I mentioned Friday that I was traveling to Jackson, TN for this conference and as you read this, I am on the road.

I mentioned that I would be blogging and twittering from there during the conference.  given that, you might want to check out my twitter feed: twitter.com/artrogers, or the missioscapes twitter feed: twitter.com/missioscapes, or even these guys, who will also be there: twitter.com/martyduren & twitter.com/micahfries.

My plan is to twitter live, either through my own feed or through the MissioScapes feed, or both.  Then I’ll recap thoughts in a blog post later.

Here is a schedule published by Union University that you might consider if you are looking to follow live tweets on particular issues:

*There is one caveat.  I am also dealing with a great many things personal and professional while on this trip.  I am not guaranteeing that I will be at every session to tweet/blog.  I fully intend to be at the ones I perceive as most relevant.  This is not to discount any of the speakers or their topics, but to simply let everyone know that other things may take precedence for me.

Next week, Union University will be hosting a conference entitled Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and the future of denominationalism.

I’m excited to be attending for several reasons, not the least of which is that the topic fascinates me.  I am anxious to hear the thoughts of those being brought in to speak to the issue.

Further, the SBC finds itself in the moment of re-creating itself via the Great Commission Task Force and its impending report in Orlando next year at the Annual Meeting.

I’ll be blogging and twittering from the meeting, but as a primer for that time, I thought that you might be interested in these videos from the B21 Panel at last year’s annual meeting, where the hot topics of the Southern Baptist Convention were discussed by some of the leading voices.

The first video says it’s 80 minutes, but it is only about 40. Total of both videos is about an hour and 20 minutes.

B21 Panel From 2009 SBC Annual Meeting from Sojourn Community Church on Vimeo.

B21 Panel from SBC Annual Meeting Part 2 from Southeastern Seminary on Vimeo.

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.

Most, not all, evangelicals I know are Republicans (I typically vote that way) and as such are duty bound to despise the welfare system.  Whatever good it may do could never outweigh the horrific and crippling results of people becoming dependent on handouts… or so the line goes.

Failure to work for oneself corrupts character and that internal collapse becomes the context and culture for generations, spreading like yeast through the dough… again, so the line goes.

Yet the same evangepublicans will consistently expect a centralized process for all things related to church.  Preschool Program, Children’s Progam, Youth Program, College Program, Music Program, Evangelism Program, Missions Program, Singles Program, Senior Adult Program, Benevolence Program… etc.  If it happens in the Christian life, the staff of the church should work it and drum up volunteers.

And I tell you that many of the things that can be said of the welfare system can be said of the program driven church.  The individuals of the church don’t have to do the work, so they don’t and they get used to it, come to expect it, pass those expectations on to their kids…

And the church in the West declines because the context and culture that we have bred is one of dependence. Laziness. Presumption.

And the best thing we can do for this church is to stop it.  Stop doing everything for them and put them into a situation where the expectations placed on the body of Christ are that these individual members must do it or it won’t get done.

Because, regardless of whether the church is centralized and program driven or decentralized and personal engagement driven… it’s not getting done without them doing it.

You buy that?

You know that I think we need to transition American church culture into a something far more effective in engaging the world around us.

The problem most often faced in the attempt to accomplish this goal is an adherence to individual preferences by those not wishing to change.

The attitude of those desiring to be agents of change, when confronted with this obstacle, is that of disdain, convinced of our own accuracy.

It is common among those pursuing change to decry the attachments to these biases as selfish and sinful when they stand in the way of our goals.

The hypocrisy of it is that many times we are pursuing our own preferences rather than that which will be best received by those to whom we are sent; for whom we claim to lobby.

When moving a church, we need to be honest about our own preferences and be as willing to lay them aside as we expect others to be when it comes to their comforts.

What matters is what communicates.  We can’t use one mindset’s failure to communicate as leverage to replace it with another mindset that is equally unable.

It is disingenuous.  The result will be a spiralling loss of relevance that makes our current failures look tame in comparison.

The chair of our Missions Team sent me an email last night asking what we would have to do to get the individuals of our church starting their own engagement opportunities rather than the team creating centralized opportunities that most will not engage.

This was my answer:

The missional mindset within the individual will never come from an institution. It is caught like a virus from close contact with one who already has the “disease.” This is the biggest point of small groups.

Missional interaction as a small group and the group holding the individuals accountable to be missional is the key to allowing the Missional mindset to make its way down to the smallest level – the individual.

The great problem we have is the baggage we all bring by way of expectations of what the church is and how it should work.

We are so used to the centralized institution doing everything, organizing everything and allowing the few to do the work of the whole, that even good Godly men and women with a heart for service think that changing the church is “wrong” because it is not what they always have known.

What we have to understand in this process is that the only reason for the change is that it is more effective at getting individuals to grow as disciples and engage the world with the message.

From Acts 17.

1. Paul was sensitive to the spiritual surroundings (vv. 10-17). He did not go there of his own intention, but was directed there by circumstance at the direction of Providence. He could have viewed the situation from a self centered worldview that would have led him to consider himself stranded and in need of support, possibly leading to a timid response to his surroundings. Instead, he responded to the vast number of idols by immediately proclaiming the Gospel.

2. Paul sought to help them understand (vv. 17-31). He did not expect those not exposed to the culture of Early Christianity to understand the Gospel, so he used the connections he had available. He walked the common pathway of Jewish heritage with the Jews in the local synagogue and marketplace. When the Greeks brought him to the Areopagus, he pointed to their acknowledgment of a God they didn’t know and drew upon some of their commonly held beliefs, quoting several local poets/philosophers.

Not mincing words or being timid, he communicated the truth through values they already held in common. For the Jews, the OT Scripture. For the Greeks, the belief they were all children of God.

3. The results were not Paul’s to govern (vv. 32-34). Paul proclaimed, many rejected, some were still open and a handful believed. Whether you believe that faith begins in man’s move towards God or in God’s move toward man, Paul is responsible for neither – only to faithfully offer the opportunity and allow God and man forge the result. Too often we concern ourselves with whether or not someone will respond and allow that to govern how we share or if we dare to offer the message at all. This is not our concern, but is between God and our friends.

We must be faithful to share.

If it is the responsibility of the church to participate in the Mission of God, and it is the responsibility of the church to do just that, then we need to act redemptively toward the people around us.

Keeping in mind that every Christian is the church, the body of Christ, then before we can effectively act redemptively to the people around us as a corporate body, we need to be doing so as individuals.

But we haven’t.

To those apart from God, we have engaged them with programmed sales pitches with pamphlets and intrusive knocks on strangers’ doors.  When they say they are uninterested in being invaded, we shake the dust off our sandals and move on, saying to ourselves that they have rejected the Gospel. They really just rejected our failure to live redemptively in a poor imitation of the Gospel.

To those apart from the body, Christians who have been burned or burdened by church and choose to separate themselves, we have no programmed response.  We simply call them names (“backsliders”) and give them the attitude that they know better and should be in church.

To those actively participating in the body, we’ll teach them to death and call it discipleship.  Sunday School, Sunday morning worship, Sunday night worship and Wednesday night “Prayer Meeting” where we actually pray very little, but at which we are expecting yet another lesson.  Accountability?  Mission?  Ministry?  Service?  Intercessory Prayer?  Mentoring in parenting?  Etc?  …  That all comes with special programs in which few participate.  Fellowship.  We do that really well within the body.

In short, individually and corporately, we’ve not been very redemptive.

We short-circuit the actual responsibility of the church and substitute the by product as our goal.  Translation: Instead of working hard to be redemptive, we work hard to get big.  The downside of that is that we can cheat our way to big.

You don’t have to be redemptive to be big.

Our goal is neither to be busy or big.  Our goal is to be redemptive.

If we are that, then no matter what else happens, we will stand before God unashamed.

Reframing Success: Redefining Success in Evangelism

Are we interested in sharing Christ for the sake of the other person or for ourselves?

Great question.

As reggie McNeal says, if we want to change the way we do church, we have to change the way we measure success.

October of 2007 saw me fly out to visit Marty Duren and his family, church and staff.  It was an exploration of what it would take to transition a church, since they were further along that road than we, who were just talking about it.

While I was there, one of the staff members was telling me about the talented volunteers that had just come to New Bethany to serve their church.  I have to admit, I sinned a little.  Covetousness.  It’s a pet sin of mine.  I take it out and play with it, from time to time.

Well, it may be a pet sin, but it’s not a private one and I announced to Dan Brothers, the staff member against whom I was sinning, that I coveted what God had given him and them.  Unphased and unblinking, Dan looked at me and said, as though he was without any doubt, and said that I shouldn’t worry.  God would send Skelly the people.  I wondered if God was alright with Dan’s commitment on His behalf.

About 2 months ago, I began to pray that God would do just that.  Send us the people we need.  I am very much against church “growth” by transfer, but I know that there are believers moving to Tulsa or are currently disconnected with a church body that could be of immediate benefit for us and vice versa.  I asked God to start sending them to us.  We were at a point where we needed to step forward and we needed people who wanted to serve to help us get there.

Don’t mistake me to be taking for granted those fantastic volunteers that serve relentlessly and with joy.  Far from it.  Rather, I am of the opinion that we need to spread the responsibilities out in order to give them a bit of a rest and, therefore, needed more servants with talents.

I’m not ready to call Dan a prophet, yet, I must say, God has been faithful to Dan’s word and my prayers.  Over the last 6 mos, God has begun to bring us wonderful people and we are being blessed by all that they do for Skelly.

Moreover, these are people who already have the vision of living missionally in our community.

God is good.  He sends you people.