Archive - May, 2010

Attractional or Missional? ….or something else?

May 26, 2010 in Church Culture, Strategy with 0 Comments

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.

How I Spend My Time

May 20, 2010 in Leadership, Systems with 1 Comment

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?

The Sins of Our Strengths

May 18, 2010 in Leadership with 2 Comments

As a heads up, this is just my opinion and could be completely wrong. But, to get this started I have to point out something first. I have noticed that most people don’t struggle with every sin (missing the mark in terms of God’s plan for our lives) but rather really struggle with a few, and are somewhat tempted, or not even tempted by others. For instance, someone may really struggle with gossip and lust, but have no problems at all with fighting against gluttony, greed, pride and other temptations and sin. Another person may struggle with envy and pride, but can resist losing their temper, gossiping, lust, and other sins seemingly without much effort.

With that said, I’ve also noticed that many of our sins are related to the weaknesses of our strengths. Often times the things that tempt us most do so because they prey on areas that our strengths expose us to. For instance, someone who is a a hard worker and is productive may struggle with impatience and anger, because their strengths create expectations and a need for control that isn’t always met. I don’t know if I’m that productive or hard working, but I definitely struggle with patience (our virtue for the month) and anger.

Someone else may be a great encourager, and part of that is because they struggle with finding their own self worth in God rather than in the words and affirmations of others. However, because they want that affirmation they are good at providing it for others.

Another person may struggle with gossip, and it’s because they actually have great gifts of mercy and helps but their concern for others isn’t always expressed in the best ways. Numerous things could cause that, including how they were raised and how much their closest friends lead them to gossip rather than serving and loving those in need.

Have you noticed any other examples of this?

Figure out your strengths and your weaknesses, and then figure out what tempts you most because of those weaknesses. Not every temptation or sin we struggle with is tied to our strengths, but some are, and knowing that is one of the best ways to fight against it.

Orange Conference Thoughts #orange10

May 13, 2010 in Children's Ministry, Church Culture, Leadership, Strategy with 0 Comments

I attended the Orange Conference before Drive, but blogged about them in reverse order for no good reason. Here are my thoughts and takeaways from Orange:

  • The Gwinnett Center is a pretty amazing place.
  • It was cool to hang out with Mike Kelly and his crew for much of the conference.
  • There was obvious intentionality in having less of a “star worship leader” feel, and more of a focus on having a community of worship leaders lead the times of singing together.
  • A lot of the guest speakers did not share a message or “talk”, and instead were interviewed by Reggie.
  • The “tweet up” (coffee house meet up of folks on Twitter) was fun. Free smoothie’s were a plus, too.
  • The Orange staff team works their butts off, and I’m amazed they can pull off a conference like that with a staff their size.
  • Rev Run was a guest, and that was pretty cool.
  • Perry Noble’s talk was tied for my favorite part of the conference. He talked about his 7 core convictions about Family Ministry. He killed it, and I laughed so hard I was in pain.
  • My other favorite part of the conference was connecting with other ministry leaders and Orange staff.
  • The new Orange website launched, http://www.whatisorange.org/
  • The new Orange Parents website/blog launched: http://www.orangeparents.org/

I’m looking forward to the Orange Tour coming to Washington D.C. in the fall, and I hope a ton of our children’s ministry volunteers will be able to attend.

Drive Conference – Final Thoughts #drive10

May 11, 2010 in Church Culture, Church Planting, Leadership, Strategy, Systems with 0 Comments

In the previous two posts (here and here) I shared some thoughts on my experience at the Drive Conference last week. In this post I’ll share the remaining thoughts and takeaways I had. You can see a highlight video of Drive 2010 here. You can see a bunch of the videos that were played at Drive here, including “Sunday’s Coming”, a hilarious spin on how most churches plan services.

Here are my final takeways:

  • Andy’s last session was on tension. I won’t share too much, as it looks like that’s the theme for the Catalyst Conference and he’d probably appreciate not having the talk given away on blog world (although I’m sure it is outlined elsewhere). Essentially he said part of good leadership is knowing the difference between problems that need to be solved and tensions that need to be managed. Knowing the difference and making that clear for your organization can help you make the right decisions.
  • I’m thinking about tensions we have to manage in CCC Kids, and in CCC in general. I want to make sure we aren’t viewing them as problems that need to be solved, thereby creating more problems.
  • “New organizations need more vision than management”. I’m not even sure where I got that, but it’s so true.
  • I attended the breakout that was a Q&A with Andy Stanley, his wife and assistant. That was pretty cool mostly because he shared some about his relationship with his dad, the issues they had to fight through and how they came through it. It was an transparent, vulnerable time for him.
  • During the Q&A Andy mentioned that he thinks the senior leader in an organization should make as few decisions as possible, pushing decision making down to those who are directly responsible. He didn’t talk about that much but was eye opening as it’s clearly counter intuitive.
  • I connected with and learned from a ton of ministry leaders, including the guys from True North Church, Kendra Fleming, Patrick Mitchell, Rich Barrett, Rob Marks, Casey Ross, and David McDaniel among others. I’m grateful for the time and wisdom they shared.
  • I went to the Orange Conference alone, so it was even more cool to have a ministry partner with me at Drive. Huge props to Tom’s brother for letting us stay at his awesome house. I really enjoyed meeting his brother’s family and having dinner with Tom & his brother while we were there.
  • There were some great quotes that came through the twitter feed that I should have saved. One example was “we cannot reach our full potential without learning to love correction.”

Well, now comes the difficult task of applying these learnings.

Drive Conference – Other Learnings #drive10

May 6, 2010 in Children's Ministry, Church Planting, Leadership, Strategy, Systems with 0 Comments

Yesterday I posted about key learnings I had from a specific session at the Drive Conference. This post will share all the other things I’ve been learning through the other main session and the breakouts.

Main Session #1

  • In the opening session Andy Stanley noted that the Colosseum was dedicated to all the Christian martyrs who died there and now crosses hang over the 2 main entrances (the Emperor’s entrance and the VIP entrance). His point was that Christians who lived when it was constructed and used as a celebration of death, slavery, and all sorts of evil could never have imagined that one day it would be dedicated to Christian martyrs, that crosses would hang there and symbolize the resurrection of Christ and not murder, and that people all over the world would be celebrating Jesus.
  • Andy’s point was that with God, all things are possible. He challenged everyone asking – What did you once think was possible, but the realities of life have led you to believe it is impossible?

Breakouts – Day 2

  • The right people are the foundation of a successful creative process
  • The breakout on the creative process made me think a lot about the tension between artists and non-artists, especially when a non-artist leads an artist. Obviously everyone has some level of artistic ability, but clear tensions exist between people who are project/task oriented and people who are not. Not every artist isn’t, but many aren’t. I’m wondering how can someone like me (total non-artist) effectively lead artists in a local church?
  • Excellence is simply exceeding expectations or doing the best you can with what you have, in a sustainable way.
  • Churches should hire leaders who are people magnets.
  • When it comes to money – What do you want for your people (not from)?

This was the greatest quote, from David McDaniel, and it was in the context of financial stewardship but applies to everything:

Why would God allow you (the leader) to break his principles personally and continue to bless your vision corporately?

Drive Conference – North Point’s Service Planning Process #drive10

May 5, 2010 in Church Culture, Church Planting, Leadership, Strategy, Systems with 1 Comment

Over the last week I’ve been to the Orange Conference and I’m at the Drive Conference now, and I’ll share some of my thoughts and learnings from the 2 conferences in random order here on the blog.

In this post I’ll share some of what Andy Stanley talked about in session 2 of Drive 2010, which was titled Rules of Engagement and talked about how North Point Community Church plans their services/environments for adults, students and children. Here were my takeaways from the session, which was extremely helpful and practical:

  • Churches must define “the win” for their Sunday services. For North Point it is when an unchurched person experiences helpful content, engaging presentation and appealing context and then comes back next week with a friend. Their long term win is for people to think and act differently in light of God’s truth.
  • Andy showed a chart they use to plan their service. You can see that chart by downloading the Rules of Engagement PDF from http://insidenorthpoint.org/programming/downloads/
    • The red columns are every week
    • Yellow is optional, doesn’t happen every week
    • It’s like a funnel because the service hopefully captures everyone in the beginning and leads them somewhere on purpose.
    • The common ground is emotion, not information. They start by finding a common emotion among everyone who might be in the audience (unchurched, churched, men, women, high schooler, senior citizen, etc).
    • Andy essentially starts at the beginning of the funnel again when preaching, trying to re-involve everyone emotionally before leading them somewhere with the message.
  • I think my favorite part was how Andy used Luke 15:1-6 to illustrate how Jesus started with a common emotion (feeling of losing something important), and tapped into emotion throughout, on the way to teaching a new idea about how God thinks.
  • In planning and evaluating, they ask:
    • How will this make people feel?
    • What do we want them to feel?
    • When is it appropriate (in the service) to make people uncomfortable?

I’ve heard Vince Antonucci talk about how he would try to plan a service that would begin by making people laugh about something that they would eventually be emotionally drawn into and challenged about by the end of the service.

I’ve thought about how this can apply to our children’s ministry environments at CCC as well as our services.

What’s the win for your Sunday services? What process do you use to help people get there?