Let it die

Kill it or keep going. In the business world the decision to kill a project is very difficult. Business “shrinks” call it “escalation of commitment”. With just a little more work we can fix this thing. We’re this far into it, we’ve got to make this work. We have a lot of man hours behind this effort. What will the guy upstairs say if we pull the plug on this one? We can never get funding again….

What about churches? Have you seen the same mindset applied to “sacred cows” in your church that should have been killed, but you keep seeing more time, more money, more resources, more calendar thrown at them to prop them up for one more year? Wonder what the guy upstairs thinks when he sees us being bad stewards of His resources.

 

New Home

Check out the new home for my blog: www.jimsthirdspace.com

 

Trying to think creatively – Part Two

Mark Twain said, “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.”  For most people this is very hard. The more you try to think differently the more rigid you become in your thinking.  Ever been to an offsite meeting?  Taking the same people to a new location, putting them into a room that looks like the room back at the office  and telling them to think out-of-the box usually doesn’t generate  a whole lot of ideas different than what you get when you stay at home.

So switch things up.  Change the environment drastically.  Go to an offsite location and do your work outside, on the deck, by the pool.  No business casual attair, go with shorts and flops and goofy hats.  You have to jolt your brain into thinking with a different set of rules.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs in science have occurred not in the lab, but when the scientist was away from his work, chillin, and looked at his problem from a completely different perspective.  Only when the brain is confronted  with a stimulus that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception.  A re-oriented perception is jet fuel to creativity.

Why should I care about this?  Benjamin Franklin said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. ”  If we are going to do the same things in church, the way we always have and expect different results, we’re insane.  We have to be willing to examine the why and the how of everything we do as a church with fresh eyes.  We have to re-orient our brain and get creative to impact a kingdom that is radically different than it was 50 years ago, 5 years ago, 5 months ago.

What do you think, which line is longer?

 

New location, new good stuff

Jim’s Third Space has moved to www.jimsthirdspace.com.

 

Needed – spiritual blacksmiths!

A friend gave me the word for this post. It is taken directly from the daily devotional publication, The Word, July 4, 2008:

“The Bible says. “There were no blacksmiths in the land of Israel in those days. The Philistines wouldn’t allow them for fear they would make swords and spears for the Hebrews…. none of the people of Israel had a sword or spear, except for Saul and Jonathan” (1Sa 13:19-22 NLT).

To keep the Israelites in slavery, the Philistines removed all the blacksmiths. It was a devasting blow. Blacksmiths made swords to be used in battle and sickles to be used in the harvest field. Can you imageine the effect that would have on a nation? Satan’s tactics haven’t changed. His goal is still to silence the modlers and shapers of a new culture – a kingdom culture. Why do we need spiritual blacksmiths? Because they understand how to shape raw material into something God can use. They not only shape it, they sharpen it. All great leaders have emerged from raw material. And tomorrow’s leaders are walking around today in raw form just waiting for a spiritual blacksmith to come along…… Spiritual blacksmiths aren’t only needed in the local church, they’re also needed in the nation to reshape our culture. We need “influencers” who can reform the ranks of business, education, government and media….

It’s time for the spiritual blacksmiths in the land to break free from the constraints of the Philistines and return to the ancient craft of shaping men and women for God’s service. The battle is too big for Saul and Jonathan alone!”

 

Building Community

We’ve been on a grand adventure this summer at church with our Summer Vacation emphasis, Discipling Through Community, (see my post June 10th). This past Sunday, June 29th we continued to see how people are hungry for a feeling of community, of belonging to a larger family. We had a picnic. Nothing high tech, nothing that flashy, just bouncy houses, a dunking booth, food and squirt guns. We mixed in a lot of food, some music, threatening weather, and did I already say, squirt guns.

Around 550 people came! The really cool part was how many were brand new faces, people I didn’t know. Someone remarked that the crowd looked like a community outing, not an internal church event, because there were so many people that were new. Everyone had a great time. People said, “we need to do this every month”. Every month would be a challenge, but the message was clear. People want more opportunities to spend time together and have fun. We want to hang out with people older than we are. We want to hang out with people that are younger than we are. We want to hear your stories, we want to be a part of your life.

We don’t know where this is going to end. We’re just going to keep providing opportunities for people to build community with each other, and let God do the rest.

 

Gasping for air….

I’ve been gasping for air as you can see from the lack of recent posts. Back on 5/31 and 6/1 I posted about Building Community, and a grand experiment we were employing at my church. I’m gasping to say, that it has been a smashing success so far. As a staff we felt a participation number of 100 – 140 would be considered a win….then it happened. On the sign-up Sunday before we launched on Wednesday, 350+ signed up! When we realized the size of the sign-up for Summer Vacation, we went into overdrive to handle the crowd. Tables were rented, additional supplies were purchased, more childcare workers were hired, new support teams were recruited, and we started.

People showed up! Lots of people….and they all had a ball. The buzz has been unreal. Everyone is talking about Summer Vacation. More people have signed up since the first week and tomorrow we’ll be jamming to summer beach tunes and making new friends.

People were starving for community. Cross generational Summer Family units were created, and it was a huge win.

Here is a clip that shows how much fun it can be, to build community, laugh a lot, make new friends, and study some scripture in a world of happy chaos: Summer Vacation Video

Pray for this crazy team of leaders I’m a part of, as we help people connect with each other, and connect with God.

 

Building Community – Part Two

Here are the next five community limiters:

6. Be physically present but mentally absent
When talking to someone, pretend to listen by nodding your head and saying “uh huh” while you are really thinking about what show comes on TV later that night. Basically, just don’t engage anyone on any level. After all, you’re just there to put in your “time” and then get on with your life.
7. Don’t share a meal
If you goal is to avoid community, this step is of the utmost importance, don’t ask people to lunch! Sharing a meal is an intimate thing that creates deeper relationships. So, when someone asks you to lunch fake a stomach ulcer or something, just get out of it.
8. Stay very, very busy
The busier you are, especially on a Sunday, the less time you have to “deal” with people. In fact, attempt to be so busy that when speaking to someone you never even stop walking past them as you say hello.
9. Make your default response “everything is great”
People will always ask how you are doing. Make sure that you have your “default” answer ready so that when they ask you are ready to say, “everything is great!” This must be your default response, otherwise you might actually let on that your life is not perfect, or worse, that you are struggling. This colossal mistake could lead to deeper conversation and deeper relationship. If you are going to really avoid community while in church, this is probably your best weapon.
10. Don’t show up
This is definitively your best method of avoiding community overall because there is no community where there are no people.

 

Building Community

We’re exploring ways to build community at my church. We get mixed signals from people that attend our church about the friendliness of the people. Maybe muddy-signals-based-on-longevity is a better descriptor.

New people walking in the door tell us we’re very friendly, that they felt welcomed, that people were very nice to them, all good things. More established attenders, (the more established you are the more entrenched you are and the more you are connected to other entrenched attenders), will comment:” Who are you talking about?”, “I don’t know that family”, “I wish there was a way to get to know the younger people”, not very good feedback.

To help create opportunities for creating community we’ve started doing some mixer things on Wednesday around the mid-week-church-meal. The Wednesday mixer opportunities will help only a sub-group of the church. This summer we’re taking it to a new level. We’re hooking our Sunday services to our Wednesday night experience, with Wednesdays being cross generational, very interactive and include everyone in your family, except for the youngest preschoolers. Artificial summer family units are being created to mix people up. It’s going to be fun.

With all that we’re doing to create community, I think it would be good to look at some things that limit or tear down community. Here are the first five community building limiters that we can experience during a Sunday morning worship service time (the time when most churches have the largest number of people on campus:

1. Keep conversations short.
   You are busy, you have a lot to deal with in your life, if you talk to someone you might get close to them and that takes time and energy that you don’t have. Just keep it short and sweet, don’t bother talking about anything more than the weather. If you don’t know a person is hurting, then you don’t have to do anything about it.
2. Always sit in your “assigned” seat
   By always sitting in the same seat you always sit around the same people. These folks know the deal, and stick to the appropriate 30 second conversations: weather, sports, how the new preacher is doing, etc. Also, this keeps you from having to venture out, meet new people, and possibly sit next to someone you aren’t familiar with.
3. Avoid new people
   It’s one thing to deal with all the people that you already know at church, but it’s another to actually meet new people. Seriously, you aren’t good with names; you don’t have the time, or the energy, so just walk right past anyone you don’t know. After all, they won’t notice that you totally avoided them.
4. Come in late
   Don’t overlook the beauty of this one. By coming in late you totally avoid even the 30 second conversations. And (bonus), you avoid the new people! It just makes life easier.
5. Leave immediately after the service (or early)
   This has the same benefits as coming in late, with the added benefit of getting on the road more quickly to beat those other churches to eat. This way you get out of that crowded church building so that you can go sit with your people and eat a meal. If you add this method with the coming in late method you could go to a church for years and never meet anyone.

Do any of these sound familiar? Tomorrow is Sunday. Look around and see how many people are using some of these five community limiters. Take a look at yourself. You may be surprised at how you may have fallen into a routine that employs some of these five. Tomorrow I’ll share five more.

 

Reggisms – Part 2

Some more Reggisms:

• Talking about the future will lead Satan to crank up enough background noise that we cannot hear God.
• Christianity is the fasted growing religious/spiritual group in the world today:
• 175,000 new Christians in the world each day
• 2% of people in apartment complexes attend any church.
• There is not one county in America that has grown in percentage of Christians to the total population in the past decade.
• The “post-congregationlist” category is at 5% of the population and will go to 30% in the next 20 years.
• Newtonian physics was the basis for modernity while quantum physics is the basis for postmodernity. It teaches that inner space is just as vast as outer space.
• Humankind likes to work off prediction and planning. Most of the stuff that impacts our congregations happens outside our meetings and it is stuff that we cannot plan for.
• People who live by a missionary set of values cannot abide those with a “club member” set of values.
• The bandwith is expanded in a missional church: how many conversations are we having, how much life interface is taking place, how is our community service component, how many community leaders are we praying for, how many teachers have we partnered with, how many community groups have used our facility?

This is a link to a Reggie video clip. It’s not a short clip:

http://www.rca.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=3766&srcid=2705