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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

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.

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.

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.

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?

In Part 1 of this thread, I talked about reasons people should NOT change churches. In Part 2, I talked about why people should change churches, and how to discover your fit with a specific church. Here, I will talk about my reason for writing about this in the first place and the challenges that are out there.

Pretty much every city in the U.S., and around the world, needs more churches (if you believe that’s a good thing). But, part of the problem isn’t the number of the churches, because some places have tons. Part of the problem is they need more healthy, growing, relevant churches that are making a difference. You hear all the time how the median church size is around 75 people (half are smaller, half are larger). Plus, you hear that 90% of churches stay the same or are shrinking in terms of size from year to year. Something has to change. In my town of Baltimore (count & city), about 18.8% of people attend church regularly, so over a million people do not.

I think there are tons of passionate, amazing Christ-followers who are sitting in churches that are stagnant or dying and they are not there because they fit with the church’s mission, vision, and strategy. They are there because they grew up there, or because it was their first church or because it was the first church they plugged into when they moved into town. Those people are loyal, and have stuck with their church in spite of numerous frustrations with the church’s leadership and effectiveness. They are making a difference there, but I believe they could really make a difference in a church that was a better fit.

I know this is crazy, but could you imagine what could happen if all those people became involved with churches, or helped start new churches, where they fit well and would be used to their greatest potential? Their effectiveness and impact could be ten-fold larger and the churches they get involved with would be more effective as well.

Yes, the church they leave would miss them, but, they wouldn’t die simply because they left. Some churches need to die in order to provide new life to other churches, but that wouldn’t be the case for most people in the situation I have described. Their churches would probably survive for a long time after they left.

In Part 1 of this thread, I talked about reasons people should NOT change churches. The Church (all over the world) is plagued with “church hoppers” who bounce from one church to another for typically selfish reasons that benefit neither the church or the individual.

On the other hand, I believe the Church is also hampered by the fact that tons of people stay involved in churches when they really should leave. I know that’s an extremely controversial statement, but let me explain my thoughts behind it.

I believe the Church (made up of all Christians everywhere) is beautiful for many reasons, one being it’s diversity. The church I’m a part of looks different than others around here, and vastly different from churches in other countries. That’s a great thing. To take it one step farther, I think all churches have unique personalities and characteristics, and people should be part of a church they can fit in with from that standpoint.

However, the questions SHOULDN’T be:

• Do I like the music style?
• Is the preaching something extremely helpful to me?
• Will this church let me ______ (fill in the blank with some personal agenda, like sing, preach, be an elder, etc)?

Hopefully you see the common thread there, with me being the central focus. To spin that a little, here are good questions to ask when choosing a church:

• What is the church’s theology, doctrine, or “essentials” in terms of beliefs?
• What is the church’s mission? (why do they exist)
• What is the church’s vision? (what future do they hope to create)
• What is the church’s strategy? (how do they accomplish their mission and vision)

Then, in light of those answers, ask yourself:

• What is God’s purpose for my life? (The Chazown book would be a great start)
• What are my core values? (list them out and compare to the church)
• How does my personality, giftedness, skills and abilities fit with the church’s strategy? (if you’re a great organist, you may not fit with the hip-hop worship style church)
• Could I invite my friends & co-workers to that church?

Essentially you are searching to see if your greatest potential as a Christian servant, is found within that church. Your church should allow you to leverage your time, talent and resources in the greatest way possible to serve your community.

In the next part, I’ll talk about the problem I see, and one of the major challenges in overcoming that problem.

For a while now I have wanted to write about this topic. People change churches all the time, for numerous reasons. Some valid, some not. I believe one of the biggest problems in the church today is that some people who should leave their church, don’t. I’ll write my thoughts about that in the next post but first I’ll mention some reasons NOT to leave a church.

To be clear, I am not talking about leaving a church because of one’s faith struggle or problems with God. I am specifically talking about leaving a church and going to another church. Here are some reasons NOT to do that:

• Don’t leave because you disagree with small changes
  Change is inevitable. Great leaders steer change to help push the organization forward. Churches change small things often, if they want to continue making disciples in the midst of a changing culture. Some examples might be removing a program, adding a projection screen (if it’s 1998), changing service times, etc. You probably know some examples if you’re part of a church. Change is necessary, and every church won’t be right every time. Give your church freedom, and only consider leaving if changes go against your theology, morals, or strategy-fit (I made that phrase up, and I’ll expand in the next post). Even in those cases, consider the possibility that you may not be right, and be open to grow and learn.
• Don’t leave because somebody hurt you
  Remember the church is people, and people are imperfect. If somebody hurts your feelings, talk to them about it and respond with forgiveness and grace. If you leave a church because somebody hurt you, you’ll probably leave every church you’re ever a part of.
• Don’t leave because you were challenged to live differently
  If your church challenges you to live in a way that contradicts your sound understanding of what the Bible teaches, that may be a reason to leave. But, if you get offended because you are challenged to be free from a specific sin in your life, because your are challenged to give financially, because you are challenged to serve consistently or get connected in a small group, that’s not a reason to leave. That’s a prodding to live more like Jesus.

In the next post I’ll talk about reasons to change churches. As a hint, I think the key is not to look at how you fit with the church in terms of what you want, but how you fit with the church in terms of the church’s mission and strategy and your purpose, strategy, style and values sync up with that.