Ed Stetzer On Small Churches

Ed Stetzer writes in Outreach Magazine:

Church leaders in America also tend to think big is good and bigger is better, but Jesus says that small is reflective of the kingdom of God. It starts as something small, but it will not stay small and, ultimately, it will change everything. A revolutionary movement begins with only a handful of subversives, but eventually expands so widely that it can overthrow a king with an army. The subversive kingdom starts small, but ultimately overwhelms the Devil and his minions when Jesus returns as reigning King, replacing the deepest darkness with brilliant light.

Jesus is unembarrassed, unashamed and unperturbed by describing the Kingdom using small things. That is His point. He says the mustard seed "is the smallest of all the seeds." He is emphasizing the smallness of the kingdom of God. But more to the point, He is describing how small can be subversive.

from this excellent article

At New Hope Valparaiso, we're small. But the impact that we are having in our community would have you think we are bigger than we are. There's no way we should be here. No way we should do what we do. Except God is in it. I could tell you story after story of how He's led, He's provided, He's opened doors for us to be His hands and His feet.

Don't misunderstand. We want to grow. We work hard to let people know and encourage them to come and join us on the journey. We hope to see this mission spread to other people captivated by Jesus' call to follow.

But we're not measuring ourselves against other churches. We're only looking to see how faithful we are to the call. If you are interested in joining a group of people who see God at work every week, come and see us. We'll make room. :)

Exactly

"All types of churches should be simply missional. What we are advocating is for church leaders to distill their ideology of what church is to the irreducible minimum that defines a church as God’s gathered people, sent to a particular community as His redemptive gift to that community.

We need all types of missional churches–big, small, traditional, contemporary, with country music (did we say that?), hip-hop, some with guitars, some with organs. We need churches in homes and churches in well-marked buildings.

The container is not the issue. The issue is not staying contained." Ed Stetzer

Here's the money part of that quote.

A church is - God’s gathered people, sent to a particular community as His redemptive gift to that community.

New Hope Baptist Church is not buildings, a corporation, or an address.

It is a gift of grace to Valparaiso and its surroundings to serve as a beacon of hope and hands of love to the people we live and work with.

That "Love God, Love People, Serve All" - deal? Yeah, that's what I'm pushing because that's what God expects from us.

Great, great article from Ed Stetzer

If we are to witness a genuine move of the Spirit, we cannot spend our time pining for the past and for methods that no longer work. Neither should we spend our time frantically looking for ways to innovate and keep up with the times. Some evangelical leaders are in panic mode as they search for new methods to fix the problem. Solutions abound -- whether it is the emerging church; the missional-incarnational movement; a renewal of polity or biblical preaching; or groups that reemphasize certain gifts, actions, or ministries. Everyone seems to have an answer.

Many of their concerns are legitimate, and worthy of consideration. But the Spirit can only begin working in our churches when we repent of the unbelieving attitudes that have repelled the lost. At times our hearts are hard, fallow ground that will not allow a Kingdom harvest to germinate.

Nevertheless, pastors and leaders must find comfort in the fact -- despite the church's decline -- the gospel is still faithful and true. To reach the lost, they must hold more firmly than ever to the gospel, find stability on its rock-solid ground, and move forward, engaging the culture.

Remember, Jesus said He would build His church. This promise should calm our fears and allow us to rest in God's mighty power to work out His purposes.

Unfortunately, many evangelicals have lost confidence in the gospel. Since society has marginalized the church, it seems people are saying: "Maybe this gospel is not all we thought it would be." Since the church cannot be trusted, they think, maybe the gospel cannot be trusted either.

Our loss of confidence in the gospel is evidenced by the fact believers are sharing their faith less and less. The seeker movement has unintentionally disempowered evangelism by training people to bring their friends to church services so professionals can take over and seal the deal.

In addition, churches have become dispensers of practical advice. During the 1980s and '90s, pastors told church members to bring their non-Christian friends to hear insight on everything from how to have a better life to how to overcome stress.

Leaders spent 20 to 30 years reshaping their churches around this new vision. Churches focused on practical advice -- moral, biblically based, practical advice -- and made inviting friends to hear such advice the church's evangelism strategy. In the process, the church unintentionally de-emphasized teaching people to share their faith. As a result, laypeople lost confidence in the power of their faith. Now, like a bear fed by the tourists, the church is unable to fend for herself. She has lost her natural ability to evangelize.

One cannot read Scripture and miss the fact it focuses on a bloody cross and an empty tomb. The gospel is about a Savior who died on a cross in our place. These are facts -- not just interesting things to think or talk about -- and they are usually unpalatable to our neighbors. If we do not have confidence in them, then we do not have true faith, and we reduce the gospel to a 12-step program for inner peace.

Luke 24:47 says, "Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations." When believers lose confidence in the gospel, Christ's evangelistic mandate withers away. But those who are confident in the gospel become living epistles, God's love letters to individuals and communities, and messages that carry the gospel's prophetic edge.

If we fail to regain confidence in the gospel, subsequent generations will continue to walk away from it. Staying culturally relevant is important, and it is beneficial to minister in fresh, new ways. After all, we must remove any roadblocks that keep people from getting to Jesus. But, in the end, if strategies and systems replace the core of the gospel, its meaning and power will be lost.

Go read it all

Friends, it's about Jesus and the good news He brought through His birth, life, death, and resurrection. Tell the story of what He's done for you.

Living On Mission

A quote from Ed Stezer about the barriers we face in energizing the next great generation.

The unique barriers for twenty- and thirtysomethings are also twofold. First, many are trying to await the renewal of the Church. Their hope is to show up one Sunday and it will suddenly be different—more missional, more externally focused, more compassionate. The problem: It won’t, unless they are willing to lead the way by serving in the church to which they are committed.

The second barrier is that the culture they face is farther from the Gospel than any other in American history. The young adults and families today have grown up without a mooring to biblical truth, and young Christians now have to begin at the beginning. They were raised to present five-point Gospel outlines, and it is not working very often. Instead, they must describe God in Genesis 1 and then Colossians 1. They will need to share about the freedom God offers first from Ecclesiastes and then Galatians. What I am trying to say is that twenty- and thirtysomethings must recognize the distance their culture is away from the cross and be prepared to work in soil that is dry and parched.

Ed in my opinion is the finest missional thinker the SBC has produced. He's right on target here. Those of us who are boomers have to consciously be working every day not just to help the church grow into her clothes (see Col 3:12), but invest in the lives of our fellow disciples who are in their 20s and 30s. That investment means not just helping them see what we see, but working diligently to learn from them too.

Maybe if Ed and others keep writing and speaking, our churches and their leadership will wake up and realize the truth of his words. Here's the thing - we have the best story to tell ever. The narrative of God's Big Story is compelling in itself. We can tell our stories of what He has done for us personally, without having to remember whether we were on point one or four. We can share out of the cohesiveness of His Word just how wide and how deep His love truly is. We can show up and project God's compassion into the lives of the people we live around and with. We can live in Spirit and in Truth. And we can make an eternal difference!

I get excited just thinking about all the tools we possess today to connect with people. I visited a teenager in the ER yesterday. We were talking and then I noticed that they now have TV's in the ER. A commercial for "Rock band" came on, and he asked me when our church's next game night was. "We ought to have it twice a month!"

How did game night get started? Some of our leadership decided that we needed more face time with our youth and college aged members and their friends. So we looked for a way to do that and came up with game night. It began with board games and then grew to include a full LAN network real-time strategy ring as well. Then last month we rolled in the Wii and the Rock Band setup. We had kids galore. They had a great time, and so did the adults. Another point of entry. Another front porch experience. We're earning trust and hopefully opening the door for more later.

Come on friends, look for ways to use what you already have in ways you never have. If there are few opportunities for recreation where you are, then create some. We have to start building the bridge from our end and we have to do it with younger followers of Jesus alongside us.

Great Article by Ed Stetzer

Why is cultural relevance a big deal? | TheResurgence

The scriptures are relevant to this and every culture. They do not need updating, correcting, or revisioning. On the contrary, what needs revisioning is our understanding and obedience to God's word as we live out His mission in context. When we live a humble orthodoxy and humble missiology, we will be salt and light in contemporary culture—a biblically-faithful, culturally-relevant, counter culture. Here is a brief article I wrote for my friends at Catalyst that might be an encouragement:

The price of Admission

A couple of nights ago, I was looking for something to read that didn't have to do with the church, or theology. My life is so centered on New Hope and what God is doing and wants to do through all of us here, that I don't really read anything else. In years past I spent a lot of time bring drawn into the stories of Mark Twain's characters, William Faulkner's Mississippi, Steinbeck's California, and the military fiction of W.E.B. Griffin and Tom Clancy - and others, lots of others.

But as time has passed, I've spent more and more time in books about church.

Well, Tuesday I went out in the garage, where boxes of books still lie packed up from our move almost two years ago (the rest are in the attic or at church) and found "Flags of Our Fathers." I remembered reading it a while back and how it helped me understand a little bit of what my own father had gone through in that era.

So I picked it up and started reading again. The author is the son of one of the men forever immortalized as the "flag raisers" on the island of Iwo Jima. After his father's death, his family finds a couple of boxes in the closet with clippings about that event. They discover things they never knew about their father's courage and his relationship with the men he shared that "mountain top experience" with that day. Great book I highly recommend.

One of the men whose life he examines had come into military service the same way my father, who passed away a couple of years ago, did. When the war broke out, this individual was in an outfit called the Civilian Conservation Corps. The author explains how it was created to help men whose families were impoverished out of that hole called the Great Depression, and served as an intro to the rigors of Army life.

Here's what caught my attention. In order to participate in the program, that would lift your family out of poverty...

You had to admit you were poor.

That you were in need.

That was the price of admission, and I suspect there were some whose pride would have kept them from participation. My father and his family must have done that, or they wouldn't have gotten helped. I'm so thankful that they did. For my father's joining the CCC was their first step up from poverty - a poverty so bitter that decades later my father would point out certain weeds and explain to his boys that "those were all we had to eat." Times were hard, but hope was available - if you paid the price of admission, and swallowed your pride and said "I need help."

Funny how similar that organization is to this one - the Church.

I've been reading with interest Ed Stetzer's posts on the future of the SBC, as well as a few of the posts examining what the findings mean.

What has amazed me frankly are those who are rushing forward to claim that declining membership doesn't mean anything is wrong. There's so much wrong that for once I do not think any church growth guru can possibly design the next Lifeway program to help us pretend to fix it.

I'm reminded of one pastor's encounter with some Nob Hill socialite who was recounting a litany of woes. The pastor patiently hear her out and suggested that the woman needed to admit she needed help and call upon God.

"Has it come to that?", she is said to have replied.

Yes brothers and sisters, it has come to that.

Contextualization

Valparaiso is a military town. Today I watched an airshow over my office. Tomorrow I'll probably do it again. With two fighter wings based here, a test wing, and Duke field nearby, we get to see almost every airplane in the inventory, and every now and then some from foreign nations.

It's not unusual on Wednesday night to have someone show up in their BDU's (soon to be ACU's). Lots of retired military lost of contractors. Okaloosa County is politically the most conservative county in the nation.

I've been rereading Ed Stetzer's work "Breaking the Missional Code". I've also been reading Redeemer Presbyterians' Church Planting Manual. My hope in doing that was to gather some insight into the best way to connect with the unchurched here. Sunday night the theme in worship was "Sent To Serve" and I tried to make the point that Jesus was seen with the worst kinds of people. We on the other hand are concerned with getting people like us.

One of the things we did as we transitioned was to relax the dress code here. It started the week after VBS when I kept wearing my khakis and Hawaiian shirts. That was 4 years ago. I'm wondering though if we didn't go just a little bit too far. If we had shirts with logos on them then possibly we could project a more "disciplined" image in a culture that might put that on their list of unspoken values.

Then too, we might need to project that as a "first impression". Giving greeters either vests or shirts might help as well.

The military influence is very strong. Maybe we've missed a chance to sync up and be more effective in drawing them in and keeping them.

Ideas?

If It's Tuesday I Must Be Reading

Tuesday is my reading day as I get a handle on where the week is headed and try to not just look at this week's opportunities but beyond that at where we as a church are headed.

Last night, I went to bed reading this again. Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community

I've reread a little more of Dan Kimball's book They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations

I have Erwin McManus' tome An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind in front of me on the desk and it's time to start rereading it.

But you know what? I'm going to read the book of Acts this afternoon and let the Spirit connect the dots.

stay tuned

Wakeup Call

Long night. Called out at 9:30 for a two hour counseling session, get back home and spend some time winding down and read... HT "Sets and Service"

“Why, if we have the timeless truth of the gospel, do we need to concern ourselves with culturally relevant ministry? Because if we don’t, the message of the gospel gets confused with the cultures of old. The unchurched think that Christianity is a retrograde culture rather than a living faith. Our job is to remove the “extra” stumbling blocks of culture without removing the essential stumbling block of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23). Unfortunately, the stumbling block of the cross has too often been replaced by the stumbling block of the church. Most people aren’t being recruited by other religions; they are being confused by the practice of ours.”

Ed Stetzer, Why is cultural relevance a big deal?

"Most people aren't being recruited by other religions; they are being confused by the practice of ours."

BOOM! Ok, I'm awake.