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As our congregation has transitioned from a high-conflict situation coupled with a systems-wide change situation to a point of stability and growth, I have noticed a change in the use of my time. 

Initially, I was working hyperactively, firefighting (in a sense), working long hours, high stress, etc.  This was also a time of managing out-of-bounds conflict and strategizing the change in church systems that needed to happen to bring us to health. 

As the conflict moved to the back burner, the hours-per-week slowly came down into the “reasonable and customary” needed to really be sustainable life.  Nevertheless, I was still working on the systems stuff.

At the moment, we are working on developing new bylaws for the church which will ultimately change the way we govern ourselves and make our systems more Biblical and give us accountable flexability within visionary leadership.  As this transition occurs, we are working to come to leadership consensus as we begin to teach the concepts of such new governance to the congregation at large. 

Now, I believe we have come to a place of quiet re-grouping, a place that can be bathed in prayer - because now there is time to do that.  I think we will find a happy medium in this, such that we can now structure prayer into ministry from the beginning, rather than trying to use it to fight through things later.  I think this is a very positive transition, one which I feel will flow throughout the congregation and bring true healing and Kingdom transformation - and therefore, growth. 

Stay tuned as we continue this process, and please pray for us!

Food for thought from TheHeresy.com.  (via tallgrassworship, via dyingchuch)

If the church were a business we would measure our profit and if we weren’t making enough we would change. If we were a hospital we would measure how many of the sick and injured become healthier. If we were a vocational training institute we would measure how many people get jobs and keep them in their area of training.

Now imagine a school that measured how much people enjoyed the classes, how great the day care was, how inspiring the teacher was, the levels of enrolment and the amount of funding they had but only passively cared about the success of their graduates in the workplace. That my friends describes most of the church in North America today.

We need to change what we measure and how we measure our success.

· Do people have a proper understanding of the gospel?
· Do they love the people that can offer them nothing in return?
· Are people willing to sacrifice for others?
· Are people becoming more like Christ in their values and behaviour?
· Do they have life and freedom?

If we considered these things, we would realize the state we are in and we would change. As long as we measure things based on our own personal satisfaction or by the markers of organizational success we will miss the point.

Full post here.

In our days of congregational conflict, we experienced the conflict in terms of the “customer satisfaction” paradigm.  The irony is that the dissatisfaction came from the fact that we had begun to measure the “success of graduates” sorts of things and found ourselves not only lacking, but almost utter failures.  From this distorted sense of purpose flowed our lack of success in the proclamation of the Gospel. 

Now, with the conflict largely resolved, we find ourselves having success in bringing the life of the Good News to bear in our lives and in the community around us.  Having focused on “success of graduates” has allowed us to find that “customer satisfaction” comes along for the ride - but only to a point.  Disciples, eventually, have to come to value discipline - which, of course, from time to time, involves correction.  As long as correction is considered part of a satisfying experience, it’s all good.  If not, well… then we’re back to where we were. 

Whatever comes, though, it is essential that we measure the right things.  And I have hope that as a culture of discipleship develops in our congregation, even discipline and correction will be welcome.

Tonight, our men’s group decided not to meet in one of our classrooms at the church, which has been our normal practice.  Instead, this evening, we went to the Dunkin Donuts shop around the corner, where one of our young men was working, and had our group there.  We read our Bibles and prayed, and didn’t disturb the other customers or employees.  But we began to see how the Good News of Jesus could carry beyond the walls of our church into our community.

Just one more small step in the right direction, eh?

Last evening, our Trustee board did something I consider quite amazing: they discussed and passed a “board covenant”.  The “board covenant” states the board’s commitments to each other and the congregation in how they do business and what business they do.  It also acknowledges the accountability structures present in the congregation and deals with a few issues of discipline.  In fact, I’d like to share it in its entirety with you.  It follows in the “read more” section below.  Feel free to comment.

Read More »

Yesterday, I attended a meeting with some of our congregational leaders in a town about an hour’s drive away.  We gathered with leaders from 3 other churches to discuss how we were progressing in congregational transformation.  I was able to give a report as to how our congregation was making great strides in becoming more missional in our community. 

Looking back over the three-year process we’ve been going through, we have really come a long way.  God has transformed many lives - and of course, for the better.  Now we hope to solidify that momentum as we continue to structure ourselves for discipleship and mission. 

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day life of ministry that we lose sight of this.  I’m grateful for these kinds of opportunities for telling the “Good News” of God’s work in our congregation.  It helps me to remember the good stuff.

Today, our congregation had a potluck.  This is the second of such in the same number of months.  As recommended by some congregational consultants who reported to us in December, we were desperately in need of time together just having fun and enjoying one another’s company - time when we weren’t trying to get anything done.  Granted, we are trying to use this time to build relationships with one another, so it is accomplishing something. But it’s not a meeting.

In Leading Congregational Change: A Practical Guide for the Transformational Journey (San Francisco: Josey-Bass/Wiley, 2000), Rev. Dr. James Harrington places a congregation’s Spiritual and Relational Vitality at the center of his model for congregational change.  (13)  In Herrington’s model, the strength and the depth of this piece is the constraining factor for any change that operates in a congregation to move it toward any positive change.  The relational vitality aspect is based in the ability of the congregation to carry out the “love one another” aspect of Christian life. 

Fellowship events, such as potlucks and other more social settings are often downplayed in church planting and church renewal, but they are essential.  They enable people to build relationships outside of the politics of church.  Next to service projects that involve a broad spectrum of the congregation, they are often the key missing ingredient to building the relationships necessary to bring about positive transformation. 

Beyond the theology, though, today was genuinely fun.  We genuinely enjoyed one another’s company - with people mixing and mingling with no hint of cliquishness.  Suffice it to say that we are taking positive steps toward a healthy congregational life, based in the life of Christ, expressed in love.  I believe we are starting to see the kind of joy and “don’t want to miss it” of the kind seen in the ancient Christian practice of communion.  And that makes this thing all worth it!

Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity of going up on our church building’s roof with one of our maintenance folks to check on a few issues.  The picture you see above is looking out across our flat roof down Eastland Ave. in Warren. 

It is now almost cliché to talk about going outside the walls of one’s congregation into the community.  But what about going above them?  From the vantage point of the flat roof, the walls are relatively invisible.  Going above gives us the unobstructed view of the community in which we live: still distant, but much more clearly displayed.

“Church folks” are often challenged to find ways of relating to people outside the walls of the church.  From this vanatage point, it isn’t so daunting.  For one, without in any way neglecting the identity of who we are as a Body of Believers, we break down the us-them divide entirely.  With our identity securely in Christ, we can relate to others without fear of the loss of our Christian perspective, lifestyle and hope.  This is the essential piece of our outward view. 

For another, we see people from a different angle.  From the rooftop, we see backyards and roofs - a very different perspective from the street level.  Perhaps added perspectives will help us relate to people better.

Finally, we have risen above the business of being the church together and can look out at others without having to draw them into our politics.  That, perhaps, is the greatest asset to rising above the walls of our church.  Outsiders don’t care about our internal struggles any more than a dinner guest cares whether the oven is gas or electric, as long as the food is cooked evenly and throughly.  Rising above our structures allows us to stand upon them to gain a vantage point, instead of being locked in them. 

These are lessons I have thought about as I stood on the roof.  Any other analogies we can draw?

My post the other day generated some comments that draws out the theme of Christian unity and church governance as an aspect of the church’s organic growth.  Ben suggested that due to the immanent eschatology of the early church, (i.e., that the Age to Come was going to show up any day), they didn’t spend much time setting up structures that would last, which created a “more vibrant, growing, organic community that would have been impossible to create from the top down.”

Our structures must be designed to empower organic growth.  This does start with Eschatology, because it is necessary for Christians to work backwards from the Kingdom of God that is and is to come in order to establish how that Kingdom applies in This Present (Evil) Age. 

This presses us to consider how we may live the Life of the Kingdom among our real neighbors - those with whom we have contact, especially in physical proximity.  This implies a decentralized network structure is going to have the most tendency for success. 

I think, however, that this defies our natural definitions of “top-down” or “bottom-up.”  In a sense, the church is always top-down, because we affirm that God initiates creation, initiates contact with humanity, initiates salvation, and initiates discipleship.  In Christ, we affirm that God acted to do what humanity could not even have started to do: to destroy sin, death and the Devil and bring the Kingdom of God into contact with our lives in This Age.  Anything less is Pelagianism. 

Yet, at the same time, in a human sense, this divine initiative produces a high level of unity, enough to maintain a quite decentralized system.  This is especially true in the early church.

For instance, Tertullian, writing around 200 CE, argues that the people to whom he is writing are not truly Christians because they have changed the faith that was handed down by the Apostles to them.  It’s a clear-cut case in Tertullian’s mind, because all the congregations have remained in the same faith.  As he says,

Is it likely that so many churches, and they so great, should have gone astray into one and the same faith? (De Praescriptione Haereticorum 28)

The implication of this quote is a profoundly different view of the church structures than we currently have.  In saying this, Tertullian implies that there is no centralized hierarchy to maintain unity, but that each congregation has received the same faith in Jesus Christ unaltered from the Apostles, as guarded by the unifying Holy Spirit. 

In effect, he says, “we have no possible way of riding herd on all these people in all these congregations.  Yet they all believe the same thing and practice it the same way.  How can you explain that, you who claim you have a better grip on the truth than we do?”  Any time human beings get together, he says, there is diversity of opinion and some level of disagreement and disunity.  So if this were not of God, there wouldn’t be the unity we see here. 

I think we can see that by the year 200 or so, Christianity had spread throughout the Roman Empire to a degree that no real regional, inter-congregational structures were possible, necessary or wanted.  And yet the Church grew and spread faster in that era than throughout most of the rest of its history. 

One final thought: even Caesar, with all his power and might, could not keep his empire united in the early 3rd Century.  Society and technology did not allow for it.  Yet in the same era, the Church was obviously and completely unified, without a central authority.  What does that say to us?

 See the yellow-ish tinge on the tree in the picture?  It’s about to burst into bloom.  All the other trees on the street are still vertical brushpiles, but this one - it’s ready to go.  That’s about where our congregation is right now.  We are slowly, surely becoming a missional congregation.  We can see that once this thing blooms, it’s really going to bloom.  Now, we just have to wait for it to mature enough to bloom. 

Our Worship is becoming more reverently relaxed and celebratory.  Our Men’s and Women’s Formation Groups are growing.  Our prayers are still leading us into greater realization of God’s vision.  We’re learning how to care for one another.  We’re probably one revision away from having a workable new set of bylaws that can be shown to the congregation at large for feedback and ratification sometime in the near future.  Last Sunday, a man who just got sober at the Warren Family Mission gave his (powerful, moving) testimony.  He has been accepted and welcomed into the life of the Church.  It’s looking more and more likely that our stuff for Teens and Children will be re-started by the early summer. 

We’ve had some serious pruning, to be sure.  But that will make the new growth all the more plentiful, as the roots go down deep to nourish it. 

Praise Be to God!

You usually have two options when faced with adversity: either yell, “Every man for himself!” or, come together and care for one another, watch each other’s backs, and build life together. 

I believe we have begun to build life together in our congregation in the midst of adversity.