Got your attention? I couldn’t decide if that title would catch your eye or bore you to death. Well, this is just the prolegomena anyway. Still, it must be done. And it’s interesting.

The most captivating, motivating, cage rattling and heart crushing statistic that I have heard in the last 40 years (and I’ve heard many – especially in the last 5) is the one Reggie McNeal quoted from Thom Rainer: “Less than 10% of Bridgers/Millenials/Gen Y have any connection to church.” I assume this is talking about the church in America, since Christianity in the East is exploding at a phenomenal rate.

Laying aside all of the detailed extrapolations of what that might mean, the most simple understanding is that we have completely failed to pass on the faith to the next generation – and they are just fine with it.

The most simple response is that we must do something different or the church in America is going to go the way of the church in western Europe or even the church in Australia, which is, believe it or not, in worse shape. Note the similarity of these declining behemoths. They are all Western Culture – abandoning church like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

So what must we do different? Well, who hasn’t answered that question?

Rather than give you yet another stab at explaining the Missional church – America’s conservative attempt to make the shift to a living, healthy model for a new century – I thought I would call your attention to the Education Crises in America.

Actually, I don’t want to spend time convincing you that there is a crises in the education system in America, but what educators are doing to address it, in hopes that there might be something that we can glean from them. It so happens, I am married to a burgeoning expert in education, who is finishing her Masters and has been wooed to pursue her Doctorate by the faculty of OU’s Education Department. She’s a smarty.

I find it interesting, by the way, that evangelical Christians have absolutely no problem decrying the failure of our school systems to relate in a positive way to our nations kids, but look at similar problems within the church and see the church as pristine in the process of failure. It is merely the culture that won’t listen and obey the edicts of the church.

School violence? “The church doesn’t have the bullying and abuse that goes on in the schools,” you might say. I would respond that the reason is not that the church is doing all that great at resolving violence, but that church is optional, while school is not, and most kids are opting out of church, particularly the kids that live in a violent context.

The problem with violence in schools, and most other problems, is, actually, the problem with culture. Look at the schools with the most violence. What kind of culture do those kids live in from day to day? It is not that the school has failed them, it is that the culture has made them. Yes, I think the problem is with culture, but I don’t think that the solution is merely to proclaim that cuture should conform and stand perplexed while it flows more quickly down the drain.

Look, too, at the schools that are high performing, low violence, high graduation rate institutions. Then look at the culture of the kids that are going there. They live in homes where academics are a high priority, where two parent homes are the norm and money is not an issue – in fact the wealthier the district, the better they perform.

Don’t believe me? Check out some statistics at greatschools.net. Look at the schools around you that you know and then look at their statistics. I’m not even listing examples, because they hold true almost across the board. You pick your own.

What schools are the exception to the rule, though?

The schools that are taking kids with a low performance culture and turning them into high performance students are schools that are change agents within the culture. They are able to shape the culture around them to literally shape the homes of the students.

My wife suggested to the school in which she served in Kentucky that the teachers make visits to the homes of their students in an effort to connect and partner with parents to develop the kids as students. Even though it was a standout school that was already way outperforming its culture (and reshaping it), the general response was that they had their own lives to attend to and they weren’t interested in spending the time to make that difference.

Sound familiar? Come to us. We are the institution. You come to us and do what we say and all will be well.

By the way, the paragraph before last is not an argument for home visits in churches. Rather it is an observation that if kids are going to excel, the best way that can happen is if it is highly valued in the home. The degree to which the church can partner with parents to create a strong Christian culture in the home (outside the walls of the church!) the closer we will have come to turning that corner.

The big debate in education right now is how they (the schools) are going to shift from a traditional model of academic instruction that is proving to be increasingly ineffective to a more effective model that meets students where they are and leads them where they need to be.

The parallels are obvious, if not exact.

Next, I am going to post a paper my wife wrote on the theory of shifting that I think will spark a few ideas. It’s about education, but I obviously think there are some very relevant thoughts.

What do you think so far?

This isn’t just a story of a concert. Mostly, it is, but there are few Missional observations as well. Just in case you are wondering if it is worth it to read the whole thing…

I survived the David Crowder Band concert at Cain’s Ballroom last night. I say “survived” because “historic Cain’s Ballroom” is a young person’s game. It is loaded with history, and Crowder even referred to it last night. Not only is it the original home of the Texas Playboys and western swing, but the Sex Pistols played there on their American tour, right before they became famous. Click on the history link on the home page, and you will find an amazing story there. The cutting edge up and coming punk rock band paved the way for a whole slew of other rock bands on their way up as well. Included in that list are heavy hitters like the Ramones, Van Halen, Nirvana, and the Police. Also included are pop bands like INXS, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis and the News, the Talking Heads and more.

It is also still set up as a ballroom, in which there might be dancing, though it is almost exclusively used for concerts now.

Do you get it, yet?

One small room, wide open/spring loaded wood dance floor – no chairs. Just a crowd, albeit a fairly diverse and respectful one. More on that a little later, but back to the no chairs thing. Ouch!. My feet and back were killing me after four hours, and now, having slept for about four hours, my feet and back have quit hurting but my knees and hips are aching.

As I said, it’s a young person’s game to go to a concert at Cain’s.

That’s not exclusively true, though. Last night there were kids and folks in their 50′s, or even older all hanging out together to enjoy the hilarity and musical mechanizations that is the David Crowder Band. Teenagers with knit hats, thumb rings and other piercings in places I had not previously considered options for jewelery stood alongside dads with young kids on their shoulders and professionals with nice shoes, sports coats and hair that was very intentionally and immovably messy.

He brought up an 11 year old who was having a birthday and led the crowd in singing to him.

At one point, Crowder brought out a Guitar Hero game controller that had been reprogrammed by the drummer and played a song with it. That’s not to mention the constant wit and charisma with which he entertains and motivates the crowd.

During the obligatory “pump up the crowd” portion of the concert, Crowder would ask us to sing after him and, predictably, it was not a full throated roar. To this he responded, “That was… that was… very… POLITE… Tulsa, that was very polite. Polite is not what we’re going for here, though. Rowdy. Rowdy is what we need here. Pitch has nothing to do with this. We’re not looking for pitch, we’re looking for noise. This is a night for loud and souding good has nothing to do with this. For those of us who can’t sing, this night is for us, ok?” Of course, the crowd went nuts.

We took our kids to the concert because they love DCB. Being new to Tulsa, we didn’t know the set up before, or we might not have gone. We stood for a looooong time and the show started late. The warm up acts were good, I suppose, but I had not heard of them and didn’t know their music. In light of my quickly tiring body, I was not yet “in the moment.”

Bonnie went to the bathroom, and to do that, she had to go through a side room on the Cain’s – the bar. Now the bar was not doing a brisk business last night, due to the make up of the crowd, but there were a few in there who were resting from, well frankly from being old or young. My kids were a little overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise so we made our way to the bar. Not long after we were there, we noticed a few people smoking – it was allowed there, but not in the main room. Also, there were a few drinks being consumed. We had asked if our kids were allowed there, and they said they were, so we shrugged and watched the show on the enormous projection screen. This is pre-Crowder, still.

Looking over at a few people who were drinking and smoking, my wife and I exchanged eye contact and she leaned over and said, “This is where church OUGHT to be.” I nodded. I thought about the statement made not long ago in a sermon where I had said, “I am the church. You are the church. The church is not here, it is where we are. We have to quit doing church and start being the church outside these walls.” Apparently, Crowder has begun to speak to many people outside of “church.” Bonnie told me of a conversation with a co-worker who is not a believer, but who knew of DCB. It may have been that some of these showed up to a concert attended by the otherwise very wholesome and sanctified crowd. I thought to myself that my wife had never read a book about being “Missional,” but I am pretty sure she “gets it.”

When DCB came out, we went down the hall to a side door that deposited us just to the side of the stage. We had a great view and everyone was re-energized.

After a while, the security guard saw my kids and invited them to sit just inside the security rail in front of the stage. They had a bench for kids all the way across the front so that they could see. Bonnie led my kids in. When I saw where they were sitting, I asked if I could go sit by my family. The security guard said that adults weren’t supposed to be there, only kids, but he thought my daughter wouldn’t go without someone. My wife kept waving me over, and I finally was able to explain to her that he had said, “no.” I was able to put my hand on the security guard’s shoulder and tell him not to worry that he had not broken any directives. My wife is the biggest kid you’ll ever meet.

When it comes to concerts, my wife will race, push, shove, stand and wiggle to get to the front, if she can. So here is my last camera pic of the night. It is my wife and 40 other kids sitting just inside the barrier with the best seats in the house.

That’s her in the middle of the shot – closer to center than my daughter and son. They are wearing ear plugs, by the way. That is, my children are wearing ear plugs. My wife is just soaking it all in.

One of the final things that I will mention is that DCB has called for folks attending the concert to bring socks and towels to every show. They are taking them to the local homeless shelter. The up front statement was that we didn’t want to just all get together and have a warm, fuzzy feeling as the end result. “We want to actually DO something,” they said.

Crowder told the story of the Houston concert where they had this enormous pile of towels and socks. The shelter came to pick them up and brought a couple of men who were living there to help. When they saw the stuff donated to the mission, they began to cry. Crowder spoke of being touched to the core at seeing the impact of ministering to people in the name of Jesus.

He said that when the people of God gathered in a place, there ought to be something that impacted the people among whom we live come out of us getting together, no matter where or when. That’s good stuff.

I love kids and parents spending time together. I got a couple of great moments at a recent homecoming parade. You can check out more and see these in a larger size on my photoblog.

“thanks for the drink”

“you wear it now”

So, if transitioning my church is the deal, then why Marty? Because Marty is about 10 years into a pastorate and 4 years into transitioning a 120 year old conventional church (they’ve changed about all they are going to change, at this point), they didn’t split the church (very important), Marty is probably the best source I have for practical advice when it comes to being a pastor, and, really, he has gone way out of the way to make it possible.

I’m staying at the Duren home which is full of bright, fun people. Sonya is a joy to know, and if you know Marty personally, you know it takes someone as confident and wise as Sonya to balance him. They have as good a relationship as he says on his blog.

Their kids, by the way, are all good natured and have good senses of humor. Like many home schooled kids, they are both intelligent and comfortable in conversations with people much older than they are.

Finally, Marty has opened the staff of New Bethany up to me. He has set up appointments with all of them and instructed them to be completely honest with me about what mistakes were made and how it all affected them, their ministries and the church. As Marty said, it is not of much benefit to me if I don’t know what went wrong with the changes.

Wow. I couldn’t ask for more.

No, I’ll not be blogging those stories. Those are Marty’s to tell, and I understand there will be a book coming out soon that will tell them. Obviously, I think it will be worth your time and money.

Well, it’s 5:00am Eastern and I can’t go back to sleep, so I thought I would go ahead and blog about my trip to Buford , GA.

First, the reason for the trip. My church brought me in with the express understanding that we would be changing some of the things that we do in order to reach a younger generation that was missing from our (and many other churches’) congregation. We’ve made one major change that has resulted in an influx of people, increased giving and a really great attitude in the church. That basically boils down to a change in personality in leadership and in the pulpit. Me.

That’s well and good, but it won’t make a conventional church healthy in a declining neighborhood. At least not for the long run.

As is typical, we have seen that initial surge peak and then a brief decline, which is usually followed by leveling off and then (prayerfully) steady growth.

In other words, we have seen just about all the benefit that we are going to see from just changing pastors. If we are to continue to grow from here, we are going to have to begin to make the changes that will be the difference in the long run.

Therefore, I need to understand what change is good, necessary and, most importantly, the pitfalls and challenges of change.

Marty once told me that the hardest part of change is doing something you know will disrupt people, but also knowing it was the right thing to do and that there was no other real choice. Well, the hard part was afterward, as you watch the decision play out and you second guess what you know to be the only real move you can make.

More later.

I am considering switching from Bloglines to Google Reader as my primary rss feed reader. If you don’t know what that’s all about, read this post: Pastoral Blogging, Pt. 7 (I hereby stop numbering them and will name them from now on…)

Anyway, this is not really brought on by Bloglines at all. It works well, adapts very well to the mobile internet on my Treo and is still the biggest feed reader. Google Reader is rapidly on the rise, however. The change is being brought about because My Yahoo homepage, which has been my homepage for a looooong time is trying to transition to keep up with iGoogle – another homepage, similar to My Yahoo. Well, Google also has online shareable docs, calendars, blogsearch, pictures (to compete with Yahoo owned, Flickr) and, of course, this reader. That’s just to get you started – there’s ALOT more.
Well, I am already using Google for those other things, excepting Flickr, so when Yahoo tries to force me to shift to its new beta My Yahoo page and I find that my email and fantasy sports teams are unsupported modules at the new version, so I switch back, but not without a hassle.

On a whim I check out iGoogle (available with free google account) and start adding modules. Guess what? I can check my email from the iGoogle homepage. Yeah my Gmail (google mail) but also MY YAHOO MAIL. I can check my Yahoo mail from the google homepage but I can’t from the new My Yahoo homepage. Errr…. Just a suggestion, Yahoo, be ready to roll before you start something like this.

Anyway, since it looks like I am going to be moving over to Google for a homepage, I might integrate my reader into iGoogle as well.

As I went through that process I found that I can import all of my feeds as they are from bloglines. In Bloglines, go to “edit” and at the bottom of the left hand column, click export feeds. Save the “export.opml” file to your hard drive and then upload it in the Google Reader. That simple.

Regardless of whether or not you switch, however, you might want to claim your feed at bloglines. It’s under My Account -> Publisher Tools. You need to find your feed, integrate some code and then authenticate.

In a mostly unrelated topic, I settled on an audio plugin to help with post Frank Page’s Q&A session with Tulsa Metro. It is PodPress, and it gives you tons of stats about downloads vs. plays vs. feed reads. Really good stuff, if you want to upload some audio. I tried another one, but it didn’t work. PodPress is low maintenance and clearly the way to go. it you want to get a little more high maintenance, you can list your audio at iTunes with Podpress, but even if you don’t, PodPress creates an rss feed that people can use to subscribe to audio that you upload. Bottom line: if they are on your blog, they can subscribe to your podcast, and if they aren’t, they are not likely to find you at iTunes because that is like a needle in a haystack. Of course, this plugin is for WordPress blogs.

Be good. I’m going to see Marty next week, so I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll blog, set some stuff to drop while I’m gone or just take some time off. Most likely the latter, but we’ll see.

A few pics from Jenks High School’s Homecoming Parade last week. Check out more at my photoblog or even my separate flickr account.

Old Cowboy

You wear it now

Thanks for the drink

Below is a graphic representation of a the continuum of perspective given to us by Dr. Minatrea. If the picture gets “squeezed” out of perspective and you have a hard time viewing it, right click on it and then select “view image.” This should take you to another page that will have the .jpg all to itself without columns to squeeze it. It depends on the width of your screen as to whether or not this will affect you.

Additionally, Dr. Minatrea revealed some research into the growth of churches relating to their perspective. He said that he did research based on the hypothesis that if you invert the perspective of a church from 75% internally focused/25% externally focused to a 25% internally focused/75% externally focused that it would be healthy and growing. The research showed that such a church would initially rise in growth, but then would plateau and decline much the same as the one that leans more toward internal focus.

The church that grows consistently and healthily is one with a 50%/50% balance of internal and external focus. We need both, but each in proportion.

What do you think?

As promised, the Frank Page audio is now available here.

I particularly appreciated Dr. Page’s genuine sincerity. He is not a politician, and I mean that in the best way.

Pay close attention to the answers Dr. Page gives in the first grouping of questions. Right out of the box, he says some honest things about the person the SBC chooses to succeed him as president: their motivations and their representation of the SBC to the world.

He does mention “Younger Leaders” who were demanding a “place at the table.” Of course, that was interesting to me, since the old SBC Bloggers (the reformers, anyway) consistently eschewed places of service for the sake of integrity and because, frankly, we realized that we were more divisive than was good for the SBC, were we to be placed in leadership. Well, that was my view, anyway, and I perceived it to be the view of my compatriots.(1)

I was unable to follow up on that statement at the time, but did email Dr. Page and mention this to him, asking him if there were bloggers that were “demanding a seat at the table.” Dr. Page emailed me back with this statement:

“I am happy to say that the young guys I have seen demanding a share of power are not amongst the bloggers I know.”

I am grateful for that clarification, since it was frequently the accusation used against us when we were all still in the SBC Blogging business.

In the middle of the Q&A, there was a question posed about an IMB missionary’s personal situation. Dr. Page was asked to address it, which he did graciously. After he answered the question – off the microphone – he was asked if he could help someone in the association talk to someone at the IMB to make sure the situation was right and he agreed to set up a meeting. I was a bit uncomfortable with that being brought out in this setting, but thought Dr. Page handled it well without committing to one side of the story. On the other hand, the person asking probably didn’t know that the session was being recorded, much less put on the internet.

Anyway, it is what it is, and we thank Dr. Page for his time and candor.

Check for the audio at the bottom of the post.

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(1) Just so you know, I have served now in the BGCO and am serving the TMABC. Since I no longer blog SBC politics regularly, I also no longer eschew positions offered. Since I am now much lower profile, though, no national level positions are being offered, so that has all worked out well for everyone, I suppose.

Q & A in Frank Page [ 31:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I am not blogging the Spiritual Disciplines today – in spite of starting a sermon series last Sunday and inviting my entire congregation to check my blog on Tuesday for the SD posts.

Frankly, I am at the busiest point of my ministry career – that is EVER in ministry – and I haven’t had time to think through the discipline of Guidance. I will throw a link to all the other posts on Spiritual Disciplines, and one to Joe Kennedy’s blog where the full list of the SD bloggers can be found.

Meanwhile, today is my daughter’s 11th Birthday. Happy Birthday, Hannah. Daddy loves you more than life.

Meanwhile, I am reading a bit more and meeting with other pastors in the area more as well. This has helped me think through some of our church issues and has sharpened me considerably.

I am headed down to Georgia to pick the collective brain of the staff of New Bethany Baptist Church in Buford, pastored by Marty Duren. That’s next week.

Finally, I have created a Facebook page, which you can see by clicking the picture on the placeholder at the top of the sidebar. I know that I am late coming to that game, but I can say that I beat Marty who created his own page, sans picture, merely a few hours after I created mine and put the placeholder in the sidebar of my blog. Coincidence???

I have procured the audio of Frank Page’s Q&A with Tulsa Metro, and hope to have it up later in the week. I have to rip it to an mp3 and then find a good plugin to use with WordPress, so that you can listen in. If anyone has a suggestion for a plugin, I am open.

Now you know what’s going on in my world.