You know the church is in trouble when...

I got pointed to this post by one of my regular news feeds. It lists 15 signs that a church is in trouble, among them are the following:

– When excuses are made about the way things are instead of embracing a willingness to roll up the sleeves and fix the problem.

– When the church becomes content with merely receiving people that come rather than actually going out and finding them…in other words, they lose their passion for evangelism!

– The leadership begins to settle for the natural rather than rely on the supernatural.

– Scripture isn’t central in every decision that is made!

– The church is no longer willing to take steps of faith because “there is just too much to lose.”

– When the leaders/staff refuse to go the extra mile in leading and serving because of how “inconvenient” doing so would be.

The ones not quoted are no less important or less worthy of thought. It just seems silly to reprint them all when you can go and read them for yourselves!

Strength and courage

Today's Bible reading was 1 Samuel 30. A key phrase that stood out was: "But David found strength in the Lord his God.

I then opened up my Desiring God devotional and saw that today's reflection was about "pressing on" from Philippians 3:13, and yesterday's reading was Isaiah 40 under the title "New Strength"! Blackaby observes:

At times you may feel so worn out and stressed that you are not sure you can take another step. you may seem to spend all you time running from crisis to crisis and to be constantly giving your time and energy to others. Your Lord wants to renew your strength and enable you to enjoy the abundant life He intends for you. The key is to wait upon Him to do so.

Do you think God is trying to tell me something!!

Now I ought to stress here that I am not running from crisis to crisis and I am not constantly giving my time and energy to others. I do not feel so worn out and stressed that I can't take another step. But I can't ignore the sense of pressure that comes with a new ministry and I'm grateful that God knows my needs and reminds of where to go for strength.

What is it that Psalmist says:

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

Psalm 121

Another new constitution

It was time. Time to settle down and read the document I've been avoiding for a few days. Purposely I left the email in my inbox. I'm usually pretty quick to archive these kind of things and delay reading them until I absolutely have to. Nothing cures insomnia quite like a legal document!

Well I sat down this morning and trawled through the BU's proposed new constitution for churches. The need for a new constitution has to do with the need for churches to register individually with the Charity Commission as I understand it. Generally speaking we don't change our constitutions just for the fun of it!

What struck me as I read through the document before me was the emphasis on prayer and worship as the cornerstones of church meetings and the meetings of the charity trustees (deacons to you and me). The actual phrase suggested is: Worship including prayer and the reading of Scripture shall be a key feature of the Church meeting. Similar wording is suggested for the trustee meetings.

Now we all know the importance of worship and prayer and Bible reading, but do we do it, in the context of a meeting, to get it out of the way before we get down to business? In the last year or so I've tried to pay more attention to the need to pray about all the things over which we deliberate, even to the point of stopping a meeting to pray. The problem is that we get very busy and I forget as easily as the next person to do this.

But how interesting will it be if we adopt the suggested constitution. How will our meetings change and how will the processes by which we conduct our business have to be reshaped in order to work in line with this new constitution?

I think we have more to discuss that we might have first imagined!

Decision-making in the Local Church

As many of you know, I'm a baptist minister. I use the lowercase intentionally at this point. As a baptist we're governed by the church meeting, the gathered people charged with the shared responsibility of discerning the mind of Christ together. Over the years, even centuries, this has created much debate about what it means to lead in such a setting, and we're still wrestling with that one. Perhaps the church's (not just baptist churches, but churches of all flavours) current confusion over leadership is because we are appointing people who are CEO's first and pastorally motivated second. Perhaps that is too convenient a generalisation.

Anyway, I wanted to think about how we make decisions rather than leadership. I'm still reading Reimagining the church. I take longer to read a book these days. Something to do with being busy and something to do with getting older and weakening eyesight! I've just finished the chapter on decision-making and was struck by a really helpful term Viola uses at the end of the discussion. He describes churches as guided democracies.

His argument is that the most biblical and God-honouring way to make decisions in the local church is by consensus. Hard as it is to achieve, it has to be our goal, even if it takes longer than we would like it to take to reach a decision. Now I know how frustrating consensus can be to achieve, and I know how frustrating it is as a leader to have to wait for consensus to surface. It would be far easier simply to delegate all responsibility for making decisions to a few people who could be relied upon always to get it right!

But that dis-empowers the church and robs the members of their full responsibility to share in the process. It's far less convenient to make decisions this way, but it might just be far more effective in the long run in terms of re-motivating the church for involvement in God's mission.

I was intrigued to listen the Bill Hybels talk at last year's GLS about how Willow Creek had been learning new ways of developing vision. He talked about how they took early ideas and thoughts to different groups within the church and asked questions like, "What excites you about this?" and "What scares you about this?"

With all the recent talk over the last ten years or so about how raising the bar when it comes to membership is the way to get people involved and committed, in other words make it more difficult to become a member, I wonder if the answer actually lies in calling people into deeper personal relationships. Relationships that are willing to work through the tough things and search out the mind of Christ through consensus rather than call for a vote and settle the matter by majority.

So perhaps we should have a simply mantra for church meetings and the processes by which we come to any and all decisions: Pray more, vote less!

Remembrance Sunday

Update to isync script

Back in February I delved into the shallow waters of Apple Script in an attempt to automate the process of synching my Nokia 'phone with iCal and Address Book.

Well this week I refined the script a little more having discovered how to quit a programme (tell "application" to quit, not exactly rocket science), and how to delay it so that it didn't generate an error by trying to quit before synchronisation was complete.

I also discovered along the way that you could tell your mac to inform you that the task was complete using one of the voices.

The finished script is as follows:

tell application "iSync"

if last sync is less than ((current date) - 3600) then

synchronize

repeat while (syncing is true)

delay 5

end repeat

end if

end tell

tell application "iSync" to quit

say "synchronisation is now complete. Have a good day" using "Zarvox"

You can add a line that hides isync if you want, but it's not that important.

From impossible to possible

From Experiencing God:

Christ will lead you into many situations that will seem impossible, but don’t try to avoid them. Stay in the middle of them, for that is where you will experience God. The key difference between what appears to be impossible to us and what is actually possible is a word from our Master! Faith accepts His divine command and steps out in a direction that only God can complete. If you only attempt things that you know are possible with the visible resources you possess, those around you will not see God at work. You will be the one who receives the credit for a job well done, but God will have no part in it.

What strikes me in this devotional is that too often we work within the limits of our resources. We let budgets and finances dictate the vision instead of the other way around. I remember an old treasurer we had in the first church of which I was a member. whenever anyone asked if we could afford to do something his reply was always the same, "If you give, we can do it." Now at first thought that sounds rather narrow, but there is something of Blackaby's point in there too. Because if we believe that God is calling us to a particular ministry, then why would we doubt that he would provide the resources, and that he might call on us to be the providers of the resources needed.

Maybe the point of the feeding of the 5,000 (the subject for this devotional) for us today is that we need to put all our available resources into God's hands and let him do the miracle of multiplication.

Now I wonder where that train of thought is heading?

Not so good, but why no comment?

David was far from perfect. The story of Bathsheba tells us that much. But there are other things that this "man after God's own heart" did that leave me puzzled, especially when there's no commentary about how God sees the situation.

I was reading the part of the story where he goes to live in Philistine territory to stay out of Saul's way. What bothers me is that he goes off raiding this settlement and that village and then lies about it. In order to secure the lie he kills everyone in the places he raids so that nobody can report the truth to the king under whose protection he is living.

It just doesn't strike me as a particularly God-honouring thing to be doing for the future king of Israel, and yet God is silent according to the text. I don't have a neat answer for this question, I just have more questions. But perhaps the thing is simply this: godly people don't always do godly things.

Somewhere in the twists and turns of a messy life, God shows up and nudges us in the right direction. Because of his grace we can go on making mistakes, not because they don't matter, but because God's love is greater than our failure. I don't know if God ever spoke to David about what he was doing or what he did during this part of his life. But what I do know is that David didn't slip onto plan B for his life and then plan C all the way down to plan ZZ.

I don't think there is a single blueprint for our lives and that if we miss it we're doomed to a life that's basically outside of God's plan. Somehow God is able to turn our mistakes and mess-ups into something that in the end brings glory to his name. That doesn't mean I live my life as if nothing matters, but neither do I fret about dropping down the list from best to least worst plan.

Church Growth for sale?

I was doing a quick search for some information on the internet and I noticed a link that didn't seem to have much to do with my search but was about church growth, so I followed it. It was set out like one of those long, long pages of advertising. you may know the kind of thing. It reads like a JML ad. "Would you pay $100 for this package? Well we're not asking a 100, we're not even asking 50. And wait, get this free gift worth another $37 absolutely free." And so it goes on with various bits of text in bold, underlined and even highlighted.

The point of this web page was to convince the reader that if they were serious about growing their church then they would naturally want to sign up to the free newsletter and buy the programme.

Now I don''t know how effective the programme is (they claim you can double you attendance in 90 days!), but I was struck by the obvious marketing nature of what was on offer. I'm sure there are some good, even sound Biblical principles in the programme, but nothing got mentioned on the web page. And God seemed rather conspicuous by his absence too.

Do we really want to grow churches that are built around good marketing strategies? What if ours is a time like Isaiah's when the challenge was to stay faithful in the face of diminishing faithfulness? And then again, is the goal to fill our auditoria to overflowing? Bigger buildings do not make a Biblical community. It takes more than that.

I guess what bothered me most apart form the apparent absence of God for the strategy, was the presentation of a quick fix for declining church attendance. It was as if I was being invited to become the envy of my friends by having a new building and a bigger congregation of apparently more committed members than the church down the road. I fear such a strategy simply moves the sheep from one pen to another.

The church is neither mine nor yours. And Jesus did happen to point out that he would build the church, which sort of suggests our role is that of partner not entrepreneur in this kingdom project.

In the end our gifts and skills and drives have to be subservient to God's greater plan and purpose. I will keep reminding myself that it is God's mission in which I'm an invited partner, not the other way around.

Remembrance Sunday is coming

When we were in Cotton End, Remembrance Sunday involved meeting the members of the British Legion outside by the memorial that was in our grounds. We read the names, paid our respects, heard the bugle and stood in silence.

I can't remember how many names are on that memorial, even though I read them every year for seven years. For what would have been a very small village at the name it seemed like a lot.

Now we're in Upminster and I wandered up to the memorial in the town yesterday to have a look. I'd been searching the internet to see what I could find, but there was very little information. I don't know how big Upminster was during either conflict, but the list of names runs to 207. 66 from the first war and 141 from the second.

My view of war will not change, but just because I will always argue against armed solutions does not mean that I do not have the utmost respect for everyone named on this memorial and all the memorials up and down the country.

Threat or opportunity?

Well I asked my question in church this morning about Sunday trading and how we might seize the opportunity rather than fret about the threat. I got some very positive and interesting ideas, and in a couple of conversations after the service I could feel a sense of excitement rising at least in my heart.

Later in the afternoon Anne and I took a walk up into the town centre. It was fairly quite with only a few shops open, but that could easily begin to change if the local department store deems their experiment a success. And at least by asking the question now we are thinking ahead rather than playing catch up. I even saw an empty shop, but that might even be stretching my crazy mind a little too far!

Missional Living

An interesting post about missional living popped up here.

The author argues for authentic relationships with the people in our various networks as the basis for missional living. I thought the description of these networks, quoted from an audio of Tim Keller, were particular interesting.

Keller suggests that the biblical term oikos [household] applies to at least five networks: your kinship network (family and relatives), your neighborhood (those who live near you geographically), your colleagues (co-workers or co-students), your affinity network (people with a shared special interest), and your friends (those from the other 4 networks whom you develop a close relationship with).

Prayer Day (3)

My prayer day is finished and it's been a good day. Different than I anticipated, but then they often turn out that way.

I went for a walk into town and was beginning to think that it was a distraction more than a help. I sat and watched people going by and prayed for them and jotted down a few thoughts. Then, just as I was wondering why I'd come out I noticed something. Shops. Now you might have expected me to notice them before, but I hadn't really paid much attention to them until now.

There's been a recent change on this particular high street. The local department store has opened its doors on a Sunday and it's been quite successful from what I hear. A question came to mind. Do we see this as a threat to our quiet Sundays, an offence to the principle of Sabbath rest? Or do we see it as an opportunity?

Now, if it's an opportunity, then what kind of opportunity is it? I began to pray and think and came up with a few ideas, but I think I'll wait and ask the church if they can see any opportunities. It would be a good exercise for all of us to do.

After that I walked back to the study at church and spent some time praying for the church. My thoughts turned to the day the first temple was dedicated and the glory of God so filled the place that the priests could not go about their daily duties. Oh that God would come down in such measure and fill the church with his Spirit to the extent that normal service has to stop while he sets the agenda.

Well that's how my day came to a close. Lot's of things to write up and  a few things to talk through with the leadership team.

Prayer Day (2)

Well here's how the day has shaped up so far.

As I planned, I spent the first part of the morning in prayer and reflection, reading the ongoing story of David and Saul. One of David's character flaws was his impetuous nature by the look of things. It would get him into trouble on more than one occasion, but this time Abigail comes to his aid. God put people around David who covered his weak spots when he listened to them! I picked up both Blackaby's devotional and one by Bill Hybels (Courageous faith) and reflected on their thoughts for yesterday (I thought it was the 29th for some reason).

After a short break I got out my notebook and began to write down a few things from my journal and a few thoughts about church and prayed about those items. As I walked around the house a little as I prayed I noticed a jigsaw that Anne is working on at the moment.

It's incomplete, and I began to wonder about vision and big picture stuff and how you don't do a jigsaw by picking a piece and then searching for the one that goes with it and then another. Most people I know seem to sort the jigsaw into similar pieces and then build smaller parts of the big picture until they begin to join up. They don't worry about completing one section before they work on another, they just work until they get a bit stuck and then move on. By doing this we build both the smaller pictures by associating bits that fit and rejecting bits that go elsewhere, slowing reducing the number of single pieces until the final picture emerges. No piece is left without a place to go. It's fascinating and I prayed about what it had to do with vision and church.

After another break I went through my pastoral notes and prayed for all the people we've talked about in our pastoral meetings. I have to confess that this took a lot of concentration. It's easy for me to get distracted when I do this and find myself wandering off on a real tangent.

Then I had lunch (it's a prayer day without fasting!) and me new study chair arrived, so I've assembled that and it's rather comfortable.

This afternoon I might go for a walk and sit somewhere in town and watch people pass by and pray about mission and engagement. I wonder if that will be easier with people and things to see rather than just the insides of the house.

Prayer Day (1)

Here's my plan for the day as it is at the moment. Things may change, but without a plan the day will just drift, so a plan is a good thing!

The first thing to do is to make sure I've got my journal and any other notebooks and pens I need. Because I keep a journal on a regular basis it is both a good place to start and a good place to record stuff. But there are some things that might need to be written down elsewhere. I also like to use plain paper to scribble things on. My thoughts don't often follow a linear pattern, and so writing them down in lines doesn't help me connect them up to each other.

The plan for the first part of my day is to spend an extended time in quite reflection and prayer, reading my current Bible passage and maybe a couple of devotional books too. As I go I'll note things down, but I will also keep a list of "distractions". These are the things that pop into my head and  may be a line of thought I should follow but more often are mere distractions that stop me focussing on the important. Things like the need to polish my shoes or to put the cheque I wrote yesterday in the accounts.

After this I will review my journal for the last month or so and see what trends show themselves. There are one or two things that I know need addressing in prayer, so I will do that. I'll also go through my pastoral notes, maybe collate them together and then sit down with the list of members and attenders and pray through that list.

I'll probably take a break then and decide what's next. The big things, so-to-speak, that I want to get to today concern vision and strategy things for church and asking some questions that I remember from a Bill Hybels book and talk about character, ministry and family.

This all sounds like a lot, and I suspect it is! But I'm not looking for definitive answers to many of these big questions, just a sense of where God is leading me and the church. I'm okay with the vague, trusting that the detail will come as the process unfolds. I don't see myself as going up the mountain to collect a five year plan from God to deliver to the deacons and the church! This is after all Upminster not Sinai!

To help me stay focussed I'll use what I've heard called the Pomodora technique. In it's least complicated form it's as simple as setting a timer and working until the timer sounds, having a short break and returning to work. After four rounds you take a longer break. 25 minutes is the recommended time slot and 5 minutes for the short break. A simple kitchen timer is all you need.

Long before I knew it had a name I used a timer to help me pray. Without it, I spend more time checking my watch than praying! Speaking of which, it's time to stop blogging about a prayer day and time to get started. I'll update you later.

Time out

A long time ago, over 30 years now, I became aware of the practice of spending a day in prayer. It was the early days of my Christian life while I was involved with the Navigators. I remember coming across a little booklet, probably by Lorne Sanny the then International Director as I recall.

Anyway, sad to say, it's not as regular a feature of my life as maybe it should have been, but I've always tried to include regular extended times of prayer in my routine. I neither want to boast or be hard on myself about how I've done, but I do want to blog a bit about the process and how it works for me. So I've decided that it's time to have a day of prayer and write about it during the day if possible. Tomorrow I'm going to spend as much of the day( not literally 24 hours, more like the working part of the day) in prayer and reflection as possible and I'll try and do a few updates through the day and a final reflection on what I learn about the process. I hope that might encourage others to think about doing something similar. I thought it might provide me with a sense of accountability too.

If you are interested in doing something similar, then you might be interested in this transcript of an old article that I think may have formed the basis for the booklet I recall from those early Navigator days.

Why we need to talk more

Mort Ryerson, chairman of Perot Systems:

“we must realize that our task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about who we are, who we’ve just become, who we still want to be. If the organization can stay in a continuous conversation about who it is and who it is becoming, then leaders don’t have to undertake the impossible task of trying to hold it all together.” 

July, 1997

Found while reading a blog post.

Beyond the Church

When we think about what it might take to reach out beyond the boundaries of the church we often think about big things. We think about "having a mission", but the problem I have with that approach is that it isolates evangelism as a series of one-off hits. That's why I'm a big fan of finding simple ways, oerdinary ways, to live out our faith.

So here's a list of ideas culled from a recent article on the Church Planting Novice blog:

Don’t Eat Alone.

Be a Regular.

Hobby with the City.

Be a Good Neighbour.

Serve Your City.

Get the fuller picture by reading the original article.

Feeding the already fed

In the light of recent thoughts about the church, this seemed apposite:

After two or three long hours on the quest for the ultimate flea market find, Lisa was kind enough to say, "Honey, let's break for some lunch." Grateful for the reprieve, I accepted her offer and we made our way to the food area, which consisted of a group of rickety, wooden picnic tables strategically huddled around several food stands.

We bought a couple of chicken sandwiches at one of the restaurants and proceeded to one of the tables to eat. After a few minutes, Lisa looked over my shoulder and said, "Honey, check that out." As I turned, I noticed an employee of the restaurant carrying a tray of samples. Normally, a restaurant would hand out samples to potential customers. But this girl was weaving in and out of the picnic tables handing out samples to those of us who were already stuffing our faces with her restaurant's chicken sandwiches!

Lisa said, "Ed, that's hilarious. I mean, all she has to do is walk about fifteen paces, go out to all the hundreds of people who obviously haven't eaten yet and offer the food to them. Yet, she's content to feed the already fed."

And that's when it hit me like an all-pro NFL linebacker. I said, "Lisa, that's it! That is the local church in a nutshell."

You see, our problem is that we've been so content weaving in and out of the church aisles and handing out samples to the already fed that we have missed the countless opportunities to offer the food, the very bread of life, to a lost and dying world.

The author goes on to talk about creativity as the solution, and it's certainly an interesting overview of how we can be more creative in a team as we prepare for Sundays. But of course for me the issue goes deeper than just what we do on a Sunday.

Yes I want our Sunday Celebrations to be the most effective event they can be, but our creativity needs to extend into the area of connecting with our community beyond the church too. But more of that another day.

You can read the whole article here.

Google Wave

I've just been sent a link to this video from Michael. The concept looks really interesting and I can see great potential for doing the kind of round robin decision making via email that can get so messy with conventional email systems.

I also like the idea of being able to work together creatively in a single document.

Worth keeping an eye on the development.