Under Orders from the King

We were buying a house—a brand new house. It was about to be built just up the hill from the model home. Tina’s (my wife) mom came to visit; of course, we took her to see the lot and the model home. We were young; in fact, I was young enough to think that we would do a quick walk through of the model and then go to lunch. Can you tell I had not been married very long? Somehow Tina produced a tape measurer and she and her mother began measuring all the windows and sliding glass doors so they could get started picking out, and/or making curtains, drapes, etc. They were talking about colors and accents, and all the stuff I didn’t care about. So I sat down on one of the couches in the living room and watched the other people who came in to look the model over.

As I sat there enjoying the couch and listening to my stomach begin to growl for lunch, a man, probably old enough to be my father, sat heavily in the easy chair next to me. He was a talkative guy. At times I have been accused of enjoying the sound of my voice too, so we got into a conversation. Apparently, his daughter was looking for a house. I excitedly told him we had already bought one and it would soon be under construction. When we exhausted that line of conversation and our women-folk hadn’t reappeared, he asked me what I did for a living. I was in my very first lead, actually solo, pastoral assignment, so I excitedly told him that I was the pastor of Church of the Foothills, gave him directions, and invited him to join us any Sunday morning for worship.

He asked me what kind of church it was. I told him what I always say when people ask me that:  “We are a non-denominational church affiliated with the Church of God of Anderson, Indiana. It’s sort of a non-denominational denomination.” He said, “Just so long as it’s not one of the those evangelical churches.” I asked him what church he belonged to. He said, “I’m Jewish.” So I asked him what was wrong with “evangelical” churches, and told him that our church could be considered evangelical. He went into a rant for several minutes about how his daughter had been going to an evangelical church and they wanted her to become a Christian, and why couldn’t we just let people be what they were born to be. At the end of his monologue, he was pretty red in the face and he asked me if I tried to get people to become Christians. I told him I did, and he asked why I thought I should try to get people to believe as I do. After a minute or two he again stopped talking and I told him that the last thing Jesus did on this earth was tell His followers to go into all the world and make disciples. I told the man, we have to try to persuade people to join us. We believe God’s Son ordered us to do so. He huffed a time or two and then got up to go find his family. Tina and her mom came back and said they were ready to go about then and we left. I never saw that man again, but that conversation has stayed with me.

We are under orders to bring the world to Jesus. Doing the Great Commission is not something we can do when we get around to it. It is what the Lord calls all of us to do. Some people will laugh at you. Some will get angry. Some will avoid you. But some will believe. Praise God, some will believe! The proper way to share the Good News about Jesus is by building relationships with people who don’t know Him and sharing our lives with them. It is more than can be done in a few minutes on a doorstep … or in a model home. It’s about loving folks who need the Good News and earning the right to be heard. I didn’t have the opportunity to do that with the man on the couch that day, but I think someone was building that kind of relationship with his daughter. I hope at some time someone came into that man’s life and got to share with him on a deeper level than I had the opportunity to do. He was very resistant to me and, I think, to anyone at that time, but maybe later someone got the opportunity to help him know our Savior.

It’s a big job that Jesus gave us. If we do it right it changes lives, cultures, and history. It has done so in the past, and it can again. In recent months several things have happened that demonstrate that the influence of Judeo-Christian values has lessened on our society. That needs to change, but it won’t be changed by winning elections and passing legislation. If the change comes, it will be because hearts have turned to God. That only happens as we build relationships with neighbors, colleagues, teammates, whoever we do life with who don’t know Christ. It only happens when we risk being ostracized and even hated. It will only happen when people see Christ’s love in us. Remember, we are under orders. Jesus did His part on the cross. The Holy Spirit will help us. We must do our assignment.

How Can a Declining Church Find a Turn-Around Pastor?

Are you involved in or familiar with a church that is in decline or stuck on a plateau? Often churches in either of those conditions carry on as if there is no problem. However, sometimes members understand that their church is headed in the wrong direction. They don’t want their church to die and they would love to see it thrive. They want to do something, but have no idea what to do. Many times, no one says much about the direction of the church until it is between pastors. Then, some blame the last pastor, and he/she may well have been a factor, but churches can spend a long time in decline or plateaued. Several pastors could come and go.

If a congregation really wants to turn around, it needs to find the right kind of pastor. A turn-around church needs a strong leader: a man or woman who sees God’s vision for the church and can clearly communicate that vision. He/she should be someone who will challenge the church to do new things and make changes that are probably long overdue. The leaders of the congregation have to come to the place where they are willing to help the pastor implement a program that may seem foreign to them, but which can give the church the chance to reach its community for Christ.

The pastor cannot do it by him/herself. He must be a shepherd style leader that can lead people where they need to go (knowing it may not be where the people want to go). The lay leaders need to become lead sheep and get behind the vision. Then the pastor can outline the vision and they will help him communicate it to the rest of the congregation. That way they can help the pastor lead.

If a congregation wants to turn around, the new pastor must be a hard worker and a self-starter who will use his time to do things that will help the church realize God’s vision. The search committee should do its homework to find out if the prospective pastor has been this kind of hard working self-starter. Check not only with his listed references, but also others who may know him/her. Here is a dirty little secret:  solo pastoring at a small church can be a great place for a lazy person to be lazy. He can fake it and look busy, while getting very little done. A church has to trust their pastor to work. The key is getting a trustworthy, hard working person in the office.

If a congregation wants to turn around it must not overlook the person who is considered a bit of a “rebel.” It may be a rebel that the church needs. If people call him a rebel because he is not big on tradition, and he wants to make radical changes, he may well be exactly the person the declining church needs. The things the church has been doing have become ineffective or it wouldn’t be declining. A rebel can lead the church to rebel against decline.

The congregation that wants a turn-around pastor needs to figure out a way to pay him/her enough so that he will not have to work another job to support his/her family. I admire bi-vocational pastors. It is very difficult to juggle two careers. (I tried to do it many years ago as a church planter.) Leading a church to turn around or get off a plateau takes the full concentration of the pastor. Sometimes, declining churches have money in the bank. They have saved it for a rainy day, but they deny it is a rainy day even as the storm rages and threatens to destroy what is left of the congregation. Perhaps, they use the nest egg from time to time when expenses, like utilities and building repairs, exceed income. Often, they are willing to use their savings to sustain the bricks and mortar of the building, but are unwilling to use it on personnel, and/or ministry programs. A declining church can survive a long time doing that, but it will not thrive. People in declining churches sometimes forget the church is not the building, but people who God is using to build His Kingdom.

If a church hopes to turn around, it needs to realize that turning around depends on competent leadership and ministries that attract people to the church and enable them to grow in the Lord. A turn-around church will pay the pastor as well as it possibly can. They will give him fair vacation times and, if they are smart, they will insist that he take his vacations. Some pastors are so wrapped up in their work that he has a hard time taking time off. On the surface this is admirable, but he needs the down time to recharge his battery. This is another reason to pay him/her enough that he doesn’t need additional employment. If he has another job, he may not be able to get vacation time from his other employer and get the rest he needs. A church that wants to turn around will realize they won’t turn around on the cheap, and the pastor’s salary is not a place to cut corners.

Declining churches, the next move you make is pivotal. The choice you make concerning a new pastor may well determine whether or not your congregation can turn around and once again be a force for God’s Kingdom in your community. Ask God to guide you to the right person and to help the right person recognize your congregation as the place He has for him/her.

Check out two other posts that deal with turn-around churches: "Potholes for the Turn-around Church and Pastor" and "The Turn-around Church Challenge: Will you take the First Step to Turn Around Your Church?" 

Please Father, Steal My Show This Sunday

Last Sunday I was bopping down the road with a contemporary Christian radio station on and was blown away by a Toby Mac song I had not heard before: “Steal My Show.” The lyrics are basically a prayer before a concert asking God to take over the “show.” Here are the lyrics of the chorus:

If you want to steal my show

I’ll sit back and watch you go

If you’ve got something to say

Go on and take it away.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=149eaHcrPHA&list=FL9ob471u_BJ8O-VN1SCau8w&feature=share)

It reminded me of my prayers when I first started preaching. I was always very nervous and I would ask the Lord to calm me and take over, because whatever I did or said was His show and I felt Him remind me that if I truly made it His show, He would not sponsor a flop.

Thanks, Toby Mac, for giving me such a great reminder. In recent years, production values have become much more important in morning worship. Not that we didn’t try to do our best back in the day, but now there are so many more things at our disposal: worship bands, music videos, illustration videos, funny videos, etc. And sound systems are now unbelievable in their complexity as well as their quality. Teaching pastors and worship leaders, even in relatively small churches, spend a lot of time with the production of the service. This is not a criticism. Worship should be the best we can make it with what we have. But, the pressure these days to “put on a good show” is tremendous.

I guess it was always like that. In the past, the pressure was on the choir director to get his group to make a harmonic sound, and the organist did her/his best to make the old instrument sound worshipful, but now the emphasis is a bit different. Sometimes leaders feel like they’re in competition with the church down the street. That may be true, but only for a few church s-hoppers—not for the majority of prospects. Our competition for them is an easy Sunday morning in bed. So, we still need to make sure we do our best.

First and foremost, our worship is supposed to be aimed at God. The object is not to glorify you, but to glorify Him. After all the hard preparation work, worship leaders and pastors should take a moment and remember why they worked so hard to produce an excellent time of worship. Make sure the focus is on our Lord. (I spoke at one church where the worship band was in a stage pit instead of front and center. It was a brand new church auditorium, so it was by design to keep the focus of the service on the cross, not on those serving in leadership.) He gave His best for us, His Son, so He deserves our best. Any applause should be for Him, not for us. This should be obvious, but is it always?

Second, in our time, at least in America, Sunday morning worship has become the receiving room for the church. A healthy church will offer many doors to prospective Christ-followers: small groups, children’s ministry, student ministry, recovery ministry, sports ministry, to name only a few, but for most churches gathering together for worship is the main event. So, we need to do our best.

Third, Sunday morning worship is still a vital part of winning a prospective Christian to Christ and discipleship. It should not be all that we do, but it is an important part.

Fourth, Sunday morning worship reveals our priorities. Is God really the reason we come together? Are we interested in new people? Do we want newcomers to understand the Gospel? Therefore, we need to do our best.

But, all we can do, in this case, is not all we can do. We MUST submit our efforts to the Lord. We must ask Him to not only use what we have prepared, but do more with it than we can imagine. We must, as Toby Mac put it, ask Him to “steal my show.” After all, it’s not our show. It is His. It is for Him, from Him, and because of Him.

Please, Father, steal my show!

Fickle Holy Week Crowd – Fickle Congregations

The crowd in Jerusalem was a fickle bunch. On Palm Sunday they welcomed Jesus as a new king coming to lead the Jews to throw off the oppression of Rome and establish Israel as God’s great kingdom on earth. By Friday morning they were yelling for Pilate to crucify Him. How could they change so fast? I know the easiest answer is that the Sunday crowd and the Friday crowd were not the same. Maybe that’s true, but if it is, what happened to the Sunday crowd? Why didn’t they show up on Friday when the heat was on Jesus?

Actually, this kind of sea change is often seen in congregations. Pastors are welcomed with great fanfare. They are invited to lead the congregation. The church believes that he can get the congregation off a plateau or bring it back from near death. The people can’t wait to see their church return and perhaps surpass its glorious past. They are sure that soon things will right themselves and it will be just like the good old days. This pastor is a leader and they know if they just have a leader their congregation will succeed.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem the crowd were sure He was the king they wanted. Even though they were greatly outnumbered by the Romans, a King Jesus could heal their wounded and restore their dead to life. If their supply lines got thin, Jesus could multiply rations like He did with the loaves and fishes in Galilee.

It didn’t turn out that way. Instead of rousing the crowd against the Romans, He went to the temple and deliberately irritated the temple authorities. He even went so far as to disrupt their money-changing operation. When He should have been getting people mad at the Romans, He criticized the Jewish authorities that He needed to legitimize His kingship. Jesus was leading a revolution, but not the revolution they wanted. So … “Crucify Him!” “Crucify Him!”

The new pastor turns out not to be what they thought. He has some strange ideas about how things ought to be done. He makes big changes in the music. He brings in guitars and drums, and not just on youth Sunday, but every Sunday. The choir is down to singing only once a month and the only time the organ is heard any more is at a funeral. He’s got somebody leading some kind of recovery group and a few of those people have been showing up in church. Somehow he got the board to let him remodel the children’s area with all kinds of wild color schemes and decorations. It looks more like a fun area than a classroom. And there are so many kids running around making noises and messes … It’s not at all like it used to be. Sure, the attendance is coming up, but those people aren’t like us. They don’t know how to dress for church. They have tattoos and some of them smell like tobacco. He doesn’t seem to care about the way things have always been done and doesn’t think he needs the approval of the long-time lay leaders. The church may be growing, but it’s not growing the way they want. The pastor is a leader, but he’s not leading the way they wanted. Someone get up a petition; let’s get rid of him. In effect, “Crucify him!” “Crucify Him!”

The Holy Week crowd got rid of Jesus and preserved the way things were, but in a relatively few years the temple system was destroyed. The local lay leaders usually get their way too, and while they may preserve the traditions of their congregation, the church dies in a few years. Sometimes, the pastor survives and leads another congregation to growth. Too often, he’s so damaged that he decides to walk away from pastoral leadership.

Jesus was just doing what God sent Him to do, and the crowd reversed itself. In the same way, the pastor was doing the Lord’s assignment too, and the congregation turned on him. It’s a small consolation for the pastor to realize that he faced the same thing Jesus did. The congregation, like the Holy Week crowd, couldn’t trade their pipe dream of the future for God’s vision. They couldn’t submit to God.

When Should Your Church Begin a Second Worship Service?

Many times it happens like this scenario:

The capacity of your church’s sanctuary (auditorium, worship room, multi-ministry room, whatever you call it in your congregation) is around 220 and your church attendance is picking up. Your average attendance passed 150 a month or so ago and you continue to see new faces. You look at the records for the last few decades and you find that three times the church has grown to between 170 and 180 and then retreated. The congregation went down to about 100 before it started this last resurgence under the new young pastor who is a very good speaker and has lots of new ideas. The changes he has proposed seem to be paying off and many Sundays the sanctuary feels full. Some of the folks are very excited about it, and most of the rest feel good about it. There are, however, some who are getting nervous that the church is not the same.

You’re thinking that it’s good that it’s not the same, because people are finding the Lord and want to join the congregation, but you also see a problem. Last week, when the children sang in worship, there weren’t enough seats, and the ushers had to scramble to add chairs down the center aisle and in the lobby. The pastor was almost ecstatic and you were just about as happy. On the other hand, Mr. and Mr. Brewster who have been in this church for over 50 years arrived a little late and a new family was seated in the Brewsters’ usual place. For years, you had heard how much the Brewsters love the congregation and how they want to see it be strong and growing, but they looked very unhappy when they had to sit in the lobby.

Since the new pastor has been at your church there has been talk about adding on. You talked to a friend of yours who owns a company that builds supermarkets and other large buildings. He gave you what he said was a very ballpark estimate of the costs to build a new room for worship and you know that those costs were well out of reach. You even discussed it with the pastor, and he estimated that the attendance would have to just about double before a major building project could be considered.

If the church continues to grow, the size of the sanctuary will very soon be a problem. The growth has not been meteoric—just 7 or 8 percent per year—a pace that you hope continues. If it does, the church will begin to feel crowded and there will be no room for continued growth. At board meeting the pastor passed out an article that said if a worship facility is more than 75-80% full, growth is severely retarded. Your church is getting close to that mark, and your research showed that, in the past, the congregation had stopped growing every time it reached that level.

A few times the pastor has mentioned starting a second service. Until now, you have not been excited about that. In fact, you are still not particularly excited about it, but you see it is probably the best solution to the problem that is looming just ahead for this church.

Now what? What’s the best way for a church to move to two worship services? How do you get the congregation to accept the idea?

1. Clearly make the case to the lay leaders using the statistics and vision.

2. Ask lay leaders who accept the idea to help get the rest of the church on board.

The major objections will likely be, “We have always been a family and we won’t know everybody any more.” The truth is that if the church is larger than 50, they don’t all know each other anyway. Having one service preserves the illusion that they do and changing to two services kills that illusion. Adding a service will not make them know less people, and it may broaden their friendship circle. The best way to counter this objection is for the members to be more uncomfortable that people the church could reach are being left out. Perhaps ask, “Who do we want to tell to stay away?” Also, it is important to give the members time to process the idea of two services.

3. Decide if you will have two duplicate services or if they will be different.

Some churches choose to have contemporary and traditional services. This can help alleviate the music style controversy many churches face, but it creates a lot more work for the music people, and may create two churches in one.

4. Get the worship team on board or recruit a second team for the new service.

It is crucial to have the cooperation of the worship team.

5. Decide the time for the new service.

Some churches decide to have the added service simultaneous with Sunday school. Others choose to have it the hour before Sunday school. Having two services and two simultaneous Sunday schools works for some churches, even though it takes a lot of volunteers. Other churches choose to discontinue Sunday school, encourage small groups during the week and provide children’s church for both services. One very important factor in this decision is the amount of parking. People can’t sit in the church if they can’t find a place to park. If the parking lot has to be emptied between services, that will be a major factor in determining the schedule.

6. Recruit ushers and greeters, and all the other volunteers you will need for Sunday school or children’s church.

The availability of volunteers may help determine the new service scenario the church chooses.

7. Ask a number of people to commit to the new service for a year or 18 months.

The number depends on the need at your church. In the story above, 50 or 75 might be sensible. You need enough people committed to the new service to effectively relieve the crowding at the existing service and to be enough that they don’t feel like they’re the only ones there.

Bathe the whole idea in prayer. This is a very major step for congregations, especially those long-established ones. If the church can take this step, it may well find itself on the road to new levels of growth, which means many people in their community will find the love, hope and salvation of Jesus.