How to know you are.
In my years as a Discipleship Pastor I went through a bit of a transformation as I struggled with how to best measure success. At first it was setting the audacious goal of having every member in a small group. When I couldn’t even get every elder in a small group it became abundantly clear that my goal was either unrealistic or just plain wrong. As I evaluated it also became abundantly clear that we really were not doing a good job as a church at tracking how we were doing. The two default metrics for every church to measure is attendance and money, and that is basically what we were doing.
After transitioning into my new role as Serve Pastor, aka Missions Pastor, I ran across Brennan Manning’s book shipped from Neue, aka Relevant, and it all became quite simple…
“How do your people love?”
How well…
How often…
Who…
Dave Gibbons, at the Story Conference, raised questions that really point back to,
“How does your leadership love?”
2 Peter 1:1-13 is a passage worth hanging on the wall of every Church Leader, Discipleship Pastor, and Church Guru. The end result in making Disciples is Christlikeness, and Christlikeness’s primary character trait is Love.
Verse 3 implies that our knowledge of Jesus should grow. Verse 5 implies that the promises of Jesus need to be applied for growth to take place. Verses 5-8 indicate that the end product of growing will be love for EVERYONE. In fact, growing in knowledge is synonymous with growing in love.
The Church is in trouble when partaking in Bible Study is more important than serving widows, orphans, and the poor. Studying the Bible is beneficial, but it should never be done in lieu of or instead of APPLYING it through acts of service to the unloved.
Here’s the rub…this is not easy, nor comfortable. This kind of love is a violent kind of love that reaches inside the hearts of people exposes their wicked and diseased hearts and offers the balm of the blood of Jesus Christ that will heal them. More on this later…
Chris Seay and Nancy Beach Musings from Story 2009
I didn’t take many notes on these two, because there was so much of their story wrapped up in what they had to say, but these thoughts are what I needed to take away.
Musings from Chris Seay
We are shaped by the stories of our ancestors. A portion of who we are is the way that it is because they were the way that they were.
Our sermons need to be less about five things to do or three points. They need to tell a story, The Story, in such a way that people are driven to the scriptures in order to discover for themselves what it means.
Musings from Nancy Beach
The Gospel is three parts: part tragedy, part comedy, and part fairy tale. The Tragedy is that man is a sinner and wicked. The Comedy is that Jesus saves us anyway. The Fairy Tale is that it’s too good to NOT be true.
Dave Gibbons asks GREAT questions @ Story 2009
Before I dive into the questions and observations that Dave makes let me say that we need to pay very close attention to him if for only that he gave his talk from something he felt the Lord gave him about 8-12 hours before he was to speak at this conference. When someone is willing to scrap a message to people that you desperately desire to impress after being awakened in the middle of their sleep I LISTEN. That’s what happened with Dave, and I was most impressed and not in the worldly sense where I think, “Boy I want to be like Dave Gibbons.” That kind of impression is a very selfish kind of impression. Instead I must say that I was impressionable, as a child is impressionable, and because that is where God had me then Dave, by the leading of the Holy Spirit, branded me…impressed me, and all at once it was painful, beautiful, disturbing, and encouraging.
I pray that my small attempt at making notes does the same for you. First, I would encourage you to read Isaiah 6, and while we usually stop at verse 8 I urge you to press on and focus on what happens after verse 8. Because Isaiah is given a disturbing message to communicate, with verse 13 being Dave’s focus.
“13 And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”
NOTES…
Why can’t we measure success in churches by:
1. Eradicating the foster care need in our community
2. Eradicating poverty in our community
3. Caring for the elderly in our community
Instead of…
1. Church attendance
2. Baptisms
3. $
Dave is not suggesting ignoring what we typically measure in the Church, but it needs to be tempered with “Are we making a difference in our communities?” kinds of questions. If we cannot answer these kinds of questions affirmatively then it makes the typical measurements of success irrelevant.
What if 80% of our budget was spent on outreach instead of our venue?
What is missing in spiritual formation in churches?
1. There is no one size fits all. We need to customize a path based upon collaborative resources
2. We miss the intersection between a person’s story and the Holy Spirit by trying to immediately funnel them through a series of steps with the false promise that at the end of the funnel they will move from broken to whole and from newborn to fully devoted follower of Christ.
Churches need to start asking, “What do we NEED to feel uncomfortable about?”
Churches need to develop a theology of suffering because walking people through suffering can birth a HOLY seed.