Category Archives: Blog

10 Lessons, from John

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Creating something out of nothing is challenging, but this is the only way we can really see the culture become the church. I want to see people grow and be unified as a church, but I always want to start with those who are not the church, with the culture around us, relationally connecting life-by-life.

These 10 lessons I’ve learned have been how God has change lives, that in turn impacted a neighborhood, and now influence a city and the world:

 

1. People Matter Enough to be Reminded
Realize that it’s not about you – it’s about a world that’s on a slide going south away from God. If you forget that, you’ll take things personally. Remember that good things don’t just naturally happen. People left alone don’t tend to seek God. People left alone don’t tend to stretch themselves to grow in faith or stretch to give money and time to those less-fortunate. It takes energy. As a leader, part of that energy is to remind people.

 

2. Never Waste a Gathering
No matter what the gathering is for – serve kids, have a party, small group, bike ride, or building houses – pay attention to not wasting it. Have fun first. Create life and people will want to come back. Cast vision and orient people to what they can expect. Always give next-steps. Every gathering is about connecting to community, but people need steps along the way.

 

3. Tell Stories to Shape Values
A story tells everybody “this is who we are and this is what matters.”

 

4. Connect Others Constantly
Give people enough time, and they’ll want to hang with their group and forget new people. Watch for people who might be feeling left out at every gathering. People feel valued and loved as people take interest in them.

 

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Have a Big “Ask”
Challenge people to grow spiritually. Many times God’s spirit prompts us but we “do the person a favor” by saying “no” for them. We’re potentially closing someone off from a life with God. That’s not a favor. You have to overcome that fear and make big asks.

 

6. Serve Well Together
Getting people serving creates ownership. When you serve together serve well.

 

7. Be Generous with Praise and Encouragement
You can’t hire enough people to do all the work. You need volunteers. Generous praise and encouragement is how you pay them.

 

8. Ask “Who’s Next, What’s Next?”
You’re only as strong as your next new leader, so always be looking for the “relative” leaders – the ones giving a little bit more. Sometimes their lives are messy. Think about how to help them take next steps of growth.

 

9. If Your Unchurched Friends and Neighbors are not Becoming the Church, You’re Ineffective
This is one of my most significant lessons. If people are not becoming the church — and LEADING the church – within 3 to 5 years, you’re not being effective. When you start to see this happen, when you the church being raised up out of culture, just as it happened in Corinth, Athens, Rome. That’s exciting!

 

10. Don’t Do This Without God (It’s His mission, your adventure)
This is really the first one. This is His mission and your adventure. You can’t do this without God.

Parable of God’s Love

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Community is a very popular term today, it is a fad, it is a word we use for any sort of gathering, and like most terms, ideas, or dreams that become fads, and can be used to tag about anything, it has lost its gravity, its weight, its meaning.

The truth is, we all long for community.  We do.  We all long to be deeply known, loved and accepted for who we truly are, while at the same time contributing our lives to something beyond us.  But this is not how we function in the west.  We are ‘doers’.  We want to get it done, get it off the “to-do” list. Then if something, like community, costs us in the way of pride, transparency, or perceived status, we quickly strip it of its value and depth, cheaply quantify it and begin to manufacture pseudo-communities in order for us to ‘feel’ like we are in community without the cost of community.  And as a culture we will go to great financial cost to make us ‘feel’ like we are in community, in order to avoid the personal, emotional, or security cost.  This is not the place to expound on that, but just for a moment think of some of the sales pitches, we buy into, “…if you buy [you feel in the blank] then you will be part of this group, family, community…”  Heck, if you buy a Chevrolet, you will receive a letter about three weeks after your purchase, informing you that you are now part of the “Chevrolet Family.”  That’s not family, I can’t depend on these people when times are bad, in fact, if hard times come my way, and I loose my job, and I can’t pay my bills, then all of the sudden, that family, is going to take away my car… that’s not family.  Think of facebook, most subdivisions, Starbucks…what are these things?  They are the illusions of community without the personal cost of real community.  In fact, we have exchanged the cost of real gospel community to surround ourselves with people who are just like us, thus validating the self-seeking, self-promotion pursuits I have in my life.

But according to scripture, this is not true community.  The truth is, when we live in true community, we become a parable of God’s love to the world around us.  In fact, throughout scripture, God seems to be very intentional about the purpose of community, and that purpose is much larger than the nice warm feeling of being accepted.  From the very beginning of time, community has been the tool for the movement of God.  From God himself (three-in-one), Adam and Eve, tribes of Israel, Jesus and the twelve, and then the church.  So, I suggest, if you desire to do anything with any significance in life, you may need to, ditch the idea of the one-man-army, and surround yourself with some people, who will love you enough to get in your junk, and still love and unconditionally accept you for who you are and who you are not.  Until then, you will be blinded by the deception of self. Often times, this is really hard to understand, especially in our culture, when idolizing or exalting a ‘single person’ as ‘the man’ is second nature, we do this in the secular world and in the church.  However, if God the creator of all things, the one in which nothing is impossible for, chooses to move his will forward through community, then it would only make sense that us finite, mortal beings would have to work through the bonds of community.

So, why does God work through community, instead of lone-rangers?  There are several reasons, but I think those reasons can be collapsed down into the following four:

In light of this, here’s what we have realized:

  • In order to be the type of community that is a parable of God’s love to the world around us, we have to fight for it, because everything in us, wants our friends, to be a parable of our glory.
  • We have to be intentional, because it is natural for us to form our lives in a way that is completely inward focused.
  • We have to be submissive to the work of the Holy Spirit in and among “US” as opposed to His ‘work’ through me telling others what to do.
  • We have to reorient our lives for the good of the community, which goes against the flesh (my desire to be oriented around the good of me).

Being Missional AND Evangelistic

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One of the things I do to make church planting possible is look after my three year old daughter Layla during the day while my wife heads off to work a “banking hours” job. I get some work done during the day amongst her hugs and TV shows and then work more after she goes to bed.

 

It’s challenging and yet I find that following her around (and yes, sometimes I wonder who leads who) helps me by providing a wealth of illustrations for teaching. Take for instance the teeter-totter. Everyday we go to the park and I watch kids playing on this classic outdoor toy. Most of the time kids have a ton of fun on it – moving back and forth and back and forth, giggling and screaming because of the gentle swaying that they co-create. We’ve all done it and probably loved it as a kid, right? Occasionally though it simply doesn’t work. There is a law at work with the teeter-totter. It’s a law of balance. The two kids on the teeter-totter must be roughly equal in weight otherwise neither of them move and the toy simply doesn’t work, the joy is lost and everyone is left feeling ripped off.

It’s occurred to me lately that something similar might be hindering the functionality of my church planting and perhaps you can identify with it. See at one end of my teeter-totter is the need to be missional. I always take missional to mean that we’re doing practical things to show the love of Jesus to those around us. Acts of service. Radical love expressed in organic community. Things Jesus would do for others if he were here today. I find this latest buzzword helpful because I am constantly running into people whose beef with the church is that we’ve stopped being practical and helpful to others. So being on mission in practical ways is important.

However, I feel the sometimes I let that “kid” get too big and the “other kid” too small. The other kid that brings balance and joy to the motion of the teeter-totter is evangelism. I think we’ve been rightly convicted about how we share the gospel and think of evangelism. Too many of us inside and outside of the church have seen the sharing of the good news of Jesus reduced to a sales pitch and if you’re at all like me it’s made you a bit afraid of giving people the wrong impression of you and your church. You don’t want to be “that guy”. For fear of being lumped into “that” category you have chosen the way of “intentional community” or some other more missional approach.

The problem I’ve seen is that intentional community can become a community intentionally not sharing the Good News of Jesus with anyone. In these cases we let the missional kid become fat and the functionality of our churches breaks down. People hide in our churches because they know they’ll never have to take that step of faith and actually string a sentence together that is both true to the gospel message AND manages to speak to the heart of a person who doesn’t yet follow Jesus.

This is very real for me. The past year of my church planting journey has seen my missional kid get way too fat and, for a while, I think our church was like an out of balance teeter-totter – doomed to zero movement and none of the joy that comes form the ebb and flow of mission and evangelism working together to see people join the Kingdom of Light.

Can you relate? Do you ever feel like you’ve let your evangelism quotient be outweighed by an unhealthy approach to being missional? Do you have any tips for others that might tip the scales and put a church back into balance?

Readiness Trumps Opportunity

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I spent a couple days last week at one of 3DM’s tasters. I appreciate their pinpoint focus on making disciples. A phrase from Doug Paul really struck home, “readiness trumps opportunity.”

Opportunity is a “when I win the lottery” approach to life – a waiting game that pins future happiness or success on something that happens to us. Readiness is a “prepared to do any good work” approach to life – a willingness that believes our future fruitfulness comes from our ability to listen and obey today. Jesus disciples didn’t change the world because of opportunity. They changed the world out of readiness.

That’s why I am so committed to what ELI is doing through Cultivate – helping leaders be ready for church planting. Cultivate isn’t a conference, it’s not a boot-camp, it’s 8 months of life-transforming training that prepares you to start a church by making disciples.

Cultivate is about being ready, not finding opportunity.

A new training cohort starts in 2 weeks – you can check it out here: www.elichurchplanting.com/cultivate.

We’d love to help you be ready.

Vision is your Signature Song

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Take yourself back to high school. Who was you favorite band? Now, without thinking about it, what song came to mind? There’s a good chance it is that bands signature song. For example:

Boston – More than a Feeling
Eagles – Hotel California
Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’
Bon Jovi – Livin’ on a Prayer

Besides knowing when I went to high school you’ve also learned something about leadership and vision. If you’re a leader, vision is you’re signature song. It’s the song everyone knows you by and the song everyone expects you to sing.

  • People curious about who you are and what you stand for may never get past the 30 second iTunes version – can you capture the heart in just 30 seconds?
  • Most people will know the radio version (yes, I remember radio too) – is it well produced and easily accessible to as many people as possible?
  • Then there will be a the true fans who take the time to download the extended version and add it to their favorite playlist. – Have you given them something special to make it worth their time and money?