Weekend links

Here are some good posts/articles we’ve found this week, either from people in 3DM’s network or outside of it and were just interesting reads!

 

• Are youth pastors saving the jobs of senior pastors?
• How to start a Missional Community
• Want to help write a worship song?
• 13 ways to raise grateful kids
• Our problem with proclamation
• The religious views of 20-somethings

 

 

Building an Extended family: Keys to an integrated life

Last month I put out a few posts about how I believe re-capturing the extended family on mission is one of the crucial things for the Western church to move forward. As you can imagine, for the majority of us, living that kind of life can actually seem overwhelming. It feels like we’d simply have more on our plates with the same number of hours in the day.

We only have a finite amount of time, yes?

So what I think Sally and I had to learn to do early in our marriage and as parents was to have an integrated life, where we learned to use time, resources and energy differently.

I fundamentally believe that’s the only way to do this thing. You have to live and integrated life. You only live one life, so live one life. I asked Sally if she would give some thought to how to do this, and here are some of her thoughts.

Keys to integrated life:

1. Begin sharing stuff. It breaks down the barriers when someone borrows your sewing machine, lawn mower or car. It’s a lot easier to shape an inter-dependent family when you’re sharing things regularly.
2. Don’t think about people as possessions. (i.e. my children, my husband, etc). Think about what they bring and who they are within the wider community.
3. What gift do I have that I could share with others for good? (cooking , cleaning , decorating, computer skills, etc). I could swap my gift for another (“if you teach me how to use Quickbooks, I’ll babysit your kids so you get a date night). What do I need and what do others need, and what ways do they relate to each other so we can be more interdependent?
4. What shared tasks would be more fun and completed quicker if done in oikos (extended family)? Christmas /thanksgiving, children’s parties, landscaping, etc.
5. If you’re discipling someone in your extended family, is there something I’m already doing that someone else could tag along with? Driving kids to school. Going grocery shopping. Going to the airport. Rather than setting up a coffee or lunch every time someone needs something, fold them into your regular life and use the time more efficiently. Plus, there are lots of other things they’ll pick up.
6. Start thinking about major decisions (like schooling , where to buy a house, etc) in terms of where your community and relationships are, not just your individual preference . Start with where the People of Peace are (people God has already prepared in advance to be open to you).
7. Have at least one meal a week when you invite someone(s) over. You’re already eating, invite someone to do it with you!
8. Walk the same roads and neighborhoods. Park the car in the driveway instead of the garage so you have to talk to your neighbors.
9. Go to the same restaurants at the same time on the same day each week and sit in the same place so you get to know the staff over time.

If only all worship pastors were this honest…

David Walker is a worship pastor, brilliant writer/musician and all-around fantastic guy. Last week he released a blog that really caught my attention and I wanted to highlight one piece of it. You can click here to read the whole blog post.

I’ve been leading worship for almost ten years. It is a gifting that I have. I have developed this over the years because it’s something that I place immense value in. I want to continue to lead and write incredible songs in and for the Church. I want to see people saved and made new through God using what I do. These are all incredible things to desire and I believe it’s the heart of God.

But it can’t just be about leading worship on a stage a couple of times a week.

When I read the scriptures, I believe at the end of this life when I’m old and grey, I want to look back most of all and identify the small amount of people that had intimate access to my life and because they did, they did the same, and disciples were made and the Kingdom of God advanced. And then those people made disciples…and the Kingdom of God advanced. And then those people…well…you get the picture…

If I’m honest, really honest, I’d have to say if I stay on the current trajectory I’m on, I’m not sure I’ll be able to say that with the assurance I’d like to.

But I want to.

And I’m cashing in all my chips to make it happen…to ensure that discipleship is the primary thing my life revolves around. That I’m making sure someone who is further along in this journey is investing into me, but, likewise, that I am doing the same thing in discipling others.

It really is worth reading the whole post in it’s entirety. Click here to read it.

Also, as a thank you to David for letting us re-post some of his blog, here’s a video of one of his original songs:

10 trends for the next 10 years in church

If you’ll remember, a few weeks ago I posted a question asking what you thought the church would look like in the next decade. You can read the post here (we had a number of really good responses).

Recently, Sam Rainer and the Rainer Research Group released a futurist study on what they believe to be 10 unexpected trends in church-life by the year 2020. I’ve posted those trends and some of their thoughts with it.

When you read it, what do you think? What connects for you? What misses?

The heterogeneous church explodes
Perhaps the most important, this first trend involves not only pragmatic issues, but theological issues as well. As the younger generation ages, they will not be represented by the homogeneous unit principal that was championed in the early years of the church growth movement. Basically, this principal states that people desire to worship and serve in church with similar people, and the best way to reach people is with others who are similar.

Boomers began to change this thinking. Many sought diversity — they intentionally championed it. For many Millennials, diversity (or heterogeneity) is normal. In the future, homogenous units will still form — there’s a reason why people attend Star Trek conventions (though it is lost on me). People with common interests, characteristics, life stages and languages will still gravitate towards each other. The difference with the younger generation is that these divides will not be as distinct, specifically in ethnic terms. The United States will be minority white by 2042 — preschools much sooner, by 2021. The Millennial generation will gravitate towards heterogeneous churches because they represent what is normal in their generation.

The diverse church will explode in growth over the next 10 years. And instead of looking at this trend through the lens of pragmatic church growth practices, I believe it needs to be viewed as a picture of the Gospel. What man segregates, the Gospel unifies. Get on board with this trend not because it will grow your church, but rather because it was God’s plan for his church from the beginning.

Church attendance continues to decline
People do not wake up one Sunday and decide to leave their church. They phase out; they begin by attending less frequently. This problem is pervasive throughout the North American church. While myriad individual, spiritual reasons exist why people attend less, decreasing frequency of attendance is the single biggest macro reason for overall church declines. For example, a church has 400 people that attend four out of four weeks. This attendance frequency equates to an average attendance of 400. But if this same church has 400 people that attend two out of four weeks, average attendance is cut in half to 200.

To reduce the problem of declining attendance frequency, church leaders will begin to track not only how many attend, but also how frequently they attend as well. I am not advocating legalistic superciliousness — that every time the church doors are open people must be there. But the family that once attended almost every week and now attends 10 times a year is gradually leaving the church.

The conservative drift draws more
While the overall attendance decline will hit churches of all types and denominations, growing churches will typically be the more theologically conservative congregations. The Millennials will either go to conservative churches, or they will not go at all.

Deep teaching gets more popular
Coupled with a theologically conservative drift, many growing churches will get deeper theologically and more popular. Many young adult dropouts left the church because they desired deeper teaching. The superficial anomalies will most likely still exist, but churches that challenge people to greater biblical depths will proliferate while others languish in their own shallowness.

Boomer ministries boom
Boomers will be a different type of senior. In fact, don’t call Boomers “seniors.” They are not part of their parents’ generation — they aren’t seniors. How senior adult ministry was done with the previous generation will not be as favorable with the Boomer generation. There is just as large a generation gap between the Boomers and the Greatest Generation as there is between Boomers and their children. Boomers don’t get on buses and visit places with their friends. If you’re wondering why your “senior” ministry keeps getting smaller and older, and no “fresh faces” are joining, it’s because Boomers don’t want to be lumped in with their parents.

Ministries to families grow
The largest generation is no longer the Boomers. The Millennials now lay claim to that title. According to LifeWay Research, the number one priority among the Millennial generation is family. Millennials desire to stay connected with not only their immediate family, but their extended family as well. Ministries to families have always been important but will increase as this youngest generation begins their own.

Staff positions evolve
For churches to remain healthy, staff structures will change between now and the next 10 years. As children’s ministries become more diverse, children’s ministers with experience in and a passion for diversity will become more important. As multi-site churches become more prevalent with more sites, administrators will need to become more skilled at managing a network of ministries. As churches refocus their programs and activities around a tight discipleship process, the old paradigm of hierarchical structures will fade as a plurality of local church leadership emerges.

The importance of the church building is renewed
The church is not a building, but a building is where the church meets. And buildings are the most expensive part of discipleship. In North America people go to buildings to do things — they go to the game in an arena, to the doctor at her office, to school in the classroom, and to the movie at the theater. Part of our culture is the expectation that things happen in buildings. This cultural expectation is true of the church — people go to church to be discipled.

Not all churches have buildings, nor am I advocating that they should. But church facilities are one of the most expensive and most critical tools church leaders use in shepherding God’s people. In short, buildings are important pieces in God’s mission of building his kingdom. Many building and design firms are becoming more intentional about creating space with the purpose of making disciples. In the next ten years, this focus will continue to grow. And churches will begin to view their buildings as part of their discipleship process.

Charismatic leadership becomes less prevalent
Charismatic leadership is based on the personality and charisma of a senior leader. Transformational leadership is based on the collective vision of an entire group. Both have their place, even in the church. A popular teacher should not lessen his or her charisma to detract followers. When the entire ministry structure is in place to elevate the leader, however, is when major problems arise.Charismatic teachers and leaders will always exist, but transformational leadership will become more popular in the coming decade.

Transformational leaders inspire people to reach for a common goal. They develop, train, and mentor future talent. They empower people to accomplish tasks. Creativity, transparency and authenticity are valued. Leaders and followers alike know what the goal is and how to achieve it. These leaders show everyone the big picture and why it’s important. The next 10 years will bring a fresh focus on local pastors leading local churches to become focused on a local mission.

Growth in video-venues slows down
The trend towards more transformational leadership will quell the popularity of video-venues in which a single teaching pastor is projected to multiple sites. The Internet and podcast boom brought with it a cultural wave of electronic teaching. While this trend has been positive — more sound teaching is readily available (for free) than ever before. Eventually, however, the wired generation will desire a more local, personal touch than the man-on-the-screen. By 2020, more campuses at multi-site churches will feature a campus pastor who teaches, and more people will seek out this type of local connection.

My Top 5 Posts from 2011

We’ve covered a number of topics in 2011.
These were the 5 most trafficked posts for my blog in 2011:

 

• Why the Missional movement will fail
• Missional Communities series (landing page for the 23 post-series)
• Why I’m not using the word attractional anymore
• Obituary for the American church
• Why does church innovation=technology? (Part 1)

 

 

THE video you should be using for your Christmas Eve service

This video of the re-telling of the Christmas story is going to blow you away.

A church in New Zealand put it together. If Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze were going to direct the Christmas story, this is what it would come out like. If you’re still looking for some engaging, fresh material for your Christmas Eve service, this is a real winner.

I’m going to Denver!

We’ve had quite a bit of people asking 3DM to come out to Denver in the past few years and we’re finally going to be coming out for an official Discipleship and Mission workshop. It’ll be January 17-19 and Denver Community Church is graciously hosting the event. If you’d like to register, you can do so here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2558109374

If you’re in the Denver area or somewhere within driving distance, we’d love to see you there!

Here’s a little bit about the workshop:

More and more, people are realizing we are in the midst of a discipleship crisis in the United States which is largely responsible for the state of the American church. At the same time, there is a wave of excitement about the current missional movement that has been bubbling up in the last 10-15 years that many people are hoping will stop the bleeding. The fundamental issue, however, is that unless we are able to disciple people well like Jesus did, any missional movement is unsustainable.

Our general experience is that people are quite intrigued to hear how we’ve used things like Huddles (a discipleship vehicle) and Missional Communities (a missional vehicle) to see discipleship and mission come alive in their church communities, looking more and more like the churches we see in the New Testament. This 2.5 day workshop is a time to look at some of the things we’ve learned in the past 30 years, dealing with post-Christian contexts where as little as 1% of people attend church. It’ll have teaching, discussion, breakout time with your team, a chance to actually experience Huddles and Missional Communities, worship and down time. We are intentionally capping the attendance for the workshop at 150 so you have a large amount of access to 3DM’s team and whatever expertise/experience we bring to the table.

If you’re interested in seeing some different approaches to discipleship and mission, this workshop would be great place to enter into that discussion for you and your team.

Details

• January 17-19
• Starting @ 2pm on Tuesday and ending @ 3pm on Thursday
• Dinners are included in the cost of the event, each paricipant covers their lunch

Nights
We will be having dinner together on both Tuesday and Wednesday night and we’d like you think of it as part of the workshop. It’s during these nights that you’ll get to see a Missional Community modeled, multiple chances to ask questions about what you’re experiencing, lots of face-time with Mike and the 3DM team, etc. The nights are one of the most important parts of the experience.

Cost
$99 -The cost of the event will cover the expense of the dinners for the two nights of the workshop and attendees pick up the cost of their lunches.

Hotels
If you need to get a hotel, get one in the city centre. The Hyatt Regency often has good rates on Priceline.com. Here is the number: (303) 436-1234.

6 Principles for building an Extended Family

In my last two posts I’ve tried to make the case why I think extended family (oikos in Greek) is crucial to understanding how God created the church to exist and function and began to explore what might need to start happening in our staff teams and laity if that’s to happen. We’ll do more posts like that in the near future.

Today, I want to pause in that discussion and give some practical handles on how to begin doing this in your context. I promise, this will be short and sweet.

It should also be noted that I didn’t come up with these 6 principles, my good friend Kheld Dahlmann is entirely responsible for these. So here are some principles for creating an oikos:

1. Shared vision (What do we exist for? In other words, in what way is this community going to bring heaven to earth?)
2. Shared resources
3. Extended family (= more than a nuclear family, we’d say a minimum of 15-20 people, max of 50)
4. Mom/Dad (leaders in “fathering” mode)
5. Prayer
6. Common meal

We show this video a fair amount at the Learning Communities that we do, but this is a window into the hunger that our culture has for these kinds of family expressions. It’s a short advert done by Walmart and Coke that one of the current team members in Pawleys led out two years ago with the advertising agency she was with.

The “Secret Sauce” our churches are missing

In my last post I started off by saying 100 years from now, I think there will be books written that future readers will find quite funny about how much our current expression of Western church has embraced a corporate model.

Quite ironically, this phenomenon has happened before.

During the Victorian era, Anthony Trollop was one of the best known novelists and one of his books, Barchester Towers, gained
great acclaim because of his often hilarious portrayal of 19^th Century Church of England. He was able to reveal how foolish the clergy were in their attempt to be accepted as members of the English aristocracy/upper classes.

I remember reading it years ago and still seeing it continue to play out in the church around me in England. There is a certain kind of hilarity (sad, though it may be) to how we’ve embraced this corporate church thing.

You see, one of the things I felt like God impressed on me on my sabbatical was how so many pastors don’t understand how the church is supposed to function like a family (particularly in these mid-sized, extended family size groups). I wonder if so many pastors, either because they grew up in it or were trained for it, are used to running programs and 501c3 organizations that perhaps many haven’t developed the all important skill of shaping a family on mission. This quote really gets to this reality:

Many men can build a fortune but few men can build a family.
J.S. Bryan

That word oikos, which refers to “household” or “family,” is the description for the church in the New Testament. And if we were to dig into the annals of church history, we’d find that almost every time we see a missional movement of God, we also see a missional vehicle being used about the size of an extended family. Coincidence? I’m not sure sure.

What a fully functioning oikos develops is a texture, a feel, a visceral quality that everyone senses (whether you’re “officially” in it or not), but few can really put a finger on.

For example, take away that dynamic oikos/family texture:

• Morning prayer feels like staff devotion
• Huddle feels like a stale small group
• Missional Communities become forced mission projects

As I’ve observed the “art” of creating extended families over the past 35 years, I’ve noticed that it always takes a combination of two things: PLAY + PURPOSE.

Families play together and have fun, both through planned events and through things that happen organically, things you can never plan. But they also have a very clear purpose for why they exist and what God has called them to.

 

With 3DM (and the other teams I’ve been with), this is the type of culture I’m trying to create. It’s about the little things, yeah? The monkey we squeeze around the office when we have an important breakthrough. Seeing movies together. Parties together. Going to our kids plays or soccer games together. Karaoke together. Each of these is just as important as the sermon you give on Sunday, the missional training you give your leaders or the staff/business meeting on Tuesday mornings.

You plan for Play and Purpose, but you also cultivate a culture where it’s happening organically as well. There are some events that serve as a trellis for the growing plant that is your culture, but if that’s it, you won’t get what you’re hoping for.

Here’s some questions you might ask about the team you’re serving with:

• Would I want to go on vacation with them?
• Would I voluntarily choose to hang out with them/their family because I want to and not because it’s forced?
• Am I doing things that let them into the life of myself and my family?

Here’s the issue: Creating this kind of extended family isn’t something you should do because you might find yourself on staff at a church. It’s not your job. You want this for the people you’re serving who have “regular” 9-5 jobs, not just for your staff. You do this because you’re human. Because you need it. Because God created you this way.

Is this the reality we are intentionally trying to create in our churches?

Why corporate church won’t work

The past few weeks I’ve been working with the 3DM Content Team on material for our new book on how to multiply missional leaders (coming out in April, 2012). I wanted to share a little preview of some of the things we’ve been discussing.

You see, I am absolutely convinced that 100 years from now, many books will be written on the phenomenon that is the late 20^th Century/early 21^st Century American church. And I am fairly certain that it will be with large degree of amazement/laughter that people, in reading about it, will say to each other: “You must be joking! Seriously???! People actually thought it was a good idea to structure the Church as if it were a business? Honestly?!”

Perhaps we don’t have the perspective necessary to see how funny or strange this really is, but I promise you, if you run your church like a business, it’ll never be a family and families are what have changed the world. Bill Hybels was right about the local church (as the Body of Jesus) being the hope of the world…just not as we are currently seeing it.

Efficiency has replaced effectiveness. Many churches are organizationally efficient, but we aren’t affecting the lives of people the way in which Jesus imagined a family would do.

We’ve created a corporate America-like church, somehow buying into a false dichotomy between a Leadership Culture which produces leaders and a Discipleship Culture that produces disciples. Here’s what I mean: In American businesses, it’s about moving people from A to B, but has nothing to do with making people. We have one guy with the vision and a culture of volunteerism to help that one guy get his vision accomplished. It’s the genius with a 1000 helpers. So while churches may claim to have “leadership development programs,” what they really have are “volunteer pipelines” that are run by managers, not leaders.

In doing so, we run the campus, but don’t expand the Kingdom. We’re keeping the machine of the church running (which, much to some people’s chagrine, I think is needed if done in a lightweight/low maintenance kind of way), but doing practically nothing to expand the Kingdom.

This is what we’ve created:

Clearly there isn’t quite the black and white dichotomy as this matrix illustrates, but I still think it serves the point. Often we have churches that are great at making disciples, but not terribly effective at mobilizing these people into God’s mission in the world (yes, I’m overgeneralizing). Or, on the other side, we have churches that are great at moving people to do things, but are pretty poor at making disciples, creating a culture of volunteerism, implemented and run by managers of the leader.

What we need is a way of making and moving people so that as we make disciples, we release them into their destiny of pushing into new Kingdom-frontier.

Corporate church doesn’t do this. Strictly organic church doesn’t do this. I would argue that in the whole of church history, there is one thing that does this, but is largely lost to us in Western culture.

EXTENDED FAMILY.

The Oikos.

A group of people, blood-and-non-blood, about the size of an extended family, on mission together, often times networked with other extended families.

Why the extended family?

• Because it’s small enough to care, but large enough to dare.
• Everyone gets to play.
• Sociologically, people locate their identity within the extended family size (known as the Social Space). We’re hardwired for it.
• To function well, it’s a beautiful combination of both the organic and the organized
• It’s the perfect training ground for future leaders

I believe, with everything in me, that until we embrace this reality, we will continue to struggle to be the fully functioning Body of Jesus.

Why might this be so difficult for overachieving Americans?

Because as J.S. Bryan has said, Many men can build a fortune, but few men can build a family.

My next 4 posts will be about building this kind of family at the center of everything that you’re doing.