One Time Guests

As I scroll across the blogosphere here is an article I cam across that we could all learn from. Especially as we have seen visitors over the last many months. Let me know what you think of this article by leaving a comment below:

Certain questions were asked to those who made “first time visits to church”. Some of the answers give you a clue as to how they want to be treated. . .

• 11 percent said they would be willing to identify themselves as a visitor when visiting a church for the first time
• 63 percent said they would prefer to wait until at least the second visit to let anyone know they are visiting
• 26 percent of formerly churched adults said they desire to slip in and casually introduce themselves after the service.

The fact is that for most churches, 90% of first timers that don’t return

“So aren’t we calling this group by the wrong name? Aren’t these First-Time ONE-TIME Guests, not first-time guests?”

With all of the assimilation strategy attempts (ie. free gifts/visits/thank you notes) to try to get those guests to come back for a second visit, what really in the end prompts a person to return?

If you look at 15 reasons why people won’t return a second time to your church, none of these are solved by giving stuff away or claiming rewards for showing up:

1. No welcome from the parking lot to the pews.
2. Finding the right door to sanctuary appeared difficult.
3. People in the pews held on to their “good seats.”
4. Too many “churchy insider words” like doxology and introit throughout the worship experience.
5. No safe, clean nursery for the babies and toddlers.
6. No sincere greeting extended by pastors or members.
7. No warmth or hospitality extended.
8. Missing joy and a spiritual atmosphere.
9. No sense of family in the church community.
10. Very limited reaching out to outsiders or strangers.
11. Very few ministries or activities for youth or children.
12. Public recognition of guests that left them feeling uncomfortable.
13. Appears to be no vision or purpose for the congregation.
14. On Sunday morning, members and ushers seem focused on “member only” conversations.
15. No one invited them back.

According to Kenny, the key isn’t the strategy or gimmicks, rather it is the culture that is created on Sunday morning and whether or not the church is “outward” focused. And this responsibility goes well beyond the pastor and staff – but it becomes the responsibility of the entire congregation.

5 Lessons in 5 Months

5 Lessons in as many months: Ministry

The fun of Twitter to me is that connection and challenge you receive when other take the time to truly engage one another through social media. This week a good friend and former staff member @joshburcham (on twitter) asked me a question: What are the 5 things you’ve learned about leadership &/or ministry since being at Pin Oaks Christian Fellowship the last 5 months? We should all be asking this question, and on a regular basis as well. So, after some time, thought, and prayer here are my answers:

1.Prayer is only an option for those who plan to fail.

I fail in prayer far to often. In any given week and at multiple times I am relearning this powerful truth. Prayer is the foundation of any great leader, movement, or ministry. Be disciplined about your prayer efforts and be consciously aware of how God uses a more prayer centered version of you in the coming week.

2.NOTHING is more important than keeping the Bible at the center of all you do.

The bible is our guide. Often I will buy into the hype that clever phrases and systems are all that is necessary to be successful in ministry. All we really need is to make sure that at the heart of our every efforts is the desire to make sure people come face to face with Biblical truth.

3.Never underestimate what God is capable of doing because you can’t imagine it yourself.

The imagination is amazing. Dreams are more than a gift. Imagination and dreams working in tandem are…fantastical…I know that is not a word but work with me here! However, our best dreams and most wildly imaginative goals are never big enough to match the wonders of our creator. His mind wanders in pools we are desperate to drink from and clouds we would die to fly through. Getting lost in the grand scale of our God’s scheme is an admirable pursuit worth our last drips of limited energy. Get lost in Him today…FYI this takes us back to the first to points of being in prayer and rooted in the Bible.

4.Good communication is NOT the same thing as lots of communication.

With the dawn of the social media tempest…or maybe it is more like it’s blazing noon day sun. We are surrounded by ways of communicating to those in and out of our spheres of influence. I will take the lead of @human3rror here and not argue the pros and cons of how and who to follow when engaging these tools of modern communication but I will say this: Just because you use any or all of these tools does not make you an effective communicator. Mass amounts of information does not take the place of careful, thorough, and intentional communication. In fact, many people are far more effective with 15 emails in a day than I have ever been with 2,285 twitter updates. Just think about how you can be more succinct and thorough in what you say and execute. Everyone around you will be grateful.

5.It is never as easy OR as hard as you thought it would be.

A quote I heard once on Man Vs. Wild can be paraphrased like this, “in survival it is not always about heading in the right direction. Sometimes just the act of doing anything can feel like progress and progress can propel you to rescue.” I hear the host say these things and my immediate thought is…I can do that. Really? I am barely running 4 miles without calling for an ambulance. Truth is survival is a lot harder than it seems. As I watch these shows I have learned a whole new respect for survivors of all shapes and sizes: People who are debt free, cancer patients, church planters, and many many more. However, a friend recently reminded of how we talk ourselves out of things before we ever begin with a comment about her journey to learning how to scuba dive: “Scuba was that way. I was so wrapped up in the thought of not breathing that it affected my breathing. Then I just breathed.” Sometimes it isn’t that hard at all. So the crazy paradoxical truth here is that you should have enough respect for the task you are about to undertake and avoid underestimating its challenge, all the while remembering that you are capable of accomplishing things you could never imagine in a thousand lifetimes if you rely on God for your direction.

Go do something. Do it now and have a blast.

Catapult Canyon

In response to an exercise in creativity (I needed it, felt really stiffled). I am posting a picture of a them park attraction. Hope you like Catapult Canyon. The name says it all!

Church Snapshot

I got the following information from David Norman’s blog earlier today:

Imagine for a moment, if all 6.7 billion people on the face of the planet were represented by one single “global village” of 100 people. What does our world really look like?

• Out of 100 people:
• 60 would be Asian
• 14 would be African
• 12 would be European
• 8 would be Latin American
• 5 would be American or Canadian
• 1 would be from the South Pacific
• 51 would be male; 49 would be female
• 82 would be non-white; 18 white
• 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

Now, contrast those statistics with your church on Sunday morning. Are we changing the world with the Gospel, or are we just sitting in our little circles pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist?

My first thought is that much of this is related to the demographics of your community and while missions opens your church up to this possibility you are mainly serving the community that surrounds you (a premise I will talk about in another post: How the Neighborhood Church Makes a Comeback). Then as I considered further…every community has diversity. We may not have the diversity mentioned in the article above (in the US probably not even close), but I believe the idea of the article to be one of principle rather than statistics. How open are you to people that don’t look like you or even act like you for that matter.

As followers of Christ we should be used to the idea of being around people who aren’t like us. We are strangely and fascinatingly wierd as a people. Christ makes us that way. Are you rubbing elbows with people who need to see that? Do you intentionally engage them for the sake of Christ in their life? Maybe, if nothing else, you will be more open to the idea after this short little read!

Shrink or Shrug?

As I studied Nehemiah I came to 2 conclusions. Leaders don’t shrink or shrug! Nehemiah was so bold in his approach to everything he encountered.  Look at his every action and you will find a leader who avoided shrinking at enormous pressures or shrugging during difficult choices. He did all this with a foundation of certainty because he knew he was “with God.”

So, the first job as a leader should be to make sure we are ALWAYS with God. Know Him better than your favorite teams stats, know Him better than your girlfriends schedule, know Him better than your bank accounts, know Him above all else and THEN act like you know Him better than anything else in your life.

Lead those in whom you have been given or earned influence. When the time comes to act be decisive and avoid cowering. If you tend to cower in critical moments I have good and bad news. Good news, you may not be a leader. Bad news, you may not be a leader. In watching Nehemiah deal with the King and those who would ruin the efforts at rebuilding the wall he was not a “shrinker.”What if he had been a “shrinker?”

He was also not one to shrug. The hardest lesson I am learning these days has to relate to the “shrug.” When the King asked him what he needed he didn’t say, “I dunno.” He jumped and made huge requests that would launch the work of God into a new stratosphere with the King’s own resources. When given the chance don’t shy away or shrug and simnply defer your chance to lead to someone or somebody else’s agenda. I love how Nehemiah took charge for God’s goals. He is an encouragement and challenge to me and I hope this is to you as well.

What Do You Think?

I would enjoy hearing your thoughts about what she said. All I can say is WOW!

Tension

“Most leaders spend their time avoiding tension. Good leaders endure it. Great leaders engage it. How do you handle tension in a team/life?”

I first posted this thought on Twitter and then thought I better explain myself. Sometimes a quote is totally self explanatory, sometimes it leaves you totally baffled, and then there are the quotes that demand you spell out some fundamentals or expose a truth for growing. So here is what I think:

Many years ago at Grand Canyon University I was able to “corner” Erwin McManus after a conference session. As always he did a fine job. However, I had a problem. My problem wasn’t so much with anything he said but with my current set of circumstances. I was about to start my first lead/head/senior (whatever you feel comfortable with) role and was excited but petrified. I approached him…thank him for his time…told him I only had one question…

“If you could go back and tell your younger self any one thing right before you started your first pastorate what would you say?”

He didn’t hesitate…not one second. He looked me straight in the eye (even with a hundred people trying to do the very same thing I was doing) and said… “I would tell myself to run head first into every challenge. You can’t afford to run away. Every challenge ignored comes back bigger than when you ran away from it.” (that is now a bit of paraphrase but the very heart of his comment)

Truth:

Every leader will face tension. Tension is that delicate balance we must all walk in order to arrive at great decisions, the most excellent and creative expressions, or any vision worth pursuing. The problem I see with current leadership trends today (especially in the church) is that we only give this thought “lip service.” The result is an idealogy, vision, passion, or creative voice that represents one person, and usually not the ONE that matters most. It is crafted out of fear and an over inflated sense of self that does not tolerate a different thought or opinion. The result is the glaring chink in the armor of a leader who has been called to stand as one commissioned strong, brave, and respected. The sad result is that people will only follow this leadership for so long, and the younger generations will flee from it with speed unlike you have ever seen.

Question:

How does one embrace and engage tension for the sake of vision? First let me say that I am a work in progress in this arena…BUT I am fighting this fight. I am hoping to engage some friends with this post who are doing the same and the goal will be to have them “Guest Post” in this blog. I will offer my thoughts and the thoughts of those who come alongside in an effort to “practice what I preach.” This is as much an exercise for me as it is anything, so be patient. Pray for me and those who will post as I am sure it will result in some great thought and personal challenge!

If you read this and would like to “guest post” send me an email (look on contact page). OR feel free to just leave a comment below if you don’t want to go to all that trouble of working out what “guest post” means.

How Much?

I recently posted a video of Penn, of Penn and Teller fame, that shows him retelling a story of a guys efforts to share Christ with him. It was honest and because of that it was powerful. Some things I think we can learn from this video.

1. It is not about results.
   • Penn was obviously moved by this encounter of a man sharing a Bible with him. BUT what moved him was the courage, the sincerity, and level headed nature of the person who was “proselytizing.” It may take hundred or thousands of like encounters before this man would ever give his life to follow Christ. Then again, he may never…as he says, “I don’t believe in God.”
2. Be a nice person.
   • One of the more profound statements Penn makes (one of them) is that the guy felt genuine and not forced or wacky. He was sane and well intentioned. Several things I could mention here but the most critical is “be yourself” and don’t worry about following  as set of rules or steps. Just explain what you did and why you did the things that changed your life for Christ. That is the power of testimony.
     • As a side note the more you study the less forced you will appear. Talk with everyone about your story. Say it over and over again and with time the more you say it the less you will be inclined to feel rehearsed and scripted.
3. Consider your motives.
   • we all have motives. The fact that sharing our faith with those who don’t know or even like Christ has eternal consequences should be a motivating factor. Penn makes a statement in his video that is enough to leave you feeling “run over” like a stray dog on the freeway. Here is what he said,

How much do you have to hate someone not to proseletyze them?

When the unbelieveing world understands our motivations more than we do…there are problems. The gospel of John reminds us that Jesus was God’s path to redemption and that Jesus is the epitome of love expressed. Romans would suggest in many places that our own lives were cared for even while we were still sinners. A sinning world is in great need of hearing the truth that Christ died to forgive them of their sins. The simplicity of Penn’s statement leads me to understand that the unbeleiving world believes our motivations are jacked up when we don’t share out of a genuine care and concern. In fact, they interpret it as hatred. That was not Jesus mission. He came to serve people and the greatest act of service is sharing THE way, THE truth, and THE life with them…the cponsequences for not doing that:

1. They may never hear about Jesus.
2. We miss our greatest calling.
3. They feel as though we hate them for not doing it.

This is having major implications in my life right now. How will this affect you? Will it affect you? Do you disagree?

A Well Penn’d Video

Got this video from @carldempsey and had to find on youtube to post here:

I believe he may one day change his stance all because good, well meaning, “sane,” Christian people share their faith out of a genuine concern for those in need of a Savior. This is why it pays to be bold. Sure he didn’t change…but that guy made a HUGE impact on the life of an atheist that may one day lead to a change! Maybe not…but either way that Christian lived a crazy, bold, and amazing witness. What will you do with the time you have?

Baptism Update

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