According to Rex Miller most church leaders typically spend up to 50% of their time preparing for Sundays, 25% of their time in various staff and leadership meetings, and the remaining 25% putting out fires and dealing with dysfunctional members. Leaders have to meet with people by appointment, cover their agendas, take care of their checklists, and touch all bases. Relationships become a functional way to complete objectives. And if they can accomplish more than one thing at a time, then all the better.

taken from The Millennium Matrix

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We must ask why so few are willingly die to themselves in community? Why we so rarely journey from self-dependence through the valley of death to life in the Spirit in the presence of a connecting guide? Where are the spiritual leaders, the elders of God’s people? Where are the spiritual leaders, the shepherds of the flock? Where are the people who can listen well and guide us through our problems to the Father’s heart and regard it as their calling to do so? Whatever became of the idea that all believers are priest?

Our communities are filled with people desperate to unburden themselves in the presence of another, to be known at a level where the only antidote to disdain is grace, to sink beneath death’s dark waters while in the grip of a set of strong hands that promise to raise them up into newness of life.

In recent conversations, I’ve asked a number of Christ-followers if they had someone in their lives whose strength and wisdom encouraged them to make themselves fully known. Every last one of them answered the same way: “I’d give my right arm to have someone like that in my life. There’s so much going on inside me that I’d love to share, not to find answers necessarily but just so someone knew. But I have no one like that.”

Files under How to Live, Inspiration, discipleship, fear, influence, leadership | |

In the twenty-first century, it’s not God who’s dead. It’s the church. Or at least conventional forms of church. Dead? you say. Isn’t that overstating the case a bit? Indeed, churches still abound. So do pay phones. You can still find pay phones around, in airports and train stations and shopping malls-there are plenty of working pay phones. But look around your local airport and you’ll likely see the sad remnants where pay phones used to hang–the strange row of rectangles on the wall and the empty slot where a phone book used to sit.There are under a million pay phones in the United States today. In 1997, there were over two million. Of course, the death of the pay phone doesn’t mean that we don’t make phone calls anymore. In fact, we make far more calls than ever before, but we make them differently. Now we make phone calls from home or on the mobile device clasped to our belt or through our computers. Phone calls aren’t obsolete, but the pay phone is–or at least it’s quickly becoming so.

Similarly, the modern church is changing and evolving and emerging. To extend the analogy a bit, no one is saying that the pay phone was a bad idea. Most people would agree that it was a good idea at the time-it was an excellent way to communicate. But communication was the goal, and pay phones were merely a means to an end. The modern church-at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings-was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means.

-excerpt from The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones

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Think about the evolution of small group ministries from its inception until now. What happen to small groups? What has become of this ministry today? Would it be fair to define small group ministry as a robust group of young believers who are actively engaging the missing? Or would we see a small group of Christians who passionately pursue intimacy and nurture in relationship. With all that said, I remember a very talented parachurch group that traveled across America offering training in small group evangelism. Small groups were being herald as the solution to church intimacy and church growth. The prospect was exciting.

The most creative idea I heard that weekend was the empty chair concept. We arranged our chairs in a semi-circle and the group leader sat an empty chair in the middle of the circle. He then emphasized the importance of filling the chair with one of our friends or neighbors in the coming week. This was my first experience with the empty chair and it pumped me up. But not only me, everyone was encouraged to think, “friend.” The session ended with a rally cry. And we kept it very close to our heart: “they might not come to a church building but they’ll come to your home.”

It’s been almost twenty years now. And I find it unfortunate that this may have been as close as we came to establishing a missional goal for small group ministries. If so, at some point in time we lost our way. Most small groups I’ve been involved with have become a home bible class study with no concrete evidence to offer that would show our care and concern for the people Jesus misses the most. And few have shown a concern for building relational intimacy with other believers. Maybe the format is not conducive to the accomplishment of those things.

Small groups never took off because of the natural tension that exists between nurture and evangelism. Nurture comes natural, evangelism does not. I can remember the dialogue—should we incorporate nurture groups and evangelistic groups as one or should we form two separate groups? There was never clear direction on this so we went with what came natural–hoping we could be evangelistic without being intentional.

Files under Evangelism, leadership, missional, small groups | 1 Comment | 1 Comment »

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. –Antoine De Saint Exupery

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Innovators are gifted with an irresistible impulse that burns deep within. They are the fountainheads of originality. Challenging the status quo with a creative idea has the potential of carrying them across the endorphin threshold. It’s about the danger of crashing. It is immeasurable, magical, and unpredictable.

Uncertain of the outcome and fearful of a congregation’s reception, immeasurable (creative) ideas are rarely implemented.  Most often they are capped in favor of measureable results. There is little room for the imaginative in a layered institution. If the creative doesn’t know, he or she soon learns not to force the issue.

They operate independent of the crowd. They set aside any herd longing of sameness relying instead on their God-given faith and creative talents.  They side-step the disparaging remarks, ridicule, and disapproval—knowing they “must” if they are going to gain the briefest hearing.

I thank God for these persevering pioneers. We need the creativity of the maven.

Having trouble with the idea of your own genius? My guess is that there was a time—perhaps when you were very young—when you had at least a fleeting notion of your own genius and were just waiting for some authority figure to come along and validate it for you.

But none came.

Of course not. It’s not the business of authoritative figures to validate thinkers; creatives threaten conventional wisdom.

But there is hope. Choose to become your own authority figure. If you do you’ll soon find yourself in position to redeem the creative genius in you that was put to sleep when the Fool was being tamed.

Reviving the creative genius in you is the beginning of Orbit.

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