Dave Ferguson – Session 3

Here's how we count today: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

This wasn't always the case. 1000 years ago we counted this way: I, II, III, IV, V…

Why the change? Fibbonaci was the mathematician behind the change. The change came because of a question/problem that could not be solved using the system in place. The math problem concerned rabbit reproduction. He ended up having to create an entirely new system in order to solve the problem. By solving the problem of rabbit reproduction, Fibbonaci forever changed the way we do math and count.

Acts 1:8 "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth."

How do you think the disciples reacted to this proclamation by Jesus? How do we react? Either we chalk that up to grandiose, naïve dreams that are nice to talk about but which we know will never happen, or we admit that there is something fundamentally wrong with our systems, and that we have to start counting differently in order to solve this problem.

Fibbonaci gave us the problem of rabbit reproduction. Jesus gave us the problem of rapid reproduction.

Rodney Stark believes that Christianity grew from approximately 1000 Christians in 40 CE to approximately 31 million Christians in 350 CE (Cities of God, 67).

How did this happen?

What's it going to take for each of us to see rapid reproduction in our own churches?

We need to start with a big dream. Jesus gave us a big dream in Acts 1:8.

1. Dream BIG
   
2. Talk about that dream all the time. People need to know about it.
   
3. Dream big, but start small (2 Timothy 2:2)
   
   1. Start with yourself – we reproduce who we are; if we want people to be intimate with God, we have to be intimate with God
      
   2. Reproduce leaders – for small groups and teams
      
   3. Reproduce artists – for larger worship gatherings
      
4. Set goals
   

   
   

Characteristics of big dreams

1. The bigger the dream, the more profound the questions you are going to ask.
   
2. Big dreams will begin to change your prayers. You become more dependent on God. There is no way that you on your own can accomplish what you feel God wants you to do.
   
3. Big dreams are contagious.
   

How do you know when you have the culture of rapid reproduction?

1. When you're more concerned with the lost than the found; Jesus left the 99 sheep to go in search of the 1 lost sheep
   
2. When you begin to love the edge (risk) more than the center (safety)
   
3. When you begin preferring the going more than the staying
   

One of CCC's sayings: Treat them like Christians until they realize that they're not.

Bill Hybels – Session 4

There was once a community of people who were completely devoted to God. They were so devoted to God that when He told them to go, they went. They would do whatever God told them to do. In this community there was a radical love for one another that broke down every kind of wall there is. Each member used his or her spiritual gifts, and they knew that they were dependent not only on God, but on one another as well. They believed that God could perform signs and wonders, and because of this, they regularly stood in awe. The people in this community of faith burned with passion to take the gospel to their world. When they were threatened and told to stop, they met in an open room and prayed not for God to stop the Romans, but for courage to spill their blood. There was once a community of faith like this.

Hybels' Counsel for those thinking about Church Planting

• Understand the difference between a hankering and a holy discontent.
  
  • A hankering doesn't last. A true holy discontent cannot be put out. God has stirred something in you that cannot be quieted.
    
  • David – he got the point where he could not take any more trash talking by Goliath about his God.
    
  • Bob Pierce (World Vision) – He saw children dying because of a lack of food. This wrecked him for the rest of his life, and he decided right then and there to devote the rest of life towards providing food for children.
    
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. – His dream for racial reconciliation eventually killed him.
    
  • If church planting is simply a hankering, then when the hard times come, you will quit. If it is a holy discontent, then nothing anyone can do to you will stop you.
    
• Understand how God has gifted you.
  
  • Who's got what gifts?
    
  • Rank order of giftedness matters.
    
  • There are times when we have to do lots of things to keep things going, but we need to make a habit in the beginning of doing things based on our giftedness.
    
• Understand the connection between leadership and faith.
  
  • We walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7)
    
  • There are going to be countless times when the money is not there, the people are not there, and problems are all around us. If we walk by sight, we are going to lose heart.
    
  • We have to walk by faith, believing that God will do what only he can do between here and there. That's what faith is.
    
  • Faith is walking in the direction that God has told you to go, believing that somewhere between here and there, he is going to show up in power and He's going to help you do what He has called you to do.
    
  • Moses and the Red Sea
    
  • Joshua and the Jordan River
    
  • Jesus at the wedding in Canaan (faith of the wine tasters)
    
• Figure out early on if you're going to take the high road or the low road.
  
  • More than anything, people desire for their leaders to have integrity and character
    
• Ask God to let you finish with a few of the people with whom you started.
  
  • It's naïve to believe that everyone you start with will be here in twenty years, but ask God to let you finish with two or three of them.

Ed Stetzer – Session 2

Missional DNA



Acts 16:9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.



Come over to Macedonia and help us.

• Come Over
  
  • What/where is our Macedonia? Forty times in the gospel of John refers to himself as "sent." We are a sent people, and so we are to GO. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you (John 20:21). John 3:16 leads to John 20:21. The NT is a book about a God who sends, who then sends his people on mission.
    
  • Paul had a vision for a people. We have to have a vision for a people, not a vision for a church. The how of church planting is going to be influenced by the who, when and where of church planting.
    
  • We have to bring Christ, not just a church. We are planting the gospel that gives birth to a church.
    
• Help
  
  • What does "help" mean? The most important help we can give people in our neighborhood is to help them understand that it's all about Jesus.
    
  • The answer can be found in the text. It was the preaching and the proclamation of the Gospel. It's at this point that Luke begins writing "we" instead of "they." It was at this point that he joined them in this "helping."
    
  • 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 Here we find words like persuade, compel, appeal, implore, reconcile, ambassador.
    
  • The totality of the Christian message is not that we can be saved from hell. It is much bigger than that. However, if at any point we remove a bloody Cross from our message, then what we are planting is not a church.
    
  • Francis Dubose, God Who Sends
    
  • If being missional is reduced to simply helping people with their physical needs, then this is not the complete help that they need.
    
  • We must BE, DO, & TELL the Gospel (good news). We must do all of these in a relevant way.
    
  • Relevance is a tool. The Gospel is the goal. We must not mix those two up. Relevance should never be our goal.
    
• Us
  
  • The "us" here refers to a lost world. Lost people matter to God.
    
  • Augustine: "My heart was restless until it had found its rest in Thee."
    
  • People have a God-shaped hole.
    
  • John Knox: "Give me Scotland or I die."
    

Ways to Determine Whether Relevance Has Become the Goal Rather than the Tool

1. When we focus on personal transformation and not gospel transformation. Gospel transformation will always include personal transformation. The same is not always true for personal transformation.
   
2. When our sermons are so practical that they do not contain the gospel. We should not preach any message that would not be true if Jesus had not died on the Cross. This is what separates us from Dr. Phil.
   
3. When we talk more about practical than we do about biblical. Do we believe that the Bible shape who we are?
   
4. When our outreach demeans those who are preaching the gospel.
   
5. When our approach makes us the hero rather than Jesus.
   
6. When personal evangelism is an oxymoron at our church.
   
7. When Invest and Invite never leads to Evangelize.
   
8. When attendance is a bigger value than conversion.
   
9. When the cross gets less focus than our church.
   
10. When not offending seekers is more important than telling the gospel.
    

National New Church Conference

This conference was going on at the same time as I was in Atlanta for Q, so I'm grateful that they have the audio from their main sessions available for download. You can download them here. I've listened to two of them so far, and both have been very thought provoking. I thought I'd take some notes on both of them.

Donald Miller - Storytelling

Jason sent me this article from Christianity Today.

Marketing Tips from Christian Community Church

Dave Ferguson, the lead pastor at Community Christian Church, shares the three keys to creating a big weekend at his church.

1. Marketing - If mailing postcards, Dave recommends mailing to each household 1-3 pieces for awareness and 4-6 pieces for action. Recently, they tried something new and launched a web-based campaign and also used door hangers and yard signs.

2. Inviting - CCC challenges its people to commit to bring three people.

3. Wow! - Lastly, they make sure to create a “Wow!” experience for first time guests.

Marketing Tips from Fellowship Church

Some excerpts:

• Banners and signage outside the church are worth every penny. Many visitors have told us that they saw our signs and logged on to our Miami campus website for more information.
• We made sure the front page of [the website] is very easy to navigate with important information prominently displayed, and also included content that would give them a taste of the Fellowship Miami experience.
• Because of a press release we filed two weeks ago with national and local news agencies, the Miami Herald was on site covering our Kickoff Weekend.
• Nothing beats one-on-one dialogue. Whether we are in local stores, restaurants or just waiting in line somewhere, we strike up conversations with the people around us. Building relationships within the community is the most successful form of outreach available.
• Our staff personally calls each first time visitor. And we’re making a special effort to call in the evenings so we can actually talk to the visitors, answer questions and invite them back.
• We know that our overall vision for this environment will take time to achieve. But we are taking immediate, easy steps (and lots of volunteer elbow grease) to upgrade the campus by planting additional landscaping and applying fresh paint. We’ve brought in some more modern wood tables for hospitality areas. We’re adding music, Cuban coffee and local pastries to create a welcoming atmosphere. And we’re fanatical about keeping the facility sparkling clean!
• A positive attitude and huge smile are tremendous assets in attracting people to any church. We have a team of floaters (greeters) who circulate throughout the entrance and areas outside the worship center, so visitors usually are engaged in several conversations before they sit down. The parking lot entrance is flanked by greeters who wave at passing traffic and incoming cars. In fact, we just talked to some visitors recently who said they turned around and came back because we waved at them!

More on Church Marketing

Here are some more links I've found. Most are from Church Relevance.

10 Big Web Photography Mistakes

15 Questions for the Perfect Postcard

How to Get what your Postage Pays For

Online Children’s Ministry Check-In System

Three Lessons about Owning a Website

Some useful tips on domain names.

Influencing Culture - Gabe Lyons

Gabe Lyons is the co-founder of The Fermi Project, the organization that put on Q. This is a great read if you'd like to understand more about the Church's role in shaping culture.

Review of Cities of God

Here's a review of Rodney Stark's newest book, Cities of God. I just ordered it, and am looking forward to reading it.

Copyright Issues

Note: I haven't listened to this yet, so I'm not sure how good it is.

Free Creative Content from LifeChurch.tv

Church = a self-theologizing community?

I like what I've been reading by this guy! This is the second part of his review of Breaking the Missional Code. Stetzer and Putnam refer to three types of emergent churches: relevants, reconstructionists, and revisionists. They appreciate and promote the first two types, but warn against the third type. You can read more here.

Bolger is not so sure that being a revisionist is so bad. (Actually, he doesn't like the term revisionist, so he uses a self-theologizing, which is pretty different). Here's what he writes:

In the nineteenth century, Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn contributed a new idea to missiology -- that of the three-self formula. They advocated that a new church work or mission, if it is to become indigenous, must be self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing. My colleague, Charles Van Engen, mission theologian (and former President of the Reformed Church of America), advocates a fourth 'self' -- self-theologizing. Why his addition to the formula?

A new community must be self-theologizing or it will become nominal. Self-theologizing, how? To become an indigenous expression of faith, a community must form its life around scripture, engaging their culture within a praxis-reflection orientation. In other words, the community goes deep into the word in order to answer the questions of their culture. They 'practice' those answers in the world, and then reflect biblically again. Instead of self-theologizing, however, what frequently happens is that new faith communities are given a theology that answers nineteenth-century questions, or sixteenth-century questions, or fifth-century questions. These historical works will undoubtedly be helpful, but they will inevitably leave some questions unanswered. Each context presents its own issues. If the deep questions of a culture go unanswered, then Christians will seek answers elsewhere, without reference to scripture, thus inviting in nominality.

What Stetzman and Putman call revisionist I see as self-theologizing: reading scripture in light of a culture's questions. These emerging "self-theologians" copy the example of historical theologians engaging their particular culture) but they do not necessarily copy their responses.

Bounded and Centered

This post is a review by Ryan Bolger on Breaking the Missional Code, by Ed Stetzer and David Putnam. In the review he critiques their use of Christian and non-Christian, believing that it implies "that that church is inherently good and unchurched is correspondingly bad." Instead, he believes that a better language might be in order. He prefers the terms "bounded and centered."

Tim Keller gives the following descriptions of bounded and centered sets...

In mathematics, there are two different ways to define a 'set'. One is a 'bounded set'. A point is in the set if it is related properly to (i.e. if it is inside) the boundary. Another is the 'centered set'. A point is in the set if it is related properly to (i.e. if it is in alignment with or moving toward) the center of the set. Organizations that are 'bounded sets' put great emphasis on the lines of demarcation 'around the circle' – at all points. 1) A person cannot work with or be part of the organization in any meaningful sense without the rite of initiation and the adoption of extensive standards which set the person apart. 2) Differences between members and the outside world are emphasized. 3) Membership is defined in terms of common beliefs and policies and folkways that are pretty extensive. Organizations that are centered-sets put more emphasis on central goals and commitments. 1) A person can work with the organization as long as it shares basic goals and is willing to work for them. 2) Differences between members and the outside world are not emphasized. 3) Membership is defined in terms of active participation toward common tasks and goals.

Bolger says it this way: "What matters is not whether we are in or out (churched or unchurched), but instead it is our direction that matters – are we moving closer to the King (or Kingdom) or moving further away?"

He goes on to say:

Why is that important? Well, given our knowledge of history, we see that some churches do not exhibit kingdom aspects -- they do not manifest the fruits of the spirit, nor do they stand for justice in the world. Using Hiebert’s rubric, these churches would be moving away from the center. Conversely, some unchurched people serve the poor (among many other good things) and are moving in God’s direction. Again, we measure what we value, and church, apart from kingdom activities, becomes a club, a lifestyle enclave, a meaningless endeavor. Indeed, the church is dependent on its mission for its very identity. So, kingdom and movement are better markers of faithfulness to the gospel than are churched and unchurched.

My friend Linda Bergquist first explained bounded and centered sets to me about four years ago. I have to admit that at first I really didn't understand what she was talking about. However, as I have been placed by God into cultures that were either apathetic or hostile to the gospel and to church, I have begun to see the importance of this.

Follow Me

Mark Batterson gives some thoughts on the simplicity of Jesus' message of discipleship.

Just wanted to share a thought. I've been reflecting on the simplicity of Jesus' invitation: follow me. That invitation is repeated twenty times in the gospels.

Find Your Own Calcutta

Can I share a goal? I never want NCC to feel like a church. I want us to feel like a movement. The church is way too static these days! The church is called to knock down the gates of hell. The church is the vehicle whereby heaven invades hell.

That is why the world resonated with Mother Teresa. She brought heaven to a hell hole. By the way, I love the advice Mother Teresa gave when someone asked them how they could make a difference with their life the way she'd made with hers. Mother Teresa said, "Find Your Own Calcutta."

Rethinking Discipleship

The National New Church Conference was taking place at the same time I was at Q. David Putnam, co-author of Breaking the Missional Code, taught a breakout session. Here are the notes. They're very good.

Missional Families - Bob Roberts

Each person has to determine how they are called to incarnationally live out the Gospel and the principles of the Kingdom in their own context of work, neighborhood, community, nation and world.