"Men at their best"

Returning a church to biblical sanity

The Church Doctor site offers an excellent perspective on how and why churches get off track and their vitality dribbles away. Read the whole thing, but the heart is his 10-step program:

Ten Ways to Return Church to a Biblical Form of Sanity

1. Take inventory annually.  Have a rummage sale of programs/activities. Offload 10%-20% per year. 
2. Clearly articulate your purpose:  look closely at the New Testament. Ask, "According to God, what is the primary purpose of the church?"  Make sure all staff and leadership are on the same page.     
3. Having defined your purpose, look at everything through the lens of focus.  (1) What contributes to the objectives of purpose?  (2) What supports objectives that contribute to the focus of purpose?  (3) What does not contribute to the objectives of focus?  (4) Which issues of category three need repair, redesign, or strengthening?  (5) Which issues of category three should be discarded?    
4. Reflect on how intentional you are.  Take inventory, using a trusted and brutally honest accountability partner.  Equip your accountability partner to ask you, regularly, "What have you said 'no' to recently?"   
5. If you add a program or activity to your church routine, ask the hard question:  "Is this the time to drop another program or activity?"    
6. Ask your accountability partner to challenge your level of proactivity, as opposed to reactivity.  You can't avoid being reactive all the time in ministry.  Shoot for 80% proactive, 20% reactive.     
7. Continually run the operation of church through the grid of light-weight/low-maintenance.  Develop a culture of asking, "Is this the simplest way to do this?  Or is it too complicated?  Too cluttered?  Too slow and inefficient?"   
8. As a leader, what is the one thing you must do every week, no matter what else is going on in the church?  If you answered by describing some ministry you do (prepare a sermon, attend a meeting, teach a class), repent!  If you answered by describing a way you will multiply yourself (equipping and empowering others - as in making disciples), rejoice!    
9. Review your church government - your decision-making process - through the lens of low-control/high-accountability.  How long, how much effort, does it take to come to conclusions and move to action?    
10. Consider intervention - an outside consultant - to help redesign your church government to a biblical form of low-control/high-accountability.

The best German restaurant in Epcot

Well, it's the only one:

I ripped this shot off my son's FB page. He took it last night.

Many years ago when my family and I visited Epcot we had lunch here. Having lived in Germany from 1983-1986, my wife and I enjoy German cuisine.

The restaurant was a buffet. After we sat at our table an attractive, blonde young fraulein approached to ask what we wanted to drink. As you may know, the workers at Epcot's national areas are all from their respective countries. They enter the US on a work visa, work a year and then go home. Our Serviererin was therefore German and looked the part, German-style dress and all.

As she was bringing our beverages I still remembered enough German to tell her that my wife and I had lived in her country from '83-'86. Her response was polite but perfunctory; she had doubtless heard hundreds of times from guests who told her they had visited Germany or had lived there.

"Where did you live?" she replied in English.

"We lived in a small farming town not far from Giessen called Dorf-Guell."

Her mouth dropped open and her eyes grew wide as saucers. "My brother plays soccer for Dorf-Guell!" she exclaimed.

Before long she was sitting down with us and we had a kind of "old home week" and we swapped reminiscences of the very small town and the local area. Finally, she had to get back to work, so we  said goodbye as she rose from the table.

"I am so glad to have met you!" she gushed. "It was so good to talk with someone from home!"

Of course, we were not from her home, but I knew what she meant and thought so, too.

What are the odds?

Why Methodism?

Christian Perfection: The Reason for Methodism

Wesley argued for and preached on entire sanctification, full sanctification, or Christian perfection (these are all synonyms) throughout his ministry. In the essay “The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explained”, which was published in 1746, Wesley argued that “holiness… is religion itself” (Works, 9:227). Forty years later in “Thoughts upon Methodism”, he described Methodism as follows, “Methodism… is only plain scriptural religion, guarded by a few prudential regulations. The essence of it is holiness of heart and life” (Works, 9:529).

Wesley defined Christian perfection in “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection” (1777) as follows:

In one view, it is purity of intention, dedicating all the life to God. It is the giving God all our heart; it is one desire and design ruling all our tempers. It is the devoting, not a part, but all our soul, body, and substance to God. In another view, it is all the mind which was in Christ, enabling us to walk as Christ walked. It is the circumcision of the heart from all filthiness, all inward as well as outward pollution. It is a renewal of the heart in the whole image of God, the full likeness of Him that created it. In yet another, it is the loving God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves (Works, Jackson, 11:444).

Read the whole thing.

Bart Ehrman Creates Stir in Atheist Community

Bart Ehrman Creates Stir in Atheist Community Over The Existence of Jesus

Bart Ehrman is one of the world's leading scholars on the history of ancient Judea during the time of Jesus, with a focus on the development of the early Christian community. He is by his own account not a Christian. Yet is his refutation of persons who contend that the Christian proclamation is fictional or analogical to other ancient myths is just devastating.

For example, the charge that Jesus is himself a fictional figure:

“Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine. There are a couple of exceptions: of the hundreds — thousands? — of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. But even taking these into account, there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.”

Read the whole thing.

Are we ready to reach unchurched people?

As we start considering what planning we need to do for our future, one thing we will need to face fully an a real, instrospective questions. One of them is, "Are we, as a congregation (including the pastor!) really ready to reach out to unchurched people and receive them into our wider church life?"

A definition is called for. People who write about evangelism generally refer to "unchurched" people as those who are not part of a Christian fellowship and never really were except perhaps very temporarily. As for people who were longer-term participants in a church but who do not presently attend, I have usually seen them referred to as dischurched. These are awkward constructions, of course, and places labels on people that they may not agree with or like. Nonetheless, I think the distinction is important.

Here are three articles that are relevant to this topic:

15 characteristics of today's unchurched person

How to reach unchurched people who think they don't need God.

9 signs your church is ready to reach unchurched people

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Yeah, that's how it works

My uncle, Prof. Rob Foy in Minnesota, died recently and a memorial was printed for him by his university, found online at "Please Remember Dr. Robert (Rob) C. Foy II in Your Prayers."

Rob was the husband of my mom's sister, Nancy. Rob was a "formidable landscape gardener," at which he labored with Nancy (who died in 2002):

The division of labor was simple: He did the work; his wife nodded her approval.

Yeah, most of us married guys have that arrangement.

"Kids begging their parents . . ."

Kids begging their parents to go to church beats parents begging their kids to go to church. Invest in your family ministry environments. Chad Ward, UpStreet director at one of the North Point campuses shared this. So true. Get the kids, and you’ve got the parents.

Read the whole thing.

To which I would add my own observation: out of 100 married couples, if the wives join a church about 20 of their husbands will join, too. But if the husbands join, at least 80 of the wives will. 

Why does Church seem much more inherently attractive to men than women? It is not because men are somehow less religious than women - synagogues and mosques are full of men, who also occupy most to all the leadership roles. 

Maybe there are so many "church widows" because for several decades most mainline Protestant denominations, through their seminaries, have presented Christianity as rather effete.

15 Things You Need to Know about Unchurched People Today

15 Things You Need to Know about Unchurched People Today

Read the whole thing.

Just takes a little effort!

Persistence:

 

20 Hidden Ministry Killers

20 Hidden Ministry Killers

Probably more accurately, "Church killers." Read the whole thing, but here they are as a simple list:

1. Denial of portents of the future
2. Comfort in the status quo
3. Tradition for tradition's sake
4. Mission focused inward, not outward
5. Programs overemphasis
6. Discipleship immaturity
7. Relationships primarily within the church
8. Shallow - avoiding hard dialog and tough questions
9. Life -  abusing a church because of our anger over our life issues.
10. Tenure - thinking that length of time in the church equals increased authority
11. Attractional - being focused on output (I confess that the author's explanation of this one seems a little opaque to me)
12. Churched - not understanding or even being interested the unchurched
13. Demographics - the congregation is dissimilar to the parish area
14. Drift - losing sight of God's purposes in the present day
15. Dull - failure to inspire and going through religious motions
16. Leadership - same people doing the same things over and over
17. Management - without a vision, using a management mind set
18. Museum - confusing the Church with the church building, and mis-setting priorities accordingly
19. Money - spending more on the facility than discipleship or evangelism
20. Anxiety - facing change with fear rather than confidence in the Holy Spirit

The author concludes, "These types of hidden factors cause tens of thousands of congregations in North America to fail to transition, change and transform following their first generation of life."