FORTY DAYS OF LOVE
The time period of forty days appears to be important in Scripture. Over and over again this particular period of time is mentioned. Here are a few examples:

It rained for 40 days and 40 nights when God wanted to cleanse the world and start over (Gen 7:12) and then Noah waited another 40 days after it rained before he opened a window in the Ark (Gen 8:6). Moses was on the mountain with God for 40 days – twice (Exodus 24:18, 34:28-29 and Deut. 10:10). It took the spies 40 days to search out the Promised Land (Num. 13:25). For 40 days, twice a day, morning and evening, Goliath the Philistine giant strutted in front of the Israelite army and taunted them before he was finally killed by David (1 Sam 17:16). Elijah strengthened by one angelic meal was on the lamb for 40 days ending up on Mount Horeb where the Lord passed by and he heard the still, small voice of God (1 Kings 19:8). Righteous Ezekiel was punished for Judah’s sin for 40 days (Ezek. 4:6). Jonah warned the City of Nineveh they had 40 days until God would overthrow the city. The people repented in those 40 days and God spared the city (Jonah 3:4, 10). Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness (Mat 3:17) and was seen on the earth 40 days after His crucifixion (Acts 1:3).

Obviously, 40 days is a symbolic time. We believe 40 days are significant at NewSong as well. A few years ago we observed a 40 day season as we went through the Purpose Driven Life book as a congregation, focusing on personal renewal. We believe only changed people can change the world; renewal must start there. The foundation for everything in life begins with getting to know and love God and then to begin growing in him and serving. But we were never meant to live our lives in isolation. We need others, and they need us. There is a second kind of renewal needed – relational renewal. That’s what the 40 day season we are about to begin is all about. We must not only learn to love God with all our heart (personal renewal); we must also learn to love our neighbor as ourselves (relational renewal).

Relational renewal is so important we are going to spend 40 days – six weeks - learning how to add depth and health to our marriages, families, and friendships. We will be studying love and practicing love as we explore and implement the relationship principles the Bible teaches. Our goal in the end is to be more loving and to be better equipped with insights and a practical path for fulfilling God’s intention for all our relationships – even the difficult ones.

What does this mean for you? You have several options depending on how deep you’d like to go. You can come to worship for the next six weeks and listen as I preach on love and how to build stronger relationships (you can also listen to, or read, the sermons online, or request a CD or DVD of each message). A second option would be to hear the sermons and enroll in a small group to meet with others to go deeper. To go even deeper you can listen to the sermons, join a small group and then use the book the series is based on, The Relationship Principles of Jesus by Tom Holladay as your daily devotional guide for the 40 Days. This book is available at Barnes and Noble, on Amazon.com and at most other bookstores.

I’m very excited to see what God is going to do through this campaign as we learn how to build healthier relationships in all aspects of our lives. It will be great to all be all doing this together as well.

Push Hard - Pray Hard

It is crunch time at NewSong. We begin a new ministry year next month, our tenth. In preparation for that we have been doing our best to get everyone on board with our mission of building community (relating to one another in small groups) and reaching out missionally in all that we do (worship as our front door, open chair small groups, and getting every man, woman, boy and girl serving so people see Jesus in their service). I just finished leading a series of eight meetings on eight consecutive nights in member homes and at the church in an attempt to convey this vision and mission. I met with considerable resistance to some of the changes we are proposing.

The gist of what we are doing is making a hard push for covenant membership. We want to make sure there is a clear understanding of what being a part of our church means. We are raising the bar – raising expectations. Why? Because we believe this is critical if we are going to be serious about transforming lives and transforming the world. It is also critical if we are going to build genuine community. People need to understand that being a part of our church involves more than simply showing up at 10:30 on Sunday morning.

There seems to be an assumption that people are afraid of commitment, but I believe that those who are genuinely converted actually want to grow and be serious about their faith – they find doing that attractive. They also find it natural to want to share that faith. Ironically, it is not the newer believers who are bucking this – it is the longer-term Christians who grew up in “churchanity” – my name for the blight of the institutional church with its consumer mentality (what can the church do for me?).

Adding to the difficulty is my blunt, “black-or-white,” “in-or-out” nature. I recognize that the gift of mercy is not high on my spiritual gifts list. In fact, it has even been said that I have the spiritual gift of irritation. I am working and praying about that flaw – I promise. Our Board of Elders called me on the carpet about it last weekend (which they should have). Leaders should not wield their authority like a big stick, which I do far too often. I was reading an article by Matt Chandler in the current Leadership Magazine and he said it best when he said, “Leaders shouldn’t wield authority, they should shepherd toward truth.” He goes on to say, “If you have to talk about your authority, you’ve probably already lost it.” Chandler says we should use authority to “shepherd” and not to “bruise.” I recognize that all too often I bruise when I lead. [Father, teach me…help me with this, I pray].

Further complicating matters is the fact that we have accelerated the pace of change at our church. I believe in every change we have made, and I believe the impetus for the changes clearly came from God. But I also recognize that NewSong does not look like the church many of our longer-term members joined. They did not sign up for this – it’s one thing to be objective and say, “This model is more biblical,” or “That definitely makes sense…” But it is another thing to have it happen to your church; few of us enjoy change.

At any rate – tomorrow the dust will begin to settle. We are asking all our members to turn in signed ministry covenants agreeing to our “Love, Grow, Share” process during worship tomorrow. We are starting with 135 adults on our membership roll. It will be interesting to see how many stick with us and how many of them look elsewhere. I take solace in knowing that those that will decide to move on are already believers and will undoubtedly find another church. Their salvation is not at stake. I also take comfort knowing that no one will leave because of the changes who is not a believer – that’s because we have few, if any, true non-believers at our church today. Hopefully that will change as we get “lean and mean” and hungry to save souls that need to know Jesus.

Sermon Player -

Here is a nifty sermon player I stumbled upon from another pastor today (Dennis Papp, Field Notes). We will eventually have this player on our church website. There is also a link to it on the side bar further down and to the right of this post.

The greatest best thing about it is that the audio starts immediately, no more waiting for the file to download or questions about if you want to save the file to your computer.

NewSong also has its own channel now with sermon.net where the player comes from. Check it out at: http://www.sermon.net/NewsongSermons


Enjoy!

Elder/Staff Retreat Part Two

Our Elder/Staff retreat held this past weekend was about as good as it could possibly be. I could definitely sense the prayers people were praying for the weekend. When I got home Saturday night I told Donna (my wife) that I honestly could not imagine a single thing about the retreat that could have been better. Everyone came. Everyone participated. No one held anything back. We all shared our life stories, including our personal testimony. Everyone had read the Simple Church book and done their homework in advance. Our staff was prepared with exciting well-done reports on their ministries and plans for the future. There was plenty of laughter, tears, good food, great worship, and amazing fellowship (including a few odd bed-partners, but that's another post for another day).

Things we accomplished:

- We thoroughly went over Clarity - Movement - Alignment - and Focus from the Simple Church book. We know our work is cut out for us; mainly in properly communicating the "why" we need to do this to our congregation. As Vicki Eitel reminded us, Jesus never said anyone "had" to do anything. But "if" one wants certain things to happen then he or she "must" make certain changes or do certain things. We need to make our process crystal clear to everyone and in time, hopefully it will become a part of our church's DNA.

- Our staff leaders gave overviews of their respective areas including their mission, lens, target audience, and what constitutes a "win" for them.

- We raised the commitment level for leadership at NewSong by agreeing on what is expected of a "Level One Leader."

- We simplified our organizational structure so everything we do fits under the "Five Things We Do at NewSong" These five are: Weekend Worship, Small Groups, Missions, Youth, and Children. Existing ministries that do not "fit" will be phased out as an act of stewardship of our resources and faithfulness to God and His mission through us.

- We reduced our number of leaders from over 50 this year (2008-09) to less than half that number for the upcoming ministry year (2009/10). We also came up with a concensus list of leader candidates to fill those positions.

- We decided we will handle our ministry sign-ups differently this year (in August). We will still have sign-ups but we will try to have many people already recruited and signed up by ministry team leaders relationally.

- During the chapter reviews from Simple Church and the staff reports we kept a running list of significant changes we have recently made (or will make soon). These include:

1) Worship (Love) as our "Front Door" at NewSong. This is part of our new evangelistic focus, which is our number one strategic ministry priority in 2009. Our services are now being designed and targeted more towards non-believers so when our members invite their unbelieving friends, relatives and neighbors they will be able to more easily connect to God. We believe we can do this and still satisfy existing believers' needs for engaging worship and relevant, biblical teaching. What believers miss out on in "depth" in worship they will now get in their small groups.

2) Small Groups will become our main discipleship (Grow) vehicle, rather than traditional Sunday School. True life change happens best in small groups which will hopefully all eventually meet in the more intimate setting of a home rather than in sterile classrooms. Besides, we have many more homes available to us at NewSong than we do classrooms. We are planning a church-wide small group emphasis in the fall built around Saddleback's "40 Days of Love" campaign where we hope to launch 10-12 small groups.

3) In Missions (Share) our focus going forward will be "to serve Christ so others see him." We we will no longer artificially divide this area between "ministry" (inside the church) and "missions" (outside the church) but instead will focus on doing everything for Christ so that those we are serving will see Him in our service. We believe you can hand someone a worship guide, or prepare refreshments, or operate a sound board as though you are doing it for Christ Himself. Doing so would constitute a "win" for us in this area.

4) In our Children's Ministry our focus will be on developing a parent-church partnership to help our children come to know God instead of parents simply taking their children to church for the church to teach them "about" God. A win in this area would be when the families in our church are intentional about teaching biblical truths in their home on a daily basis.

5) One final noticeable difference will be an emphasis on being intentionally relational in our worship, grow groups and recruiting for our share ministries. This is a shift from our former "warm body" method where we were just looking at numbers, having multiple ministries, filling slots and always having impersonal sign-up sheets in the back. Strong churches are built on solid, godly, peer relationships. We plan to take full advantage of the strong relational ties that already exist at NewSong and to strengthen them further.

NewSong Elder/Staff Retreat

Well, tomorrow we are off for our Elder/Staff retreat for NewSong Church. So far all our staff members and Elders are attending - that is eleven of us. I am very excited at this opportunity to synchronize our efforts by clarifying, aligning, and focusing in our mission as a church. One of our four strategic ministry priorities for 2009 is what we called “Empowering Leadership” and is about expanding our leadership base. This is critical in order for us to move from being essentially a single cell church with me at the center to being a multi-celled church with multiple points of entry and several leaders as hubs for people to latch onto.

Church leadership gurus call where we are the “Shepherd-Rancher” threshold. It's an indisputable fact that the leadership style that works well with a church of 35-50 people will most likely hinder the growth of a church with 150-200. The little church pastor knows everybody, does all the praying, all the baptizing, all the teaching, and becomes a bottleneck for growth at some point because everything has to be run by him or her. He or she is the only one who knows everyone else in the church, and this person ends up with his hand in everything that happens at the church. The problem is there is a limit to how many people one person can personally shepherd. As the church grows the pastor must change roles from “Shepherd” to “Rancher.” The Rancher helps oversee the farm, mainly through under-Shepherds.

We have been at the threshold where this needs to be addressed for some time now at NewSong. The time has come for me to be more “hands off;” I must learn to delegate more, trusting the people to make what needs to happen transpire. The “sheep” for the pastor become the leaders he/she is mentoring and equipping for ministry. While shepherding only a few, they continue to serve as rancher to the entire flock.

Can we make this transition at NewSong? My experience has been that not too many pastors are able to do this. Most of the fault for this lies with the leader who is unable or unwilling to give up the responsibility and authority they presently have. But the people in the church who are not willing to be unselfish enough to let their pastor’s leadership style change share in the blame for this as well.

Theologically and practically most of us recognize it is not good for people to look exclusively to one person, a pastor, for all their spiritual guidance, answers, and leadership. The same Spirit that rested on Christ came down on all believers at Pentecost. On the flip side, it is also unhealthy for pastors to lose touch with their people and begin treating the congregation like widgets or numbers. Pastors can never let themselves become so “hands off” that they don’t know what is going on in the church. A disengaged leader can be disastrous.

Ideally, a pastor would be able to adopt a different style to match the different phase of development of the congregation. He or she should be find a way to grow along with the church. This assumes the pastor wants to stay, of course, which I want to do at NewSong. Flexibility on the part of the pastor and a willingness to continue to expand on the part of the church are the keys. A leader who feels he or she cannot adopt a different style as the church grows should recognize this and find a new church where his or her leadership style is needed. Likewise, the congregation that is plateaued or declining must decide if they want to be unselfish enough to grow, or if they want to remain comfortable where they are. A word of caution: Biblically-speaking such a congregation (one that opted for "comfortable") would be standing on shaky ground.

Days of Small Beginnings

Some days I wake up and everything about planting a church seems overwhelming. We have been at it for nine years now at NewSong and we’re still averaging less than 200 people in worship on any given weekend. Each week it seems like we have to reinvent the wheel about some facet of our service as though it has never been done or thought of before. Even the simplest things, which should have been worked out years ago, still cause us to stumble around as though we are caught unawares or unprepared.

I recognize church-planters don’t have a monopoly on discouragement. Anyone can get discouraged. The hill looks too high to climb. The ditch seems too broad to jump. The odds seem too overwhelming. The finish line seems too far off to even matter.

The book of Zechariah tells us that this is exactly how some of God’s people felt as they went about a task that seemed too big and too difficult for them to accomplish. Zechariah, a prophet of God, was with his fellow Israelites back in Jerusalem after the temple Solomon had built was destroyed.

The Israelites had already rebuilt the walls around the city, but the rebuilding of the temple was still incomplete even after many years of fits and starts. Zechariah struggled to encourage the people to get the temple rebuilt, but progress was slow. The work was inconsistent, and the people’s motivation seemed to come and go. Inner discouragement hindered their ability to consistently follow through with a slow-and-steady building plan. They wanted their efforts to produce more immediate, noticeable, "bigger" results. Boy does that sound familiar!

In the midst of these events, God asks, “Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?” (Zech. 4:10). The question reveals the cause of the Israelites’ discouragement: impatience and short-sightedness. The truth of the matter is, as we have known since the days of Aesop, “slow and steady wins the race.” Building a church involves far more slow, “tortoise” days than fast, “hare” ones. The perception that all you need to do is to get a good praise band together and some cool media and you’ll be the next Northpoint in six months time is simply not true. In fact, the statistics that are regularly quoted indicate that 80 percent of church plants don’t even survive their first year. Church-planting is a day-in, day-out, “grind it out” undertaking. Church-planting is a “two steps forward and one step back” proposition. Church-planting is not for the faint of heart or the weary of step.

And so today I choose to refuse to despise these our days of small beginnings. Today I commit to stay at the wheel, believing our small beginnings will someday produce a great ending. I will choose to hold on to God’s Word even when it seems as though what we’re doing is not making

I Love My Church

I love my church - I mean the people. I know this sounds weird on the heels of last night's late-night post (this one is even later!). But tonight at the Christian Life and Witness class at FBC Cumming, NewSong had what had to be the largest group there (except for FBC) I'm certain of that. The people who were there really care about lost people. People at our church are hungry for Jesus - and hungry for God's Word. I sat next to Michael Smith and he spent the whole time underlining every verse the speaker mentioned. Michael also handed me his "counselor" application before the event was even over. He is ready to help someone come to Jesus! I'm excited about what God is going to do in Forsyth County and at NewSong through this event. I love NewSong. I love my job. I love the Lord Jesus.

Yes, pride is a sin - but I confess it. I was proud tonight; proud of my brothers and sisters in Christ. All of them, from all 25 churches that were there - God bless you!

Easter 2009

Easter Weekend 2009 at NewSong began on Friday night as a small crowd braved a tornado warning to attend a Good Friday service. Luckily we had John’s Creek Police Chief Ed Densmore with us who remained in constant radio contact with Fulton County authorities about the weather as we worshipped. We delayed our service about 30 minutes as we enjoyed time together downstairs in the church in a room with no windows. Then we went upstairs for the service. We had a great acoustic worship set led by Jordan C. and then just as I was wrapping up my comments we heard the tornado sirens start back up. Allison asked if we could do one more song at the end of the service and Ed responded, “Now might not be such a good time,” and we all scurried back downstairs. After another 20 minutes or so in the windowless room below we all headed for home.

Sunday’s sunrise service was amazing (the two photos in this post are from that service). By the time Amy and I arrived at 6:15am volunteers had everything well in hand. The chairs were all set up in the parking lot, the tables were being prepped and the food cooked by a bevy of volunteers led by Karen & Jesse Rivera and Dave Allen (thanks everyone!). The sun rose right on cue through purple and pink skies as the gorgeous wisteria vines covering the trees glowed in appreciation of the rising sun. We had about 75-80 Jesus-lovers who braved the 45 degree temps to honor our Lord. Thank-you Jesus!

After a sumptuous pancake, egg, sausage, bacon, and hash brown breakfast we finally we held our Easter Worship Celebration at 10:30am. Many of our members brought guests as requested, all our volunteers were “spot on” as they “served as if they were serving Jesus.” The praise band was rocking. There was an air of excitement in the air as we celebrated Jesus. As one staff member said, what happened today is a good example of what a “win” looks like at NewSong. I tried my best to bring the gospel and to make it plain and not churchy. I spoke on the hope that Jesus’ resurrection brings that is so much better than the hope the world offers. I did get slightly off track at the end and forget a simple acronym (BASE) but I covered well, making things up as I went. I also went off on a rabbit trail about “dead dog parties.” I suppose you had to be there to appreciate that. What can I say, I was excited. It was Easter!

Bottom line, we prayed that people would bring their friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors to church. They did. We prayed that God would show up. He did. Were lives changed for eternity? I believe so. We may not see them right away; we might never get to see them ourselves. But I believe the Holy Spirit did His work and will continue to work in hearts that were exposed to God’s truth and His unfading and unfailing hope yesterday at NewSong.

Thank you NewSong Church for being faithful to invite others to hear about Christ! Through your commitment to our vision to see people who don’t know Christ get the opportunity to know Him, we have reason to celebrate! Let’s keep it going now. God is amazing and He certainly blessed us with an awesome Easter this year. All glory and honor to Him!

Sermons "In the Barrel"

In the old days preachers talked about having a sermon "in the barrel." That usually meant that after many years of preaching, he or she had written so many sermons they could always pull one out they had preached before, dust it off, update a few illustrations, and use it again. This was especially the case in the days when preachers moved to a new church every three or four years. They could pull out a whole bunch of "old" sermons and preach them again at their new church.

Personally, I've never had much luck recycling my sermons. I've tried, but either what I had to say the first time was not very good, or else what I said really just doesn't seem as applicable now as it did back then; so preaching from the barrel just doesn't work for me. To me, preaching is a moment in time where the text and the preacher and the congregation and the Holy Spirit all come together and something great happens (hopefully!).

I have begun to experience some interesting side effects of preaching for seventeen years however. When I decide on a text and start studying it, trying to discern what I believe God is saying in that particular text to our particular congregation, I often search on the Internet for ideas and illustrations to augment my own study. These searches are usually specific once I get an idea to preach on, for instance I'm preaching this Easter from 1 Peter 1:3-9 where Peter describes the basis of our hope as believers is Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead. The main idea of my message is how we need hope more than ever today and the hope we need is available to us through Jesus' resurrection and that hope is applied to our life when we place our faith in Him and become part of God's family. My search terms this week were something like, "sermon, 1 Peter 1:3, hope, resurrection." When I searched using those words I came across a link that looked very promising - whoever wrote the blurb my google search uncovered was really thinking like me. It was only when I got to the website where the quote came from that I realized the "guy" was me from a previous sermon I'd written. Ha ha... that guy isn't so smart after all.

Like I say, this is happening to me more and more. I suppose it's only normal too. I have hundreds of sermons online now and since we all have lenses through which we interpret Scripture, if you stick to a text long enough, and really pray through it, it only makes sense that what you find there would be similar to what you have previously discovered when studying that text.

So why not just preach the old sermon that's in the barrel to begin with? Well, like I said, the impressions God gives are often similar, but they are also usually different enough that you are really expressing a totally different thought or making a totally different point of application when preaching on the passage this time. Scripture is like that; it is so full of meaning and application.

The good news this Wednesday afternoon is that I have all three of my messages for this Easter weekend done! I'm preaching about the cross on Good Friday, specifically about one of Jesus' sayings from the cross: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46). At our Easter Sunrise service I'm preaching about the women going to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body and the disciples' odd reaction to the news from the women that "He is risen!" (Luke 24:6). And finally, I'm preaching the text I mentioned above from 1 Peter for the "main event," our 10:30am Easter worship celebration. The theme of that message is the hope Jesus' resurrection brings; it changes everything!

It is going to be a great Easter. My daughter Amy will be home from L.A., my church and I are going to invite a horde of unbelievers to worship this week, the weather is going to cooperate - and, most importantly, I am convinced God is going to show up in a big way. I can hardly wait!

I trust that each of you reading this are also looking forward to a joyous celebration of our Savior's resurrection this Sunday. May God grant you a meaningful Easter where His hope comes alive in you in new and powerful ways.

Recovered Post: Ups and Downs

Here is the post from yesterday that I deleted this morning trying to get rid of a weird comment. On re-reading it I find I'm not as down this afternoon as I was last night when I wrote this; looks like God is winning the battle!

Ups and Downs

Posted Yesterday at 10:25pm

It has been one of those up and down kind of days.First, the “up” part: I was able to get my “Monday” stuff done at church today and even got my message ready for Good Friday. The message is a meditation on one of Jesus’ sayings from the cross: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” Luke 23:46. It was good to have some quality study time meditating on the cross. I hope to have more of these special times with God this week.

The down part is that I struggled with disappointment today over the small crowd we had on Sunday. I knew it was coming; spring break means we’re going to have lots of people out. But even though I was prepared for that, the crowd size disappointed me. I confess I have a unhealthy preoccupation with numbers. I know the true measure of success for every church is how well they are fulfilling their God-given mission. But still, when 22 families are out in a church our size it hurts.

God was good to me though. After church when I walked out to my car I noticed one of our communication cards stuck under my windshield wiper. A child had written on it, “Pastor Steve, You are appreciated and loved. Thanks for all you do." Thanks my young friend. And thanks God for the encouragement.

The lesson in all this, of course, is that it is God’s church and not mine (Matt. 16:18). Furthermore, the battle itself is the Lord’s, not mine (1 Samuel 17:45-47). It does not matter whether the battle is “out there” or “in here" (in me),” because the battle is the Lord’s. David knew that when he faced Goliath, Joshua knew it as he circled the walls of Jericho, and Peter and Paul knew it as they faced their challenges too.

Perhaps in this special week where God overcame even something as debilitating and as final as death, God can teach me and change me too.

Lord, hear my prayer.

Successful Evangelism

In Craig Groeschel’s blog today he writes,

“Just because people attend your church, serve, and give, don’t assume they are saved.

My father-in-law was a deacon in his church for years before truly understanding the grace of God.

One of my greatest fears is that many of our churches are full of people with a false spiritual confidence.

I like to tell young preachers, you don’t fail when you invite people to repent and follow Christ and no one responds. You fail when you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ.”

Groeshel's comments really struck home with me. At NewSong we’re about to start intentionally reaching out to nonbelievers in ways we’ve not done before. We’re going to make it a priority. We’ve been planning for it, preaching about it, and praying about this for several weeks now. Easter Sunday is almost like a “re-launch” for us as we make this, I believe, bold move.

Reading Craig’s blog makes me wonder if maybe we'll even see some of our own folks really “get it” when we do get intentional about preaching salvation. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

By the way, what a great quote he closes with. I couldn’t agree more: You don’t fail if people don’t respond. You fail if you don’t invite people to repent and follow Christ. We need to remember this if we don't see immediate results as we preach more boldly and invite a response.

Thanks Craig!

Town Hall for Hope

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!

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.

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...

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…