I have been driven from my bloggy slumber by this awesome and short two minute video on the Missional Church.  If you already get the difference between a missional church and an institutional church, repost it for others to share.  If you don’t get it, then by all means, spend the two minutes to watch.  It is as simple a representation as you might possibly ever see & hear.

First seen by me on Todd Littleton’s blog, but then seen on Ed Stetzer’s blog just a few minutes later.

Yes, I read Todd’s blog before I read Ed’s.  Sorry, Ed. ;)

Last year, the BGCO (Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma) invited Ed Stetzer to speak to leaders as part of our ongoing evangelism push.

Missional Leadership from Ed Stetzer on Vimeo.

Here’s the outline to the video:

Missional Leadership

1) Reconsideration of Leadership

a) From superman to everyone
b) From church to kingdom
c) From me to we
d) From personal power to people empowerment

2) Rejection of Clergification

a) From three tiers to one mission
b) From “called to the ministry” to “called to ministry”
c) From “called to missions” to “sent on mission”
d) From exceptional to ordinary
e) From “priests” to a “priesthood of believers”

3) Renewed focus on mission

a) From “full service” to “simple mission”
b) From “pay, pray, and get out of the way” to “join God on His mission”
c) From decisionism to disciple making
d) From “mission statement” to “Jesus mission”
Luke 4
Luke 19:10

4) Realignment of priorities

a) God is a missionary God
b) I personally join Him on mission – modeling
c) I lead others to join Him on mission – leadership
d) I equip others – multiplication

Found originally at: The Lifeway Research Blog

Before I get to the steps, let me hasten to say that they are not original to me, but I heard them in a recorded sermon almost 20 years ago.  You might note, then, they were quite memorable.  Sadly, I can’t remember the pastor who preached the sermon, so as much credit as I can give, I have given…

1.  Surrender to obedience.  You might note that the title of this post is NOT 3 easy steps to knowing and doing God’s will.  There are not many things more difficult that to surrender to obedience for the human will, but to know and do God’s will, it is essential that you agree to do whatever it is God tells you to do.

We can not expect that God is going to gently guide us through life if we are consistently rebellious to His direction.

2.  Seek diligently.  Frequently.  Constantly.  Ask God to reveal what He wants you to do.  God is not capricious and does not hide from those who seek Him.  If you tune your heart to Him, He will reveal Himself to you.

3.  Relax.  If you surrender to do what God asks you to do no matter what it is and you consistently pursue the leadership – He will get you where He wants you to go.

It’s not complex.  It’s just not easy.

Has it really been 2 1/2 weeks since I last posted? And that just a video link?

Hmm…

Well, I haven’t lost my passion for writing.  Far from it.  I really miss it.

But I have been consumed with a fascinating task – that of leading my church through a major transition.

I plan on blogging this as well – particularly the specifics of the form to which we aspire – since I think it will be relevant for the majority of those who still drop in on this blog.

The transition?  From a Sunday School/Program primary structure to a Small Group/Corporate Worship primary structure.  Which is to say that we will still have some Sunday School and some programs, but they will be secondary in the self perception, intentionality and processes of who we are.  We are looking to change our DNA.

This is opposed, you might surmise, to simply adding Small Groups as yet another program to the church in hopes that this program will be the one that revitalizes a flailing church.

Well, again, I’m going to blogging about that in the future, and it is my great passion to do so, but I haven’t had the time.  My energies have been dissipated in the various tasks involved in actually doing that thing.

PS – You could pray for us.  It is difficult to accomplish such a change and we are laboring to do a great work.  Thanks!

A while ago, I posted a great video as pt. 1 of a Missional Conversation between Ed Stetzer and David Fitch, but I never saw the follow up videos.

I found them today and wanted to share, so here are all of them:

Ed Stetzer & David Fitch – a missional conversation from Missional Tribe on Vimeo.

Pt 2:

Pt. 3

Enjoy!!!

I’m really excited about Doug Baker coming to Oklahoma and manning the helm of our state’s Baptist Paper.  Once disregarded by me as a “newsletter” full of the latest “get on the bus” propaganda, Baker brings credibility and an unflinching resolve to The Baptist Messenger, allowing him to take on the real issues facing churches.

Exemplifying that, The Messenger has launched a podcast and from Union University’s conference on the future of denominationalism from earlier this month, Baker takes on understanding the Emergent/Emerging church in his second podcast – Emerging Southern Baptists: The ECM comes to Nashville.

Excellent voices in an exceptional forum.

In speaking of Missional churches, Dr. Mark Devine cuts through to the heart of much that we are working through at Skelly:

Increasingly we live in a nation that is made up of multiple subcultures, and that matters because culture affects meaning.  Now if you pick me up and you drop me into Bangkok, Thailand, you don’t have to tell me that culture matters in the conveyance of meaning, but lesser cultural discontinuities can be traversed here in our own world: crossing the street, crossing town.

And they matter because it changes – it undercuts our ability to anticipate the meaning that will be conveyed when we speak and when we act in certain ways.  And so given that, any who want to see the Gospel advanced must take that into consideration and begin thinking like missionaries here at home (emphasis mine) in ways that, for example, Southern Baptists have been thinking for decades overseas.

Yes, churches are not – they may not behave in a Missional way if they do not realize that this changing cultural context is part of the explanation for why they’re having difficulty growing why they’re having difficulty retaining their own children when they turn 17, 18 years of age.

Because these subcultures we’re dealing with are not just geographical.  There are subcultures that involve communities and networks that people can inhabit.  It causes the generational friction and difficulties to come upon us quicker and with more tangible results in terms of just communicating what we mean to people.

In a followup question asking Dr. Devine to differentiate between Missional and Attractional churches, he had this to say:

Attractional churches focus disproportionate amount of their energies on what goes on inside their church buildings or on their campus – the programs, the worship services, the various groups that meet, recreation, sports, whatever it might be – and then they advertise using various means to woo people, both unchurched believers and unbelievers, into that realm.

And so once they cross the threshold of that ministry setting, that church, much of the work of church growth is done because those that they want to attract will find themselves being helped by these ministries and so forth, and they will stay and they will stick.

Part of what the Emerging Church is saying is that, increasingly, those that we want to reach cannot be reached that way.  They need to be reached where they work, where they play, where they study and where they live.  And they have to be reached by actual people in context where they can gain trust and communicate with each other.

Missional Churches will do a variety of things to shift much of their energies outside the worship service.  It’s not as though that’s not important or that does not mater to them, but it’s that to reach this new population that’s out there we have to start putting energy in those places.  So they may have house churches, they may have small groups within their neighborhoods – not just to penetrate those neighborhoods with the Gospel but to allow for community to develop there.

So, as you can imagine, this kind of understanding – it expects and requires that all believers know themselves to be Missionaries appointed by Jesus Christ and that involves a burden of a new kind of equipping for them to go out.  It also requires a greater or at least a different kind of investment in the evangelistic task.  Because now we know that in order to convey meanings, it often requires more time. … They don’t understand what we mean when we just whip out a tract and hit them with language that they really have no cultural linguistic worldview handles to use to make sense of what we’re saying.

Really good stuff here folks.  Go check it out.

Last week my baby daughter – the pink princess – turned 13.  She’s been moving too quickly toward this date for some time, but there is no help for it now.  Both my kids are teenagers.

Serving for 19+ years in Youth Ministry kept me younger and more able to relate, but that only goes so far.  It’s like saying I’m the Limburger Cheese that stinks the least.

Nevertheless, I have adopted a particularly uncool behavior to my relationships with each of my kids:  I tell them I love them.  All the time.  In public. While they are with their friends. While they are getting out of the car on the occasion that I drop them off.  All the time and in every place we happen to be.

And they don’t disappoint.  In typical teenaged fashion, they bow their heads and move along as quickly and quietly as they can to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the occasional snicker from their friends.

I know a few parents who might choose not to say this to them because it is clear they are embarrassed.  The kids might even request it, which is a wound suffered deeply, no doubt.

Another slight is experienced by the parent that expects a return promise of fidelity. The “I love you, too” that doesn’t come and whose absence hangs like an offensive odor before the parent now left alone to endure it.

I don’t care.  It doesn’t bother me one bit that they are embarrassed or that they don’t return my expression of affection.

I tell them “I love you” against their will and without any concern for reciprocation because I say it for them.  They need to hear it from me and they need to hear it often.  Who they are is greatly shaped by the confidence they are cared for and accepted, especially from their parents and especially in their teens.

So I give that affirmation to them even when they don’t give it back and I am the “uncool” Dad.  I can be that, if they will be whole.  Easy trade.

Sorry, Jimmy and Hannah.  You are going to be openly loved and hugged and cheered for and claimed.  I am unashamed.  It may not be what you want, but I am sure it is what you need. So just take your medicine and I’ll check you again when you’re 20 or so.

Oh, and I love you.  Always will.

Marty’s got a new Examiner article up focusing on Pastor Appreciation Month (October is it, by the way).

Good article with an excellent representation of a hard working pastor and his family:

Why I Appreciate Pastors

For great info, you can follow the twitter feeds of: Marty Duren, Micah Fries, Trevin Wax and me.

For blogs of the full content, be sure to check out Trevin Wax and Steve Weaver.

Did I actually just say that? Yup.  I’m pretty sure I did.  I might clarify by saying that I don’t think you grow a HEALTHY church that way.

The thought process has gone, for decades, that if you have a great Children’s program and then a great Youth program, you will draw the kids and then get the parents.

It appears that when it works two things happen, and neither of them are healthy.  1) Families transfer from a smaller, dying church to a bigger church with better programs, and/or 2) reclamation of church dropouts.

While the reclamation of dropouts sounds like a good thing, my observation has been that they only reconnected when their kids got to the age where church programs became a part of an already overcrowded schedule of their kids’ activities.  Because their reconnection was just part of the general “busy-ness” in which they enrolled their kids, they typically pursued a nominal Christianity as a tangential part of our congregation.  That is to say, they attended sporadically, they rarely gave and they never served.

Neither transfer growth nor nominal reconnection produce a healthy church.

In a recent study published in USA Today, it was revealed that 70% of people aged 18-30 had dropped out of church by the time they were 23 years old.

The survey addressed a small group of these dropouts who return, but the question was not related to the role of children in their return to church:

The news was not all bad: 35% of dropouts said they had resumed attending church regularly by age 30. An additional 30% attended sporadically. Twenty-eight percent said “God was calling me to return to the church.”

The survey found that those who stayed with or returned to church grew up with both parents committed to the church, pastors whose sermons were relevant and engaging, and church members who invested in their spiritual development.

That last statement is paramount.

To grow a healthy church, we are going to have to 1) grow healthy families, where 2) discipleship is a process that takes place within community and happens over a timeline from cradle to grave and 3) the worship is going to have to be relevant.

That sounds to me like a church with family based small groups (parents discipling their kids in an engaged community) and relevant worship.

Conversely, that would include a scaling back of programs.  Churches aren’t programmed to grow.  They are programmed to die.

The mashup of my observations and the survey is that even if you grow by transfer or by nominal reclamation, the program model is going to produce 3 out of 10 real disciples, and of the 7 out of 10 who wander off, you might see a fraction return in a positive way.

Program driven churches have been withering in America for decades.  To depend solely on those programs is to follow that well worn path to the death of our churches.

We need a more organic, healthy, family inclusive and holistic mindset and structure.  We need to re-shape the church.