitious aim was to systematize all the existing knowledge of his day. To do so he made critical observations, collected specimens, and gathered together, summarized, and classified practically everything known to man in his day. His systematic approach became the method from which Western science later arose. One of my spiritual mentors, John Wesley was also a great systematizer.
This morning I awoke with the desire to organize what I intend to blog about. I’m listing everything I can think of below. I may have to go back and change this from time to time, but that is fine. It gives me a handle, and I need handles!
Africa
Bible
Books
Childhood (My)
Church
Church Planting
Doctrine
Evangelism
Family
Heroes (My)
Highlands
Leadership
Mississippi
Music
NewSong
Philosophy
Sermons
Spiritual Formation
Struggles (My)
Vision/Mission
Worship
There, now I feel better :-)
I’m not sure if this is “real” science or just pop psychology, but it makes sense to me because it helps me order my world. You see, I am a systematizer – an organizer to the “nth degree.” I’m extremely “left-brained” (see above). Starting this blog has jump-started my “systematizing” motor. The need to organize, analyze, and discover why things are the way they are consumes me. There is so much to learn, so much to say, so much to figure out, and so much to put into a framework or system that can be analyzed, used to make predictions of future behavior, and help make accurate assessments and good choices.Of course I’m in good company with this. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was the tutor of the young Alexander the Great, was the greatest systematizer of all time. Aristotle's ambitious aim was to systematize all the existing knowledge of his day. To do so he made critical observations, collected specimens, and gathered together, summarized, and classified practically everything known to man in his day. His systematic approach became the method from which Western science later arose. One of my spiritual mentors, John Wesley was also a great systematizer.
This morning I awoke with the desire to organize what I intend to blog about. I’m listing everything I can think of below. I may have to go back and change this from time to time, but that is fine. It gives me a handle, and I need handles!
Africa
Bible
Books
Childhood (My)
Church
Church Planting
Doctrine
Evangelism
Family
Heroes (My)
Highlands
Leadership
Mississippi
Music
NewSong
Philosophy
Sermons
Spiritual Formation
Struggles (My)
Vision/Mission
Worship
There, now I feel better :-)
Friday, March 27, 2009
God's Mission For NewSong I
We will celebrate the ninth birthday of our church next month. Our first service was held on Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000. You would think that after nine years we’d have a pretty good handle on what we’re supposed to be doing as a church and how to do it. Every church, of course, has the common calling of making disciples. The Great Commission, in various incantations, can be found in all four gospels and the book of Acts. No church has the right to opt out of disciple-making. But within that über-calling, each church has its own unique calling because every church is different due to its location, size, culture, personalities, gifting, resources, etc…. Because every church is different, each one must carefully listen and discern who God is calling them to reach, and how he wants that church to reach those people, and what to do with them once they’ve been reached.
We’ve been trying to figure that out at NewSong for quite a while. This post, and a few to follow it, will tell the story of how God’s vision for NewSong has unfolded. It’s kind of a long story, so I’m going to break it up into pieces. This is the beginning of that story.
NewSong started with a Christmas party at our home in December of 1999. I believed God had called me to plant a church so Donna and I invited a few families we had gone to church with before to our house and we asked if they’d pray about helping us plant a church. By the end of the evening we had agreed to start a Bible study and see if people would come and if God would open doors for us in terms of a location to meet and all the other resources we’d need to actually plant a church since we had no denominational or other outside help. And so in January, 2000 we began meeting on Wednesday nights for a time of worship and Bible study at what was then known as the Sawnee Community Center here in Cumming, GA.
As for the mission of the church, I had one in mind when we began the church but in retrospect I now think it was more of a generic mission, "make disciples," gleaned over a few years of reading, working in other church settings, and from planting another church. Because we didn’t understand god’s unique mission for our church at this point we ran off in several directions in the early years. Thankfully, God continued to open doors for us. We made some good decisions and a few bad ones too. Overall our numbers remained fairly steady. We’d gain a few people, and lose a few. We attracted some people who had left other churches and then found us and were happy for a while before the same unresolved issues in them caused them to get disgruntled with us too, and so they left. We had a few people who came to us “wounded” and we provided them a safe place to “heal.” Once they healed some of them moved on, others stayed. We also attracted some strong, spiritually-mature believers. Some of them stayed, and a few of them left too; probably because we were all over the page with what we were doing (or not doing) as a church.
During this timeframe we spent a lot of time and other resources doing what Stan Self (in the Summer 2008 edition of Unfinished, the Mission Society’s magazine) calls the “chicken-house approach” to ministry. Self recalls growing up around chicken houses and how he’d watch the chickens spend their days pecking around in the wood shavings on the floor of the chicken house. As they did, they’d cluster in groups of 10-15 chickens. Every so often, for no apparent reason at all, one of the chickens would look up, then break and run about 20 feet from where it had been. When that happened, all the other chickens in that bunch would dash off en masse in hot pursuit. By the time they caught up, the lead chicken was pecking away in the shavings again. For a moment the other chickens would look around as if they were trying to determine what that was all about. Then they’d join the first chicken in pecking the wood shavings. A few minutes later the same thing would happen in another part of the chicken house, as one group after another would break, run, stop, and peck.
Self’s point, of course is that chickens aren’t the only ones guilty of this. How many churches have set their sights on being the next Saddleback, Willow Creek, or Northpoint? I admit I was guilty of that at NewSong. Not as blatantly nor as badly as I was at a former church plant I was a part of (that’s another story for another day). The point I’m making here, and it’s nothing you probably didn’t already realize, is that these are great churches and there are definitely transferrable principles we can learn from them. But there is only one Saddleback, Willow, and Northpoint and there is only one Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley. Those churches and their pastors didn’t get the way they are by chasing the lead chicken. They got that way by discerning and focusing on God’s unique calling for them and their churches.
Here is the good news – as far as NewSong is concerned. I believe we are finally beginning to get some clarity about our unique calling and mission. We are finally doing the hard work necessary to discover who God is calling us to reach and how he wants us to reach them. God has also led us to a process where we can take people from being non-believers all the way to the point where they are mature disciples of Christ capable of reproducing other disciples.
In tomorrow’s post I will begin telling the exciting story of how this unfolded. It will hopefully be helpful for me to sort out as I write it, and for our church and its leaders to hear, and, who knows, it might even help some other church leader some day.
Until Then…
We’ve been trying to figure that out at NewSong for quite a while. This post, and a few to follow it, will tell the story of how God’s vision for NewSong has unfolded. It’s kind of a long story, so I’m going to break it up into pieces. This is the beginning of that story.
NewSong started with a Christmas party at our home in December of 1999. I believed God had called me to plant a church so Donna and I invited a few families we had gone to church with before to our house and we asked if they’d pray about helping us plant a church. By the end of the evening we had agreed to start a Bible study and see if people would come and if God would open doors for us in terms of a location to meet and all the other resources we’d need to actually plant a church since we had no denominational or other outside help. And so in January, 2000 we began meeting on Wednesday nights for a time of worship and Bible study at what was then known as the Sawnee Community Center here in Cumming, GA.
As for the mission of the church, I had one in mind when we began the church but in retrospect I now think it was more of a generic mission, "make disciples," gleaned over a few years of reading, working in other church settings, and from planting another church. Because we didn’t understand god’s unique mission for our church at this point we ran off in several directions in the early years. Thankfully, God continued to open doors for us. We made some good decisions and a few bad ones too. Overall our numbers remained fairly steady. We’d gain a few people, and lose a few. We attracted some people who had left other churches and then found us and were happy for a while before the same unresolved issues in them caused them to get disgruntled with us too, and so they left. We had a few people who came to us “wounded” and we provided them a safe place to “heal.” Once they healed some of them moved on, others stayed. We also attracted some strong, spiritually-mature believers. Some of them stayed, and a few of them left too; probably because we were all over the page with what we were doing (or not doing) as a church.
During this timeframe we spent a lot of time and other resources doing what Stan Self (in the Summer 2008 edition of Unfinished, the Mission Society’s magazine) calls the “chicken-house approach” to ministry. Self recalls growing up around chicken houses and how he’d watch the chickens spend their days pecking around in the wood shavings on the floor of the chicken house. As they did, they’d cluster in groups of 10-15 chickens. Every so often, for no apparent reason at all, one of the chickens would look up, then break and run about 20 feet from where it had been. When that happened, all the other chickens in that bunch would dash off en masse in hot pursuit. By the time they caught up, the lead chicken was pecking away in the shavings again. For a moment the other chickens would look around as if they were trying to determine what that was all about. Then they’d join the first chicken in pecking the wood shavings. A few minutes later the same thing would happen in another part of the chicken house, as one group after another would break, run, stop, and peck.
Self’s point, of course is that chickens aren’t the only ones guilty of this. How many churches have set their sights on being the next Saddleback, Willow Creek, or Northpoint? I admit I was guilty of that at NewSong. Not as blatantly nor as badly as I was at a former church plant I was a part of (that’s another story for another day). The point I’m making here, and it’s nothing you probably didn’t already realize, is that these are great churches and there are definitely transferrable principles we can learn from them. But there is only one Saddleback, Willow, and Northpoint and there is only one Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley. Those churches and their pastors didn’t get the way they are by chasing the lead chicken. They got that way by discerning and focusing on God’s unique calling for them and their churches.
Here is the good news – as far as NewSong is concerned. I believe we are finally beginning to get some clarity about our unique calling and mission. We are finally doing the hard work necessary to discover who God is calling us to reach and how he wants us to reach them. God has also led us to a process where we can take people from being non-believers all the way to the point where they are mature disciples of Christ capable of reproducing other disciples.
In tomorrow’s post I will begin telling the exciting story of how this unfolded. It will hopefully be helpful for me to sort out as I write it, and for our church and its leaders to hear, and, who knows, it might even help some other church leader some day.
Until Then…
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Here We Go
Okay, so I've been told several times lately I need to blog. First it was the staff at church. Then my good friend Walter Hughes started a blog. Then I stumbled across this article by John Piper titled, "Six Reasons Pastors Should Blog," so I finally decided I'd try it. I don't know, maybe it will be a good thing, maybe it will change my life, or someone else's. Or maybe it won't last a week. We'll see.
Oh, about the blog name. That was a big decision. I puzzled over that so long the battery on my laptop died and I had to go and get my charger.
Donna wanted me to call it "Love, Grow, Share" after the NewSong mission statement.
Leigh had some other suggestions.
I almost named it "De Profundis" which is the first two words (in Latin) from Psalm 130, "Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord."
In the end I chose the name "Life's Mirror," which comes from a poem by Madeline Bridges. I thought it was catchy because I plan to use this platform to post my reflections on things like church life, leadership, faith, books I read, people I love, things I'm interested in, and a host of other topics. The poem itself basically says you get out of life what you put into it. Or to quote those profound poets of the rock-n-roll era, "In the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make." Madeline says something similar. Her poem goes like this:
There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,
There are souls that are pure and true,
Then give the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.
Give love, and love to your life will flow,
A strength in your utmost need,
Have faith, and a score of hearts will show
Their faith in your word and deed.
Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind;
And honor will honor meet;
And a smile that is sweet will surely find
A smile that is just as sweet.
Give pity and sorrow to those who mourn,
You will gather in flowers again
The scattered seeds from your thoughts outborne,
Though the sowing seemed but vain.
For life is the mirror of king and slave,
'Tis just what we are and do;
Then give to the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.
Okay, I've rambled enough now for one post (I suppose, I've never 'posted' before!)
If any of you more experienced bloggers out would like to give me pointers, I'm all ears.
Until next time...
Oh, about the blog name. That was a big decision. I puzzled over that so long the battery on my laptop died and I had to go and get my charger.
Donna wanted me to call it "Love, Grow, Share" after the NewSong mission statement.
Leigh had some other suggestions.
I almost named it "De Profundis" which is the first two words (in Latin) from Psalm 130, "Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord."
In the end I chose the name "Life's Mirror," which comes from a poem by Madeline Bridges. I thought it was catchy because I plan to use this platform to post my reflections on things like church life, leadership, faith, books I read, people I love, things I'm interested in, and a host of other topics. The poem itself basically says you get out of life what you put into it. Or to quote those profound poets of the rock-n-roll era, "In the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make." Madeline says something similar. Her poem goes like this:
There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,
There are souls that are pure and true,
Then give the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.
Give love, and love to your life will flow,
A strength in your utmost need,
Have faith, and a score of hearts will show
Their faith in your word and deed.
Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind;
And honor will honor meet;
And a smile that is sweet will surely find
A smile that is just as sweet.
Give pity and sorrow to those who mourn,
You will gather in flowers again
The scattered seeds from your thoughts outborne,
Though the sowing seemed but vain.
For life is the mirror of king and slave,
'Tis just what we are and do;
Then give to the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.
Okay, I've rambled enough now for one post (I suppose, I've never 'posted' before!)
If any of you more experienced bloggers out would like to give me pointers, I'm all ears.
Until next time...
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