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The infographic below has some interesting facts to me, including:

• Maryland has the 5th highest average-income in America
• The top 5 states with the highest average income are all in the northeast. It’s no wonder that evangelism (telling people about Jesus) is seemingly more difficult in the northeast. Jesus said something about wealth and focus on material things making it hard to follow him.
• The top 1% of people in terms of wealth own 40% of all stocks.
• People who aren’t rich have more debt. The key thing though, is not to think they have debt because they aren’t rich. No, they aren’t rich because they have debt. In other words, if we could live at whatever level would allow us to be debt free now, we would be rich later….and we could use that money to plant new churches

Made by Online Schools for Mint.com

I came across a statement recently that Sandra Bullock had originally turned down the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy in the movie, The Blind Side, because of her perception of Christians. The source of the statement came from this article, where she said the following:

“One of my biggest concerns stepping into this was how people use their faith and their religion as a banner, and then they don’t do the right thing,” explains Bullock. “They go, ‘I’m a good Christian, and I go to church, and this is the way you should live your life.’ And I’m like, do not give me a lecture on how to live my life when you go to church every week, but I know you’re still sleeping around on your wife. I told Leigh Anne the banner waving scared me because I’ve had experiences that haven’t been great. I don’t buy a lot of people who use that as their shield. But she was so open and honest and forthright. And I thought, wow, I finally met someone who practices but doesn’t preach—someone who blazes trails, and they do it as a family.”

It’s unfortunate how true some of those statements are, such as the number of people who “use faith and their religion as a banner” but don’t “do the right thing”. Also, how many Christians “practice but don’t preach”?

I actually think the number of Christians that “practice that don’t preach” is larger than the number of those who say one thing but live something else. The problem is, the banner wavers, as she calls them, often times have a bigger platform to begin with or end up with one because our culture loves to publicize the hypocrites and failures. Many people want to hear the stories about failure because it makes them feel better about themselves.

I hope more and more that people who know Christians will be able to say what Sandra said after getting to know the Tuohy’s, that they “finally met people who walk the walk.” She may have meant walk the talk, but you get it. Didn’t Jesus say something like that?

I tweeted about this last week but it’s too good not to blog. In the video below, Mark Driscoll is preaching on Luke 8:19-21, where Jesus talks about who is family to him. In this part of the message Mark talks about why your church may not feel like family, and the answer could be you….

Click here to see the video on the blog

The Barna group published results from a recent survey that had some predictable results, and some surprising ones. You can read the article here. Some of the predictable results included the fact that women drive most church participation and most church participants are not single.

Some other results that were fairly predictable, but interesting to read were:

• People in the Northeast (where I live) are “unlikely to be active in terms of small groups, Sunday School or volunteerism”. I think that is directly related to the next one.
• “Catholics are not particularly active beyond worship attendance, while evangelicals participate in many different forms of ‘group faith’.” The Northeast has a much greater Catholic presence, practicing or former, than other parts of the country so I think this one is related to the previous one in relation to involvement.
• “Attenders of large churches involve themselves in the broadest spectrum of faith activities”. By large churches, they mean 500 or larger, which would be the vast minority of churches in America. A lot of people have an unfounded bias against large churches but studies show over and over again how those churches tend to have more involved Christians.
• People who are involved in a small group are more likely to read their Bible on their own than those who simply attend church – 84% versus 67%.

CCC is in the Northeast, in a highly Catholic and former-Catholic area, and we’re a “large church” by this study’s standards. What can churches in our area do with this information?

On a different note, our area has one of the most radical, effective Catholic Churches I’ve ever heard of: Church of the Nativity

Below is an infographic from Mashable comparing the soon-to-be-released Droid X and the newly released iPhone 4. What’s your phone of choice?

You have probably heard the phrase that says “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. That’s probably true in all of life but is especially true in the realm of finances. Everybody needs some type of financial plan for how they will manage their money otherwise we end up like most Americans, saving -2% each year while swimming in debt. Dave Ramsey is a great Christian financial guru who’s company helps people become debt free using a specific plan.

One of the blogs I follow is Patrick Mitchell’s. Patrick is a children’s minister at a church in Charlotte, NC, and recently he blogged his experience implementing Dave Ramsey’s plan a few years ago. I thought it might be helpful to read and learn from his experience:

The plan

Our journey with the plan (part 1)

Our journey with the plan (part 2)

$13 million and our new money experiment

In the previous post I talked about how we all want things and often times there are specific people who have what we want. Obviously we need to guard against envy and selfishness but there is also something else we sometimes miss when thinking about what we want in life. If you’re like me, you want it NOW. Or, if we’re practicing patience….next week. We see somebody else who has what we want and we wonder why that can’t be us?

What I often miss is the fact that the person that has what I want, usually put in a ton of time and effort to get it. For instance, the pastor of a hugely influential church may have worked 10 years to get there, sacrificing countless things in the process. He may have saved money for years to prepare for not being paid for the first 3 years of the church’s existence. He may have lost friends in the process of growing the church, because they no longer believed in his vision. He may have gone through tough spiritual battles that typically come with leading a church. God may have done some hard work on him to prepare him for that journey. But, from my perspective, I typically forget about all that and wonder why that can’t be me…..now.

More common is the fact that we usually don’t even know all that information anyway. Most successful people haven’t documented all the things they went through to get where they are. We just assume it happened over night. In the business world Jim Collins calls this the flywheel concept. People inside the loop feel like it takes forever to get great momentum and success and people outside the loop feel like it happened overnight.

I want to never discount the journey and the hard work others put in to get where they are. In terms of a relationship with Jesus, the journey is where we are molded, developed and prepared.

The inspiration for these posts came from watching the video interview with Matt Chandler below. He talks about going from being a janitor to becoming a pastor and the importance of all of that. I’ll never forget my first time teaching middle school kids the Bible, and how beneficial the time I spent in that role was.

WHAT HAVE YOU WANTED….WITHOUT ALL THE WORK?

Regardless of what field you work in or what skills you have, you can probably identify some people you look up to. Maybe it’s a celebrity, an athlete, or one of the best in your field but we all know what it’s like to want something somebody else has. Often times we want it for great reasons, too. In church world plenty of people want a big church so they can be a strong influence in their city. Church planters (people who start new churches) want their church to explode with growth like Elevation experienced. Yeah, that’s probably 1 out of 10,000 churches, but why can’t they have that?

You may want the house, job, vehicle, vacation experience, influence, book deal, music album, acting job or wisdom somebody else has. I can tell you I will always want to be a part of a hugely influential church. I also have to acknowledge my pride and selfishness in that, even though my motives are mostly pure (I hope). I want to see cities in America, and particularly my city of Baltimore, transformed by Jesus Christ. The Church (universal, not just one church) is God’s Plan A for making that happen, so naturally I want to be a part of a great church that is making a big difference.

At various times I want a host of other things as well, mostly things that are selfish and material in nature. In the next post I’ll talk about something I miss or forget about in the midst of all that. It’s not going to be about envy or the fact that we have all received one blessing after another through Jesus. That’s all true and important but I’m going to talk about the work that it takes to to get what we want.

In the mean time…. WHAT DO YOU WANT, SELFISHLY OR NOT?

Disclaimer: this post is about a popular “debate” in church world today that you may have zero interest in.

There is a debate in church world over different models, or ways of doing church. I blogged a while back about this here (sorry the video isn’t there). Basically, people who don’t like churches that encourage inviting people to church label those churches as “attractional”, saying all they do is yell “come to us” and aren’t concerned with living among people and representing Jesus Christ. They claim the “Biblical” model is “missional”, which could be defined as living among people, in culture, and leading them to follow Jesus through a personal relationship only. Some, but not all, generally don’t like the idea of a church gathering or service, and would rather see the church be a network of small groups only.

Tim Stevens started another conversation on this topic with this post. Today he referenced Alan Hirsch’s claims that the “attractional” model will only reach 40% of Americans. I still have no idea how he got that number when 63-67% indicate they would be somewhat open to attending church if someone invited them.

Here’s my main problem. This debate seems to assume that all American churches are either “attractional” or “missional”. I would argue there is at least one other model, and I’ll call it “fellowship”. Fellowship is a church word used to describe the relationships and community among people, typically Christians in a church. I believe at least 80% of American churches are the “fellowship” model, meaning they are designed with Christians in mind. I would say “attractional” and “missional” are designed with non-Christian people in mind, and therefore both are largely different from the “fellowship” model.

The problem is, some people assume the “fellowship” model is the “attractional” model, and because the “fellowship” model isn’t working, neither is the “attractional” model. I can probably only think of 5 or so “attractional” churches in my area, but I could easily name 50 “fellowship” churches.

All of this assumes that a church is just one or the other, when in fact all churches are a measure of all of those models, and probably more.

Sorry for the overuse of quotes, but that’s my way of letting you know I think all the labels aren’t worth much. Knowing which model you are is worth a lot, mislabeling churches and then judging them solely on your idea of what they are isn’t worth anything.

The old management adage that says “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” definitely has some truth to it. Ever since we started Community Christian Church I have tracked my time each week. For the longest time I tracked it in Excel, making my own list of tasks and categories that I spent my time on and listing how I spent my time each day. Unfortunately, that system made it difficult to look at multiple weeks, or months, at one time.

Last November I searched around and found myhours.com. It’s not flashy, by any means, but it gets the job done. I’ve tracked my time in there since the beginning of November. Basically you can create projects, and each project has tasks that you set up. I created a project for church, and all the tasks represent how I spend my time.

I ran a report to list my time by task, and then put that into Excel and grouped the tasks into categories so I could see generally where I spend my time. Here are the results with some of my observations below:

• Some of the 0% weren’t actually 0 hours, just so few that it rounded to 0.
• I’m glad leadership was the leading time consumer, as that’s my primary job
• Admin was mostly dominated by time spent on email
• Our children’s ministry is divided up into 3 environments, Preschool, Discovery Island and KidStuf. Having great leaders of those environments frees me up from spending time there. KidStuf is an exception because I have a part in it, which is like everyone else’s and involves a lot of time in rehearsals.
• Learning was high, but a lot of that has to do with just coming back from 6 days of conferences, so that will go down as the year goes on. But, I want learning to be around 10% because it’s directly affects the leadership category.
• I hope the 3% of time I’m investing in other churches is helping

Do you track your time? Where is it going?