towards leadership and culture

pastoral staff off to the races

Is there any room for churches to compete with each other? Does competition ever result in the improvement of the church? Competition is one of the primary values in a capitalistic society. The idea is that competition between organizations pushes each other foreword and results in better products at lower costs. Is the local church improved under these conditions? Daniel J. Cladis states that, “God in perichoresis portrays to us the unity of God in three persons. There is a flow of affection, love, and unity among the three persons of the one God. Competition is alien within God.”[1]  God does not compete with himself. Do we compete with the guys down the street? Most church growth is considered transfer growth where members of one church begin attending other churches. Is this the primary result of church competition? I think so. Churches are quick to host a bigger and better VBS or sermon series. How often are they competing to out-do each other in outreach? I feel that this is a rare occurrence. Perhaps the heart of church growth is not competitive because this is one area where the Holy Spirit is doing the real work. Does the church down the street make me a better church? In many ways it does. Is the source of this improvement competition? I do not think so. The church down the street is most helpful to me when we collaborate and encourage each other. I think that this should be the modus operandi of the local church today and focus on the mission of God together.

Prayer results in action. Prayer is not a dead end spiritual discipline. Some people see prayer as an end to itself. Prayer is the act of aligning our hearts and desires with that of Christ. We enter into a conversation with Him that is more than any exchange of words. Praying with God draws us close to the heart of God so that the very pulse of our being is synced with Him. A life of prayer leads us to see things as God sees them; to be come emotionally engaged with the heart of God. This type of relationship can only have one result: action. Many of us, on the other hand, are too quick to act. We jump into our local church with the fury of an apostle and set out to change the world before consulting with God. Action must begin in prayer. Keating concludes in his book titled Intimacy with God that, “contemplative prayer with out action stagnates, and action without contemplative prayer leads to burnout or running around in circles.”[1]What is the relationship between our prayer life and our Christian service? Are the two aligned? Does the one inform the other or have we fallen into a place where action and prayer never meet? Let your prayer life drive your life of Christian living.

Are we missing a personal touch? Over the last few weeks I have been looking at different group email programs. They all strive to make email more personal.  These services call themselves engaging, social and stylish. I remember a time when I would beg for an email to show up in my inbox; today I do everything I can to keep them out! Don’t get me wrong, I love email. It is the most useful ways to communicate online but it is lacking one key thing: a personal touch.

We do this in church: substitute personal things for efficient things. There is a lot of talk in ministry circles about customer service; asking the question how are we (church staff) serving our customers (church members)? I am not sure this is the right question to be asking. You also hear things like, the bigger we get the smaller we must become. This is the right idea but how do we pull it off? Any of us could create a laundry list of idioms that highlight our desire to make a personal connection with others, with our community. The problem is that each of us have a limited capacity for personal connections. It dosent scale. So we find ourselves in a place where we create systems of scale instead of personal connections. This is the best solution… or is it?

Can we create a relationship based systems that grow as the church grows? I am talking about being relational in the way we recruit volunteers, the way we receive an offering, or about the way we teach the Bible. Many people assume that going to a big church means that you give up a certain amount of personal connection. I have spoken with those who are drawn to this ambiguity and are content to lurk in the back row. I dont think this is necessarily true. We must create relationship based systems of doing church. This is how you build a culture: it starts from the bottom up.

Church culture that values individuals does not start with the church picnic. It starts with your mail. We need to reinvent yesterday’s email mail today. People need to become excited to receive email from the church. (I am using mail as a metaphor for the many ways in which we interact with the church.) When you preach, send  a post card or create a registration form you must ask yourself: does this sound conversational? Would I talk to my mother like this? Most of what we tell people on Sunday is not from the pulpit. It is from our lobby, our parking lot and the background we choose for our worship slides. This type of communication is contagious because it is honest. It will begin to saturate your congregation and they key to relational scalability will seed itself throughout the church: honesty. Can an honest sermon title help create an honest church?

Churches are getting bigger in North America and we run the risk of creating a gospel-machine that misses the mark of creating disciples. Is it a forgone conclusion that bigger churches will be less personal?