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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.

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?

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?

Our church is just over 4 years old, and we have had to develop a lot in that short time for all of our ministries, including our children’s ministry. Fortunately we used resources and ideas from a ton of great churches, including North Point and CCC in Naperville, IL. Our curriculum and strategy partner, reThink, was also a huge help in that process. What that meant was, we typically didn’t have to create resources from scratch and instead had to tweak something that already existed.

We’re far from finished, and I’m sure a lot of what we have done could use further improvement and refining but I wanted to make all of our resources available to children’s ministry leaders everywhere. So, I’ve uploaded everything our church has created for children’s ministry, including processes and systems for leadership, administration, environments, events, and resources for volunteers and parents.

Head on over to the FREE RESOURCES page to see what’s available. Contact me if you need editable files and please send me back anything you improve upon!

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.

I watched this video today:

The video seeks to describe the "missional" church. I have an issue with this video because it indirectly seems to claim that other church models are not missional. Missional is really just carrying out God's mission, which could be summed up when Jesus said his purpose was to seek and save the lost and our purpose is to make disciples (followers of Jesus) of all people.

Sometimes the other model that is not named in the video is called "attractional", based on the idea that the church attracts people to services, events, etc. I think this is a false dichotomy and Christians and churches should be both.

The "attractional" model is inherently missional anyway, because all churches will tell you that most of their guests are invited, so somebody was being missional to them before they visited church. Missional models are attractional whether they like it or not, because just like churches, we as individuals are either attractive or not in terms of how we live our life. I'm not talking about appearance. I'm talking about living a life that makes others take notice and ask why. 

It would be easier if it didn't matter how we looked, talked, loved, or lived as individuals and as churches while we try to help people find their way back to God. But, that is not the case. People will not listen to what we have to say unless something about us "attracts" them rather than pushes them away.  

At CCC we're in the midst of the CCC at the Movies series, where we take some popular movies and look at the truths about God they communicate, whether on purpose or not.  Two Sundays ago David shared a message based on the movie Kung Fu Panda – which is a totally awesome movie. 

Our church was started to reach people who are not a part of any church.  We are constantly trying to evaluate how well we are doing in light of that vision.  Last month we had a church-wide survey that had a ton of questions that helped us evaluate how well we are doing in a number of different areas.  Here are some of the interesting things we found:

We also learned there are some things we can improve on:

The survey was a bear to analyze but it provided a lot of great information, only a portion of which I mentioned here.  It will probably be a yearly thing for us and should go a long way towards helping us constantly get better at everything we do.