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1. Justin Bieber recently shared about his Christian faith and lack of church attendance. In an interview he said, “A lot of people who are religious, I think they get lost. They go to church just to go to church…I’m not trying to disrespect them…but for me, I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.” I find Bieber’s stance to be quite common in Christians, especially younger Christians and I appreciated Dan Kimball’s response to this:

“We aren’t Christians based on whether we go to a church meeting or not, that is based on our faith in Jesus. So I agree with him there, but having faith in Jesus then means we should then be functioning in a local church according to the guidelines of Scripture. It would be sad thinking of a Christian living out their faith on their own without being in a faith community.”

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2. Adam McHugh’s blog is one I bring up quite often. He’s an author who has done a wonderful job of continuing to discuss topics covered in his book on his blog. As a more introverted person I constantly struggle with how to successfully navigate church ministry with people. I want to value people and also remain true to myself, something that isn’t easy to do. A post he wrote this weeks gets at this bias toward extroversion as what being a good Christian looks like.

“It is bad enough when people in the church criticize our introversion as unfaithful or closed, but it is extra painful when the extroverted bias of our culture leads nonbelievers to consider believing introverts to be bad models of faith, even to be turned off to the gospel because of our temperaments.”

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3. Bobby Gilles does a lot of writing, and because of my season of life this post on writer’s block was helpful to think through. There are plenty of different spaces to do writing in. I tend to prefer writing out of my home because I have all my resources available and I also have a quiet space to think in. Bobby does a good job of looking at the pros and cons of various spaces to write in.

“Compare your productivity at home with elsewhere. And this is what it comes down to, no matter which setting you’ve used till now or which you prefer. Where do you write more? And where are you more apt to write the good stuff? The stuff that makes you say ‘This is why I’m a writer. I’ve hit my mark here.’”

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Have a great weekend friends.

1. Adam’s blog is one of the first blogs I ever read consistently. He recently wrote about how numbers should count for something in youth ministry. I’ve always had the opinion that numbers as a statement of validation for ministry is awful, but that numbers are people so they can’t be overlooked either. I liked Adam’s take on how numbers show what we’ve been entrusted with. We are so quick to overlook stewardship because it means we’re on the hook to be involved.

“After hearing Mark DeVries talk about numbers a couple years ago, I’ve recently been changing my mind. Now I’m very concerned about numbers, but not in the way I used to be. Mark talked about numbers actually being pretty important, but the number that was important was the number of youth that have been entrusted to you.”

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2. This is a blog that is newer to my reading list but what I’ve read so far has been great. Stephanie wrote last week about her time living just outside the red light district in Amsterdam. I really hope Ashton Kutcher took the time to read her post. The world needs better men who value women as children of God, not commodities to control.

“We are on the edge of disaster if we claim a moral line between women who were coerced to sell sex in a dirty basement brothel in a third world country, and women who are coerced to sell sex in Empowered America by more sophisticated means. To say that a woman who sells her body is disqualified from the pain of her profession, from victimization, and from meriting human compassion is a lethal mistake.”

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3. One of the things I’ve struggled with most at my church is our multiple service formats. For a long time I loved it but in recent years I’ve come to despise it as the antithesis to true community. Ed Stetzer wrote with a different perspective this week that has helped me despise it a little less:

“When multiple worship services with different styles are created because a church has a desire is to create opportunities where people can worship God in spirit and in truth, their motivation is much better than simply creating consumer room. If their desire is to create a new place from which they can reach out to people in a certain cultural context, that seems a better– even an appropriate– motivation.”

Enjoy the first weekend of October, the best month of the year!

“Be there for your friends. Grieve with them. Celebrate with them. Give them meals and hugs and hold them tightly. Don’t worry about having nothing to say. Pursue them. Pray for them. Love them. Constantly let them know you have their back.”

2. I do believe Adam McHugh to be one of the most underrated author/writers in Christianity today. His blog has a smaller following than most authors and his first book is one of the best to come out in recent years. The Leadership Journal ran an excerpt from his book Introverts in the Church earlier this week. If you haven’t read the book, you have to read the excerpt and then go buy the book.

“Introverts can become so absorbed in our internal worlds that we miss the needs of others around us. Our scheduling and emotional boundaries must not preempt the divine interjections that shape so much of our identity and our work. We must remember that the events that form the foundation of our calling—the incarnation of the Son of God and his resurrection from the dead—were cosmic interruptions in a world that had grown callous to God’s love.”

3. Brett McCracken is another one of my favorite writers and yesterday he posted about the upcoming political race for President and the role the media plays in our perception of candidates. The danger in politics is to put ourselves in an echo chamber where everyone agrees with and says the exact same things we do. So while the media can make it more difficult for us to embrace a candidate, I think we need a wider range of media so that we don’t get lost in our own world of opinions.

“For any given candidate, about every perspective known to man will be broadcast, tweeted about and linked to by someone in our social network. How can we help but not become hopelessly confused, cynical, and unenthusiastic about all of our options, when each of them has a million vocal enemies crowding our thoughts with perspectives of every sort on a daily basis?”

Your thoughts?

Have a good weekend.

One of the things I’ve never liked about the festival of links as I’ve done before, is the lack of engagement in conversation. So here’s what I’m going to try (trial version) for a few weeks: linking to three posts or articles and sharing some thoughts on each of them. The goal with this being that we can talk about those posts in the comments, and that you won’t feel as overwhelmed by only having 3 links to dive into. Alright, here we go.

1. The past few days I went to Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit. Howard Schultz of Starbucks backed out of speaking at the last minute and Bill Hybels took a few minutes to address the whole thing. I thought he did so with grace, class, and honor. The debate of homosexuality within Christianity and church is a difficult one, but what Bill did was as good as I’ve ever heard. He stood against sin, but sin for all people. This is how it should be. Here’s the video:

2. Jeff Goins said this week that writing can be dangerous. Here’s a couple quotes that stood out to me: “Every writer is an individualist. You can’t spend that much time in your own company and not think more in terms of self and less in terms of the community. This is the beauty and danger of the writing life.” And…”Ideas can be dangerous. They launch revolutions and upset the status quo. They can spread propaganda (whether it’s true or not sometimes doesn’t matter).”

I think we could take Jeff’s statement even a bit further. Art and creativity is dangerous. Writing is a piece of that. Why is it dangerous? Because it is creating a new future. It is creating something that did not exist before. You always have to the power to overturn the proverbial apple cart by creating something new.

3. And my favorite post of the week is from Matthew Paul Turner, as he wrote about The Great Evangelical Endangered Species. Yep, he wrote about old people. This is spot on:

“Listen friends, no matter what age or experience we are in life, we need old people sitting in our pews. We need them. We need to learn from their wisdom. We need to engage their stories and honor the value of their history. Do we have to always agree with them? No. Do we have to let the old rule how we do all things. Of course not. But we must honor them. We must respect them. We must create healthy spaces for them to worship God among us, and not in some separate building as a part of the “non contemporary” service.”

I think when I first started in ministry I was ready to do whatever it took to reach young people, but I think I’ve come a long way to think that without the involvement of old men and women and their wisdom, just “reaching” young people will be a superficial thing lacking the depth needed to be something that lasts.

Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these in the comments.

Enjoy your weekend.

Over the past 9 months my church has been through a lot of change. Not just economic change, but leadership change as well. And the reality is many people have left. My church today is much different than it was 9 months ago.

Most, if not all, people don’t deal with change well. Once we get comfortable with something the way it is, we never want it to change. We want our sports teams to always win, our children to always obey, our churches to sing our favorite songs, and our spouses to be as skinny as the wedding day. Once we get something different, once something changes, we have to adapt and rarely do we think of this as a good thing.

Many co-workers of mine have struggled (I have too!) with how to adapt with such significant changes. We were used to the way we had done things, now we had to envision doing it completely different.

Over the past few years as so much has changed within my church ministry context, God has taught me two lessons on dealing with diminishing resources and change.

Pray.

I don’t have a magic ball that tells me what 6 months from now will look like. But I do present my needs and requests to God often. I know where the needs of my ministries are and I want God to know I’m hoping he provides in very specific ways. Just one year ago I prayed specific prayers about the type of people and roles I needed God to provide, and to my delight He provided more than I ever asked for.

Adapt.

As money and people available slowly go down, you cannot do things the way you did them in the past. Expectations have to change. As I said earlier, we view this as a bad thing, but I think that’s losing sight of what really matters. Our focus stays the same, but the implementation of how we flush out that focus changes. There is always more than one way to accomplish a goal.

For those of you in church ministry or even in the business world, what have you learned from working in an environment with diminishing resources?

Check out below the many options of a church below:

I feel like I’ve done a lot of the talking lately, so I’m looking to hear from you on this one.

What does this picture bring to mind for you?

Watch out! Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven (NLT).

We can argue some other time about these rewards in heaven, they’re not the point of this post.

I recently watched an episode of the new show Secret Millionaire on ABC (watch the episode I watched here). There was a lot to like about the show (highlighting great non profits gone largely unnoticed, showing the impact people with money can make by giving a little) and probably a lot to dislike about it as well (you can rant about that somewhere else). But at the end of the show I had to ask myself: “Do I think she would have given all the money away if this didn’t air on national television?” Of course, a pretty judgmental question to be asking but it’s what ran through my head.

I often ask myself questions like this about things related to church: “Are they motivated to do that because people will see them to be Godly?” or “Is this what they did or what God did?”

This weekend my church is leaving our building to serve the community around us. It made a little bit of local news already. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Are others wondering if we’re doing this to make news like I’ve questioned about the tv show? I know my church isn’t doing any of this to get noticed, but perception is reality and I’m sure many will read the news as our Christian ploy to make ourselves look better.

You might say to me, “Settle down, this is really just a matter of where your heart is.”

So I ask you…when people share their good deeds in public, is it good as long as their heart is in the right spot?

Or is it more complicated than that?

When the preferences of the church members are greater than their passion for the gospel, the church is dying. -Thom Rainer

Your thoughts?

In today’s world of podcasts and blogs and church websites, we have the opportunity to sit under the teaching of just about any pastor we choose despite most of us calling another church our home.

There’s good and bad to this I won’t get into right now.

I am curious though…

If you could sit under the teaching of one pastor who is alive today, who would it be?

(I’ll answer in the comments, looking forward to seeing your answers)

Honestly, I love the whole concept. I love their raw honest look at church, I love their writing, and I love their ability to pick up on BS.

I was a little scared about what they might say about my church, because you never really know if what you desire to be about as a church translates to people who have little to no church background. To really get to know a church, a time and energy investment must be made. No one can fully see all that a church is or isn’t in an hour or two on a Sunday morning.

So even though I was a little scared, I was mostly looking forward to hearing their perspective. Most of church becomes about what appeals to “insiders” and very little thought goes into what it takes for the Christian faith as presented on a Sunday morning to translate to “outsiders” (I use quotes there because I hate the idea of inside and outside, like I am God and determine those things, they’re merely meant as gross generalizations to help you in understanding).

Here are some of the highlights for me of what Joel shared:

“Consider yourself forewarned. Sunset Presbyterian isn’t for bench warmers. Also, its sermons aren’t quite ready for prime time. Like any good megachurch, however, it is home to a well-rehearsed rock band and karaoke system.”

“Sure, the service was dry and Tex couldn’t give a straight, non-preachy answer my questions if I’d held  a .44 magnum to his head. But these folks are trying to be better people, and they’ve found a like-minded to community in which to pursue that ideal.”

And here were my favorites of what Amanda wrote:

On the offering…I guess we use similar baskets (bags) as other churches they’ve visited: “I had to laugh again when the velvet bags went around the room. Is there a Jesus Supply Warehouse or something?”

Finally, the pastor summed up the day’s message by saying, “Maybe God’s tapping you on the shoulder and telling you to go to Uganda?” I turned to Joel and whispered, “What if God’s NOT tapping me at all, but I still want to go to Uganda.” “Check your meds.”

“Would I go back to Sunset? No. We just didn’t click. But I’ll tell you this: I am glad this church exists. Their members reek of kindness and generosity and I believe they do good work in the community and in the world. That’s pretty much all you can ask for.”

Take a look at their posts about my church home (Sunset) and then subscribe to their blog (Joel’s post // Amanda’s post).

One of the things worth thinking about is whether churches should plan their gatherings with non-Christians in mind or not.

I fully believe most churches have people who would not call themselves Christians in their midst every weekend.

But should churches change their focus on weekend gatherings for non-Christians or not? Why?

(Maybe a better way to think of this is…if you knew Joel and Amanda were coming to your church on Sunday, would you do something different? If so, why not change that right now?)