How to Plant a Church Without Losing Your Marriage

Great list for anyone in ministry or not, by Brian & Amy Bloye in their new book It’s Personal: Surviving and Thriving on the Journey of Church Planting.

1. Do what is important, not what is urgent. “If you try to make everyone happy, the ones who lose out will be the ones your know will forgive you: your spouse and your children.”
2. Bring fun and adventure into your relationship. “when wives of pastors get involved in extra-marital affairs, it tends to be because the other man was someone who was fun to be with.”
3. Take time off every week. “Sometimes it appears that you can’t afford a day off; the truth is, it’s the other way around. You can’t afford not to take a day off.”
4. Keep intimacy a priority.
5. Focus on being a team.
6. Find your significance & security in Christ. “We were created, as human beings, to find our meaning not in what we do but in what God has done for us.”
7. Make time for meaningful communication. “Get the conversation rolling…keep your ears unclogged – listen attentively.”
8. Help your spouse go as far as he or she can go. Don’t put extra weights on him or her. Help him feel light and fast in the race of life.
9. Share your spiritual lives with each other. The pastor shares his spiritual journey from the stage. Do it at home as well.
10. Make your spouse your project. Get to know her strengths and weaknesses, love languages, keep a prayer list of her needs. etc.
11. Set meaningful boundaries. “people come and go, and even staff come and go, the only constants are God and the two of us; to lose us is to lose everything…”

This book is really helpful. Looking forward to sharing it with church planting friends.

Current Church Planting Bibliography

More than occasionally I’m asked by people interested in Church planting, “Hey, what should I be reading?” Here’s my current top ten list of favorites in no particular order. All of these are in the category of “I wish I’d read that before I planted a church.”

• Church in the Making: What Makes or Breaks a New Church Before It Starts by Ben Arment. Honest book about the difficulty of planting a church. Discussion questions after each section would be great for Core Group Training.
• Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church Does More by Doing Less by Dave Browing. Great book to help with focus and vision. Here’s a brief review I wrote a few years back.
• Planting Missional Churches by Ed Stetzer. The textbook.
• Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers by Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird. Great book for churches wanting to sponsor churches or plant multiple churches and campuses. Research based. Great reference guide to what’s up out there in Church Planting.
• The Multiplying Church by Bob Roberts. From an experienced sender. The chapter on Starting a Church Planting Training Center at Your Church would be worth reading for every sponsor church pastor. My thoughts here.
• Church 3.0: Upgrades for the Future of the Church by Neil Cole. Challenging questions and answers for the church going forward into the future. Can’t get this book off my desk right now.
• Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community by Ed Stetzer and David Putman. “Don’t plant the church in your head. Plant it in the community.” One of my fav Ed Stetzer quotes. This book helps us do that.
• It’s Not Personal: Surviving and Thriving on the Journey of Church Planting by Brian & Amy Bloye. Reading right now. Incredibly honest look at the life of the church planter.
• Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Movement by Dave & Jon Ferguson. Great text book for starting at every level. Includes great chapters on multisite and sending out church planters, which is a core competency of the Ferguson’s church.
• Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church by Reggie McNeal. Is it going to be about how many, how much, how often? I hope not. This book will help you get the right scorecard.

Other books that have been foundational for our current church plant: The Externally Focused Church by Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw, The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, Total Church: A Radical Reshaping Around Gospel and Community by Steve Timmis.

What would be your recommendations?

Real Men in Church

You cannot defeat men like this. Tell them to keep quiet, and they disobey you. Throw them into prison, and they convert the jailer. Whip them, and they rejoice to be allowed to suffer for Christ. Stone them within an inch of their lives in one city, and they carry on with just the same message in the next. Kill them, and others arise to take their place. Endurance like that simply has to win in the long run. But we do not see enough of it in our western church. There is plenty of obstinacy, to be sure, but usually about the wrong things: church property, ministers who aren’t liked, or style of services.

Michael Green on the endurance of the early church in his great book called 30 Years that Changed the World.

Good Reads in 2011

The most challenging/practical/memorable books I read this past year: 

• On the Verge: A Journey Into the Apostolic Future of the Church by Dave Ferguson and Alan Hirsch. Hirsch plays the theorists and Ferguson plays the practicioner. Great look into the changing nature of ministry and disciple-making and how to transition our churches to reach people in today’s shifting cultural sands.
• Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture by Brandon Hatmaker. As a leader of a church that’s focusing 90% of our energy outward, this book was a huge encouragement. Great ideas and inspiration for creating a culture of ministry and service.
• Cracking Your Church’s Culture: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration by Samuel Chand. “Culture – not vision or strategy – is the most powerful factor in any organization.” I’ve learned this the hard way as a leader. Great book on shaping the culture of a church or organization. Here’s my brief review.
• Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches that Make Disciples by Jim Putman. The real call of Christ is to make disciples and this is one of the most practical tools for how to do it, since Disciples Are Made, Not Born. And get the 12-week Training Manual. If the church is going to be good at something it should be disciple-making. This helps. Here’s an overview.
• Journey’s to Significance: Charting a Leadership Course from the Life of Paul by Neil Cole. An interpretive biography on Paul. Really hoping this is the beginning of a series by Cole.
• Truth that Sticks: How to Communicate Velcro Truth in a Teflon World by Avery Willis and Mark Snowden. Avery Willis’ last book as he passed away earlier this year. About bringing Bible-storying to the North American context. Very compelling book demonstrating the need for the lost art of story telling.

A few in process and that I’m looking forward to reading in 2012:

•  Xealots: Defying the Gravity of Normality by Dave Gibbons.
• Thirty Years that Changed the World: The Book of Acts for Today by Michael Green.
• Missional Communities: The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church by Reggie McNeal.
• Outspoken: Conversations on Church Communication by Tim Schraeder.
• Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus by Hugh Halter.

What else should I add to my list?

Persistent Modification

Always think of this great list from Will Mancini as I look toward a new year and new endeavors:

What can I:

• combine?
• subtract?
• double?
• adapt?
• reduce?
• reinvent?
• cage?
• tweak?
• add?
• eliminate?
• amplify?
• modify?
• cut?
• accelerate?
• concentrate?
• stop?

From Church Uniqe: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement. Get the Visual Summary free here.

Partnering w/the Non-Profit World

Getting ready for a day of meetings with one of the largest networks of relationships in our community. Nope, not going to an denominational or church meeting, but to hang out with a local non-profit that I’ve been privileged to work with over the past few years. Lots of great reasons for churches to partner with non-profit organizations in our communities. In his great book, Barefoot Church, Brandon Hatmaker list several great ones:

1. Nonprofits typically have a great reputation in the community. “While nonprofits are often the most well-connected organizations in the city, churches remain some of the most isolated voices in our community.” Getting involved can help open doors for greater influence and greater impact for the gospel.
2. Nonprofits are experts in their field of work.
3. Partnering with nonprofits offers a new posture for the church. A few years ago I attended a volunteer roundtable hosted by the Lt. Governor of our state, and as the only pastor in the room I sunk in my chair as leaders of non-profits asked why churches didn’t get more involved in the community. They saw the potential for impact for and with the church before I did. And don’t assume that these partners are against us sharing our message. Most expect it and desire faith engagement.
4. Nonprofit partnership is an easily reproducible strategy. If you’re looking for opps to engage the community, the nonprofit world is a easy “plug and play” arena. We as leaders need only to assimilate opportunities to serve, communicate the process, and empower people to go.
5. Nonprofits need volunteers more often than they need money. Hatmaker notes that “lack of resources is the most common excuse churches make not to serve the poor.” While they’d certainly appreciate a financial donation, a working relationship does not hinge on it. Often the greatest need is people.
6. Serving with nonprofits provides a platform to serve selflessly. Serving with a nonprofit is an opportunity to shine the spotlight on something happening for the good of our community. Our culture sees churches as self-absorbed (I asked one non-profit leader how a church could help him and he said honestly and without malice based on his experience personally and professionally, “I didn’t know churches helped people”).

Hatmaker also lists six steps to effective partnerships:

1. Start with a common redemptive purpose. There are definitely nonprofits that are doing much of what God’s word calls us to do in relation to justice and bringing hope. Start there.
2. Prioritize developing relationships. There will be worldview issues that collide when engaging outside the church. And we’ll have a better platform for engaging these as we build nonagenda-oriented relationships with community leaders.
3. Trust their leadership. If you can’t trust their leadership, then move on to a different non-profit. But I’ve found nonprofit leaders from Fire Depts to Food Banks to be hard working, trustworthy, and eager to have the church as a partner.
4. Lose your agenda. We’re coming to serve them in a common redemptive purpose. Focus on serving them.
5. Give away the credit. “If you are willing to partner with local nonprofits who have spent years building credibility in different areas of service, take a backseat, and don’t seek a name through this.”
6. Commit to be available. The best way to build credibility with community leaders is through availability and follow through.

Check your local government website. They should have a list of nonprofits in the area. If you’re in St. Tammany it’s here. You can also sign up to receive a monthly update to this list with specific opportunities called The Loop.

Check out this church in Austin, TX that assimilates opps to serve through nonprofits in their city. Here is their Christmas list.

What nonprofit are you working with? Have you learned any lessons in this regard?

Another topic for another day is starting a nonprofit alongside the ministry of the church.

Pick up Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture by Brandon Hatmaker for more great ideas and inspiration for incarnational ministry.

 

“Apathy is passionless living. It is sitting in front of the television night after night and living your life from one moment of entertainment to the next. It is the inability to be shocked into action by the steady-state lostness and suffering of the world. It is the emptiness that comes from thinking of godliness as the avoidance of doing bad things instead of the aggressive pursuit of doing good things.”

John Piper, in his latest book Bloodlines

Serving on Sunday, part one

A growing trend in church life is congregations taking a Sunday and scattering throughout the community to serve. Most are doing it once a year. Some, like the church I’m part of, are doing it once a quarter. I even heard of one recently doing this once a month! Outreach.com even created some products for this segment of congregations. Seems Pastors and church leaders either hate this idea or love it. Some reasons I’ve heard and can think of against this:

• It subverts the importance of preaching the Word of God.
• It hurts church growth by making things awkward and uncomfortable for newcomers, visitors, and the disconnected.
• “We can’t go a Sunday w/o taking an offering.”
• It promotes a liberal agenda of social action.
• “I can’t imagine how we would find enough for everyone to do around our community.”

Brandon Hatmaker in his great book Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture talks about his church’s experience with this practice. Austin New Church does a “Serving Austin Sunday” every time there is five Sunday’s in a month. He gives three reasons why:

1. It creates a service minded DNA. It’s an opportunity to communicate serving is a priority to the church.
2. It changes the posture to the community. The community sees the church’s deed matching the creed.
3. The opportunity to invite others. Hatmaker says it’s the most highly attended Sunday for non-believers, skeptics, the unchurched, and the dechurched. “I’m constantly amazed at who might show up at a service project.”

Other reasons for and against? Leave in the comments. I’ll share some of my thoughts for and against after two years and eight Faith in Action Sunday’s a little later.

Brandon’s book is well worth reading! Also check out his blog.

Diagnosing Spiritual Immaturity

“the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart”

http://bible.us/Matt12.34.HCSB.

How can I know where I am spiritually or where are those I’m trying to disciple and lead? Try listening. Jim Putman in Real-Life Discipleship: Equipping Disciples Who Make Disciples breaks down five stages of spiritual maturity by what will be common phrases for a person at each stage.

Spiritual Infant

• “I don’t have to go to church to be a Christian.”
• “I pray and read my Bible. That’s good enough for me.”
• “I didn’t know the Bible said that.”
• “Jesus helps me be a good person. I don’t need church.”
• Characterized by ignorance, confusion, dependence, worldly perspective.
• Needs personal attention of a spiritual parent, teaching and modeling the Christian faith, accountability to develop new habits.

Spiritual Child

• “My church isn’t taking care of my needs.”
• “I didn’t like the music today. If only they did it like…”
• “I love my small group; don’t add more people to it.”
• “I’m not being fed at my church, so I’m going to a church that can meet my needs better.”
• Characterized by self-centeredness, pride, idealism, spiritual highs and lows.
• Needs relational connections to a church family, help to start feeding themselves, teaching about identity in Christ.

Spiritual Young Adult

• “I love my small group, but there are others who need a group like this.”
• “Randy and Rachel missed church today. Their kids have the flu, maybe our group could make meals for them. I’ll start.”
• “I have some friends I’ve been witnessing to. I think I could lead a Bible Study for them with a little help.”
• “In my devotions, I came across something I have a question about.”
• Characterized by action, zeal, God-centered, others-centered, independent, desire to serve others.
• Needs opportunities to serve, ongoing relationships that offer encouragement, accountability and skills training.

Spiritual Parent

• “This guy at work asked me to explain the Bible to him. Pray for me.”
• “Our small group is going on a mission trip, and I have given each person a different responsibility.”
• “We get to baptize someone from my small group today. I want them to get plugged into a ministry right away.”
• Characterized by intentionality, reproduction mindset, dependability, desire to see others mature.
• Needs ongoing relationships with other disciple makers, a team approach, accountability and encouragement.

So where are you? If you’re moving toward spiritual maturity you may want to get this book or the training manual to learn more about how to be a spiritual parent and make disciples who make disciples. Here’s a few other great quotes from the manual:

• Every Christian is commanded to participate in the mission to make disciples.
• Your work is complete when the person you are discipling can make a disciple.
• The church was not designed to be a group of spectators who attend weekly lectures; it was designed to be a trained army with a powerful message.
• We cannot change the definition of discipleship to sit and listen and then expect to make disciples as Jesus did.
• Don’t mistake Bible Knowledge, years of church attendance, physical age, education, and so forth for spiritual maturity.
• A church is successful when everyone is in the game, maturing into disciples who can reproduce disciples.
• When disciple-making is reduced to a program, people often fail to connect it to a lifestyle.
• Relationships create the environment where discipleship happens best.
• Serving produces players, not spectators. Service helps a disciple develop and mature.

Changing the Scorecard for the Church

“The typical church scorecard (how many, how often, how much) doesn’t mesh with a missional view of what the church should be monitoring in light of its mission in the world. The current scorecard rewards church activity and can be filled in w/o reference to the church’s impact beyond itself”

from the introduction to Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. This book outlines the shifts that must take place to make the church in America a missional movement again. The book is also full of ideas of how to engage in making these shifts. He admits to not having the silver bullet, but Missional Renaissance provides great insight for next generation ministries. I read this book when it first came out and its been bugging me ever since. The ideas are provocative and thrilling and now more and more leaders are coming to the conclusion that our measurements must change. Much is being written about this right now. Others that I’ve read and been helped by are Transformational Church by Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer, On the Verge by Dave Ferguson and Alan Hirsch, and Barefoot Church by Brandon Hatmaker. This is a great conversation for us to have, so grab McNeal’s book and be provoked. Here’s the three shifts he suggests with a few of my fav quotes:

Shift #1: From an Internal to an External Ministry Focus. The missional church engages the community beyond its walls because it believes that is why the church exists.

• Moving to an external focus pushes the church from doing missions as some second-mile project into being on mission as a way of life.
• Internal focus is to define effectiveness by church activity and whatever it takes to be a “full-service” church.
• Externally focused means seeing ourselves as a CONNECTOR not the DESTINATION. Like an airport is a place of connection, not a destination. It’s job is to help people get somewhere else. When church sees itself as the destination the scorecard gets confused.

Shift #2: From Program Development to People Development. Moving away from the assumption that people are better off if they just participate in certain activities and processes that the church or organization has sanctioned.

• We’re learning that there is no necessary correlation between time logged sitting in pews or chairs at church and attaining Christlikeness in mindset and mission or purpose.
• a new scorecard celebrates investments in people, not just programs, and cheers breakthroughs in people’s lives, not just organizational achievement.
• McNeal’s question: “Are people better off for being a part of this church, or are they just tireder and poorer?

Shift #3: From Church-based to Kingdom-based Leadership. …thinking of kingdom impact more than church growth.

• Church based leadership is institutional, maintenance-oriented, positional, church-focused, and highly controlling.
• Kingdom leadership is organic, disruptive, prophetic, kingdom-focused, empowering.
• Kingdom leadership focuses on people development not program management and event production.
• Good questions for church leaders: Does your call revolve around a mission or a job? Have we minimized the call of God down to a guaranteed employment contract and a regular paycheck?

A few of my favorite quotes:

• The true vitality of a congregation rests in the abundant lives of its participants and in the blessed lives in the community it serves.
• To think and live missionally means seeing all of life as a way to be engaged with the mission of God in the world.
• We must change our ideas of what it means to develop a disciple, shifting the emphasis from studying Jesus and all things spiritual in an environment protected from the world to following Jesus into the world to join him in his redemptive mission.
• Missional followers of Jesus don’t belong to a church. They are the church. The missional church is not a what, but a who.
• Our job is not to “do church” well but to be the people of God in an unmistakable way in the world. Our “thereness” is what the world needs.

Lots of great ideas in the book. Like this example of measures that reflect a missional paradigm for life and ministry:

• Number of growing relationships with people who are not Jesus followers or church people.
• Number of personal relationships with community leaders.
• Number of venues for interpersonal service in the community each month.
• Number of hours in personal service in the community each month.
• Number of life-coaching relationships.
• Number of external, missional experiences and stories used in speaking and writing.

Also see this great list I posted from the book earlier of success measures for the church.