September 2007 Archives

In an excellent article, Sally Morgenthaler outlines the change in her thinking about worship as evangelism:

By 2002 a few pastors of praise and worship churches began admitting to me that they weren't making much of a dent in the surrounding non-Christian population, even though their services were packed and they were known for the best worship production in town..

For all the money, time, and effort we've spent on cultural relevance—and that includes culturally relevant worship—it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all...

May you, as leader of your congregation, have the courage to leave the "if we build it, they will come" world of the last two decades behind. May you and the Christ-followers you serve become worshippers who can raise the bar of authenticity, as well as your hands. And may you be reminiscent of Isaiah, who, having glimpsed the hem of God's garment and felt the cleansing fire of grace on his lips, cried, "Here am I, send me."

Jordon Cooper has a fascinating post from the book Founders at Work. I don't always like applying business books to the church, but there are a couple of ideas that may be worth thinking about.

Start-up companies are often at their best when they start. "The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak." This has echoes of what Tim Keller and others have said about church planting.

Then this quote:

The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like...I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

I like this. We could use less emphasis on looking successful, and more emphasis on being the church.