October 2005 Archives

59% of pastors believe the average pastor in their denomination does not stay at any one church long enough.

One out of every ten ministers has been fired or asked to leave a church at some point in his career.

Why Pastors change churches:

27% - Desire to serve in a different region or type of community
20% - Promotion to a higher position
16% - Wanting to move to a larger church
15% - Being transferred by the denomination
15% - Leaving to plant a new church
12% - Feeling God’s call to a different church
11% - Getting better pay and/or benefits

*From Facts and Trends September/October 2005 issue.

Scott continues his series:

as a pastor i believed that serving on a committe and being a part of a small group was the least a christian should do. i have come to understand that for many of us, it is the most we can do. we are insanely busy. church is insanely inconvenient. i was paid to have meetings, hold small groups and work evenings. most people have to come home from working 50 or 60 hours a week, get groceries, clean the house, do laundry, make supper, do the dishes and drop in bed. i never realized before how difficult it is to dedicate 2 or 3 nights a week and some weekends as a volunteer at a church. right now i work a part time job, am starting the club, am renoing the house and trying to have a social life. the thought of spending a couple of evenings a week in church activities stresses me out.

I remember John Hull saying he didn't realize how much effort it took just to show up to church until he left pastoring. For a lot of us, a measure of spirituality is how busy we are at church. If you can't keep them godly, keep them busy. I'm glad to see this starting to change.

The first track of disillusionment with modern approaches to church disillusioned me. There's a second track that gives me hope.

• It's the track of rediscovering the Gospel as more than just a decision. It's about sin, but it's about so much more.
• It's about rediscovering the mandate in the Bible to bless the world. It goes all the way back to Abraham (blessed to be a blessing) and continues right up to today.
• It's about discovering that many people at Richview were way ahead of me in sensing that the programmatic church model doesn't work, and they were already longing for something more.
• It's about thinking about the church as a community of apprentices of Jesus Christ, trying to learn together what it means to follow him.

This list tells you a lot about me - when was the church anything but concerned with these things? - but the thought of being part of a community of people trying to figure out how to follow Jesus, bless the world, and live the Gospel - that excites me. It's like the life that comes on the other side of dying.

robbymac: Detoxing From Church:

Perhaps the biggest task for established churches and newer, de-structured communities (house or coffeehouse), and individuals (like me) will be to remember that this is ultimately God's thing. It's His Bride we're talking about here. God is fully aware of the state the Bride is in. He's more proactive, loving, and desirous of Her being healthy and attractive than any of us are capable of being. The trap we need to avoid is to let this whole (very necessary) process of detoxing from inadequate models of church leadership and church structure to polarize and further divide the very Bride that we're so longing to see come to maturity and health.

A great reminder. The whole article is worth reading.

Over the past few years, I've been on two tracks. One of them has been discouraging, and is reflected in the more pessimistic posts on this blog. The other track has been filling me with hope.

The first track is the one I described last week:

So this is where it began. Instead of seeing church as the hope, I began to wonder if the church, in some sense, had to die.

In a sense, I began quitting on church - not the Church, mind you, but on my programmatic approach to church. I am not blaming others here. I was repenting of my own understanding of what the church was and how it should be led.

Track one was moving away from something. Moving away from something is never enough.

Tomorrow: track two

From WadeHodges.com:

The greatest crisis facing most churches in America is not a financial/attendance crisis. It's that our ministry in the world, our way of being in the world, looks so unlike the ministry of Jesus in the gospels.

A few years ago when IDEO was working with the Mayo Clinic on innovation, we had a small office in their Department of Medicine. I happened to visit the space one day and was struck by a Henry Ford quote the team had posted on the wall. "If I had asked my customers what they wanted," said the inventive Mr. Ford, "they'd have said a faster horse." (Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation)

We think in categories that already exist. That's why a lot of us have been searching for the church equivalent of faster horses: better programs, more polished preachers. One could argue that we are doing "church" better than ever before, with diminishing results.

The alternative is to look in a completely different category. Cars overtook horses, and DVDs overtook VHS tapes. Perhaps the Kingdom will overtake the church.

I'm finding it freeing to stop asking, "How can I do church better?" and ask more of this question "How can we participate in what God is doing in His Kingdom better?" It's not about building a better church in the conventional sense. It's about participating in what God is doing.

• that the end of Christendom presents the church with new and exciting opportunities; that the end of Christendom means that some things have to die. These deaths are painful but necessary.
• that in some contexts, Christendom is still very much alive, and the old ways will still seem to work for quite a while (e.g. Bible belt, rural contexts).
• that some people will never adapt to the end of Christendom, and that is okay. Sometimes a generation has to die while a new generation is being born.
• that God can and does still work in old contexts.
• that those who are in old contexts need to be careful of allowing traditions to nullify the Word of God (Mark 7:13).
• that God is calling even those of us in old contexts to rethink our investments in programs and buildings to determine if these are strategic.
• that niceness and complacency are as dangerous as arrogance.
• that we need to continually ask what Jesus is saying to the church.
• that we can celebrate new ways of being the church that are faithful to God and Scripture.
• that those doing new things need to be careful of dismissing those who are serving the old way.
• that God is not scared by the future.
• that the Kingdom is breaking out all over in the world.
• that we sometimes try to contain the Kingdom in the church.
• that God and His Kingdom can't be contained.
• that this is an exciting time to be serving God.

From scott... diagonally parked in a parallel universe:

i was wrong but not completely guilty. i was put on a pedestal and though i knew better i let it happen. i wore my humility like a crown and by pointing out how i was one of you, i showed how i was not.

More to come

Dallas Willard, quoted in Leadership Journal:

Pastors need to redefine success. The popular model of success involves the ABC's - attendance, buildings, and cash. Instead of counting Christians, we need to weigh them. We weigh them by focusing on the most important kind of growth - love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, kindness, and so on - fruit in keeping with the gospel and the kingdom.

via

And so it came to pass that some quit the ice cream store. Still, many ice cream stores stayed in business. In the ice cream belt, people built newer and bigger stores with new flavors of ice cream nobody had imagined before. A whole industry published books on how to run a successful ice cream store. Most books were gimmicks, but by the time people realized this, they were reading the next book that promised exactly the same thing.

But some didn't quit the ice cream store. In many parts, sales went down, and people didn't want to eat ice cream any more. Some longed for how it used to be. Others were threatened, because all they knew how to do was to scoop ice cream. Some store employees were secretly excited and a little bit scared, because they realized there were better things to do than serve ice cream. Although it could cost them their jobs, they believed that something better was coming.

One day a group of ice cream store managers got together. They talked for a while, and realized that what was happening at their store wasn't unique. They also realized that not everybody is cut out to quit the business and start something new.

As they got talking, they began to list their thoughts about what to do. They all agreed that there are two main problems with ice cream stores: they don't serve healthy food, and they are very expensive to run. Their two main costs are paid staff and buildings, and it was hard to think of how to run a store without these.

But they also began to list some good things about their ice cream stores:

• Some of their loyal customers who used to like ice cream still liked to get together at the store, but they were ready to try something new.
• Some stores had started to sell healthier items on the menu, and could see ahead to the day that they stopped serving ice cream altogether and only served healthy things.
• Ice cream stores have lots of assets that can be used for better things than ice cream.
• Some managers thought they could use their ice cream store as a base to launch something different and healthier. They could use their assets to support former employees who had quit, or even those who had never stepped foot in an ice cream store.

Ice cream stores would never be what they used to, and the managers were sometimes a little bit jealous of those who had already quit. They could never decided if they were taking the easy or the hard route by deciding to stay.

They resolved to do the best they could in their context, serving as little ice cream as possible (smaller scoops!), while helping others realize that other foods are healthier. They resolved to be honest that the day of the ice cream store is over, and rather than crying about it, they wanted to help people see that it was a good thing.

There were still a lot of people who loved ice cream. Maybe it was better, they reasoned, to stay and help this group adapt, rather than allow somebody new to come in who was reading the latest books on how to build a better store, and would introduce new flavors and make the customers even fatter from eating even more ice cream.

They also started to look for ways to use the store for better things. They couldn't justify spending all that money on a store if all it was going to do was serve ice cream.

Most of all, they prayed that they would never stay at the ice cream store simply because it was a job. What kind of job is serving ice cream anyway?

Did the managers who stayed do the right thing? I don't know. I do know that some were right to quit, and they could never picture going back and serving ice cream again.

But for those who stayed, only God knows if they did the right thing, and only time will tell.

Jordon links to notes I took from Reggie McNeal earlier this year. I needed to re-read this:

The future is not something God is working toward; it is where he is working from. The future is a virus that is looking for any way to break in. God starts from the end back. He works back from the future. We never see God coming; we see him going.

The future is invading the present. God is not caught off guard. We need to talk about futures that have already happened. Because God is not off guard, he has already made provision.

John 4: the disciples were in the bubble. Insular. Verses 34-35: four months more and then we'll get serious about mission. Our strategic plans are sometimes nice ways to say no to God.

What do you look at? Problems, tasks. Jesus sees opportunities. Whatever we see determines what we're working on.

Jesus did what he saw his father doing. What are you seeing God doing? Are you responding to that or your job description, people, etc. We've been taught in the modern era that we see God in a book. He is there, but our vision needs to be mightily expanded.

We are insular. We've built a parallel universe. Instead of intersecting all the avenues of culture (arts, government, finance), we've built a separate domain. We have our own music awards, radio stations, bookstores, cruise ships. We eat with people like us, vacation with people like us. We go in for port calls but we scramble back.

We need the capacity to see beyond ourselves (John 4:34-35). The biggest problem the disciples had was they grew up in church. Most of us need to get over our church experience. In a lot of Christian crowds, there are relatively few new disciples. This should scare us.

If God had given the Pharisee's line, John 3:16 would say, "For God so loved the church..." The Pharisees talked about the kingdom of God too, but they thought it was all about getting enough people to behave. People who think we will bring in the kingdom by fixing the culture - only Pharisees think like this.

Pharisees - "You want God, come and get it." Religious people are always a problem for God. Dress like us, become like us. Pharisees had their own subculture. We are the Pharisees. Everything we love to hate about the Pharisees is what the culture sees in us. They don't associate Jesus with his followers.

There are people who come to every seminar I teach looking for a better way to do church. That is NOT the point.

In Barna's new book Revolution, Barna describes a group of people that are faithfully serving God, often outside of a church structure. "They are not willing to play religious games and aren't interested in being part of a religious community that is not intentionally and aggressively advancing God's Kingdom," he writes. Listen to what happened as Barna told a pastor friend about this group over lunch:

The reaction could not have been more cordial - or confrontational. Our scheduled ninety-minute luncheon turned into a three-and-a-half hour marathon in which I spent the last two hours on the receiving end of a lecture decrying the scriptural justification of the Revolution. Harry's closing volley summed up his position.

"So you see, God has no Plan B. The local church is God's Plan A, His chosen vehicle, and He does not need any other plan. Anything outside of that means is simply indefensible from a biblical standpoint. Never second-guess God, my friend. Follow Him and accept His paths. No church has ever been perfect, but that's no reason to abandon it. Remaking the Church into the form you desire, rather than the form God ordained, is simply not legitimate. Let God be God. Help the local church become more effective, but don't ever, ever take any steps to replace it."

If Barna is right, and I think he is, we are seeing a rise of large group of people who are committed to follow Christ, but are largely abandoning the institutional structures of church. This is obviously threatening to a lot of people, like this pastor. How should we react?

By the way, it's not just church attenders who are doing this. It's pastors too. They are quitting the ice cream store, and many others are wondering if it's time.

I'll reflect more on this in coming days, but for now I'll say this: We need to be careful how we define church. Here is a list of what some people are quitting:

• Church buildings
• Sitting in rows
• Worship as an event led from up front
• Preaching as lectures
• Programmatic expressions of church
• Professional clergy
• Internally focused budgets

Whatever you think of these - and not all of them are bad - these are not the church. In other words, it's possible to give all of these up and still be every bit as faithful a follower of Jesus Christ.

In fact, I'll go further: none of these describe the church that existed in the book of Acts.

So when we talk about quitting the ice cream store, from my parable, I think we need to say two things. First, not everyone has to do so. But second, for those that do, we need to understand that they may be quitting something familiar and even desirable to ourselves - but they are not quitting on God, just on one expression of church.

Imagine working at an ice cream store. One day you wake up and realize the importance of eating right. It's not just a phase; it's something you have to do. You'd face a bit of a crisis. Do you quit? Do you start serving healthier ice cream? Do you stop serving ice cream altogether and transform the ice cream store into something altogether different? Or do you rationalize that ice cream is okay as long as people are getting their nutrition elsewhere?

I've felt like that before. My kairos moment a few years back became a crisis for me. I rediscovered my calling, but I felt a little like the guy at the ice cream store trying to promote health. Most of the goods and services of the church seemed about as likely to promote spiritual growth as ice cream is to promote good health.

I realize the church has been tremendously helpful to a lot of people, and many churches are doing a fine job. But overall the news wasn't encouraging.

• Half of believers say they have not experienced the presence of God or a genuine connection with Him in the past year.
• The promises delivered by most churches - that if you attend regularly, join a small group, sign up for a ministry, attend this or that - seem increasingly empty. "We don't have much evidence to support the assumption that all this church activity has produced more mature followers of Jesus. It has produced many tired, burned-out members who find that their lives mimic the lives and dilemmas of people in the culture who don't pay all the church rent" (Reggie McNeal).
• The church in North America is having a diminishing positive impact on the culture at large.
• The attractional model of church - trying to get unbelievers to come to church - seemed to not only be failing, but to be the wrong model in the first place.
• Most of the energy expended in a church is focused on programs and maintenance rather than spiritual formation and service. A lot of the serving that takes place is self-serving rather than serving those who can't repay us, especially the poor and those who might never attend the church.

I faced some choices:

• Quit the ice cream store? Was it time to move away from the traditional model of church to something completely different?
• Start serving healthier ice cream? Instead of the normal programs and emphases in the church, to try to use them to serve something better, even though people really wanted the stuff that's bad for you? Rich, unhealthy ice cream does taste better, after all.
• Transform the ice cream store into something else? Try to change models of church within a church?
• Rationalize that people will get their nutrition elsewhere? Keep doing church and hope that people grow elsewhere?

I was stuck with this dilemma for a long time.

Starting this site was a bit of a milestone for me. I was at a conference and something snapped. I'm not sure why, but I had a kairos moment. Instead of trying to make church better, maybe churches had to do the opposite - to get out of the way to let God move.

I wasn't sure what this meant, but I'm not alone. I'm pretty sure that God is behind a divine discontent that is sweeping across western Christianity today. Reggie McNeal talks about people quitting the church not because they are giving up on their faith, but to preserve their faith.

D.A. Carson writes:

...which of us can safely deny that a fair proportion of what goes on in many traditional evangelical churches - whether corporate worship, small-group Bible studies, and even prayer times - feels disturbingly inauthentic at times?

...We may go through meeting after meeting, and all of it is reassuringly familiar, but we do not come out saying, in effect, "Surely we have met with the living God!"...There is little intensity in confession, little joy in absolution, little delight in gospel, little urgency in evangelism, little sense of privilege and gratitude in witness, little passion for the truth, little compassion for others, little humility in our evaluations, little love in our dealings with others.

In Barna's new book Revolution, Barna reports on the state of churched Christians and concludes:

The point here is simply to recognize if we place all our hope in the local church, it is a misplaced hope. Many well-intentioned pastors promote this perspective by proclaiming, "The local church is the hope of the world." Like most advertising slogans, this notion is emotionally appealing. The trouble is, the sentiment is not biblical. Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the hope of the world. The local church is one mechanism that can be instrumental in bringing us closer to Him and helping us to be more like Him. But, as the research data clearly show, churches are not doing the job. If the local church is the hope of the world, then the world has no hope. [emphasis mine]

So this is where it began. Instead of seeing church as the hope, I began to wonder if the church, in some sense, had to die.

I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small, and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless. How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power? I increasingly believe that our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need. If the church has a future it is a future with the poor in whatever form. (Henri Nouwen)

via

This blog marked the beginning of a journey for me. Unfortunately, the journey is often exciting at the beginning, but it's easy to lose your way (and excitement) as it progresses with no clear end in sight.

In the next few posts, I hope to outline where I am now in the journey. I'm in a new phase, and one that is a little bit more exciting, and constructive.

So here's where I'll be going over the next few days:

Part one: Why I started dying church
Part two: When I may have gone too far
Part three: When I started to find hope again
Part four: The way ahead

Update: I obviously haven't followed this outline too closely, but I'll cover all of these themes. I promise.

An article from 1982 comparing the church as a field vs. church as a force:

The goals of the church-as-a-field are defined in terms of numbers in attendance, of budget, and of facility. Those things tend to make up our concept of success.

Of course, the goals are flexible. If we are not reaching great numbers, then we change our success semantics from quantity to quality. We're after a few good men. And, we've handled the success problem.

Budget? Obviously, it takes money to run a church. But when this becomes our goal, we have seriously confused means and ends. When we operate the church in order to get money enough to operate the church, we shouldn't be too surprised that people write off the church as something which is opposed to Christ.

Facility is vitally important to the concept of the church-as-a-field because the only way to increase the field is by enlarging the facility. If you are going to do a great work for God and it's all within the building, then you must have an enormous building.

(Via Jordon)

From Dead Youthpastor Walking:

bye kids. tired of church and its abuse of people's lives. tired of God and what he allows his commissioned followers to do in his beloved son's name. tired of bad dreams and newsletter scraps from churches gone by. tired of compliance-based "christians" selling real estate in heaven to which they don't have the deed. tired of finding myself fighting back tears during worship, not because of what Christ did for me, but because of whatever flashback hits me triggered by a hymn, a verse, or the way someone looks at me. tired of being a failure in the eyes of so many. tired of the quiet dark speculating time during the night when i consider whether it was a mistake to leave youth ministry. tired of preaching to the choir and stroking ego's as a means to an end that i'm not that sure of myself. tired of hailing a new class of "emerging" celebrities. tired of pretending things are ok. tired of apologizing in my sleep to hundreds of former youth across the country for being part of the machine that is truly full of sh**.

and tired of the church as it stands. -- when God wants me back he can damned well ask.

i do believe this is my last post. bye. -- DYP

Via John Frye