Portability

You need to stick with me on this post . . . it sounds like it’s going to be about writing, but I am going to turn it on the church and I would love to gain your input.

I was thinking last night.  I was working on a few things – some artwork, a webpage, and I was running a story through my head.  Some of you know, others don’t, that I have been wrtiting a lot lately.  To be honest I thought it was something I would be completely incapable of doing.

I thought this for a myriad of reasons, the biggest reason being I didn’t think I had the intellectual ability to make it happen.  I have been writing in the form of screenplays – and I seem to be okay at it.  And I actually have a lot of ideas for stories, which was another worry of mine.

Anyway – I was sitting there last night I was trying to get past a roadblock in a story.  I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it.  Then it hit me.  Portability.  I recently read the book Story by Robert McKee (Wikipedia Entry Here).  It has been a great took to help me with the structure of my stories and the writing process. There was a point in the book where he talks about how no story is portable.  He will talk to a writer and ask him about his story’s setting.  The writer will answer America – really it doesn’t matter it works anywhere.  McKee’s response is to say that assumption is untrue.  Divorce in Manhattan is different than divorce in the Bayou is diferent than divorce in Hollywood.  It absolutely matters where the story is taking place.  Your characters will react differently to different situations depending on the setting they are in.

This made me think about the church – why have we made our ministries portable?  Let me ask this a better way.  Why are we all doing the same exact ministries?  We have said it works for Saddleback, it will work for us.  That’s great, but they’re in socal and you are in the midwest.  Why aren’t we defining and creating ministries because of the leading of the Holy Spirit and the weight of God on our hearts about the needs of the poeople around us?

I think this story principle applies directly to the church – we put up a church give it the same band with the same music and the same ministries and are surprised when it doesn’t grow.  We have begun to ignore our local and global communities – we have disconnected from their needs and just made everyone elses ministries portable and decided they work for us like they did for someone else.  No more seeking God’s heart.  Let’s just stick to the box.

Now I get it – there are some ministries just generic enough that there could be a need for them everywhere.  Okay, but have we asked ourselves why and what that means for our commnunity of believers and for the community that surrounds us?

What do you think?

Learnings From an Odd Source

So today for our pastors meeting we did something a little different. We have been doing it different the past couple of meetings. trying to make them more helpful to us as a team and as individuals. To be helpful from a spiritual standpoint and from a leadership perspective.

Jon Keatts led today’s meeting and he showed us footage from a video I would have never watched on my own. It was a portion from a VHS tape series called “The 7 Laws of the Teacher” taught by Dr. Howard G. Hendricks. The first strike I would have had against it is it’s a VHS, secondly it has the title “The 7 Laws of the Teacher”, and thirdly it;s twenty years old. But it was good – I mean it was meant for teachers, Sunday School Teachers, etc. But I was looking at it from a how we do church perspective. Here are some meaningful points:

• Maximum learning comes from maximum involvement – preaching form half an hour a week won’t do it alone. People need to be involved, and I’m not talking about working in the nursery – but practically living what is being taught
• Experience is the best teacher – goes with the first point
• Learn by doing. Must be doing the right things.
• I hear and I forget. – 10%
  I see and I remember. – 50%
  I do and I understand/change. – 90%
• What kind of doing?
• Activity that provides direction without dictatorship. – organic movements, small groups, and ministries that are informed and formed by the congregation.
• Students don’t work for you – they work for themselves.
• Let them hang themselves – organic and incarnational – allowing room for people to experience what it means to fail, to have the willpower to move on and find new ways to be the hands and feet of Christ using the passions God has given them
• Activity that puts constant stress on application
• Activity that is planned with a purpose.
• A lot of what we are doing is an insult to their intelligence. – By telling people that serving as an usher is making an eternal difference, or giving them 5 steps to being a successful husband you are telling them they are stupid. They can smell the bullshit.
• A lot of what we are doing m – i – c – k – e – y – m – o – u – s – e.
• Activity that concerns itself with the process as well as the product. – the journey is important, it shapes us and teaches us what it means to live a life like Christ.
• They go beyond – you and know what they believe and why.
• Activity that is realistic and lifelike.
• Sin is fun – we forgot that.
• We’re answering the questions nobody’s asking. – so true of the church today

n is for no survivors – pt1

A quick note: I am having some trouble with my comments since upgrading to the current version of WordPress. I hope to have this resolved soon

I wanted to spend a few posts blogging about what’s been on my mind. Mainly it’s the church. N is for no survivors comes from this simple question: Is anyone going to to walk away from the carnage of the modern/western church? I will just do a preface and overview for this first post so you will understand where I am coming from.

I don’t know if you have read George Barna’s book Revolution (if you haven’t you should) – but in it he shows some trends and numbers, numbers that “indicate a revolution is already taking place within the Church–one that will impact every believer in America. Committed, born-again Christians are exiting the established church in massive numbers.”

Even without seeing the numbers, I completely get it. I work at a church, and sometimes I don’t understand what it is that I am doing.

The church is a whore, but she is my mother. – St. Augustine

I am starting to grasp in part that this is a generational thing. People my age are generally wary of corporations and large companies, we don’t like to be members of anything (goodbye Blockbuster), we strongly believe in social justice issues – redemption, environment, fair trade, poverty, AIDS, etc – and unfortunately these are things that are on the backburners at most churches.

But churches are still stuck in the 80’s mindset of running the church like a business and a corporation – they give people titles with words like executive in them that are 5 words long, no matter how modern they are in style they still follow inane traditions like church membership, they only believe in being involved in social justice issues when it makes them look good in a public light, or when it’s easy or beneficial to them. They need something in return if they are going to help someone with AIDs or befriend a homosexual.

So when you put 1 and 1 together it’s easy to see why it is that people of my age are leaving. When I look around though, it seems to be a wider trend among people of all ages. It seems that people are alright with Jesus, they just aren’t crazy about the church – and it’s not just outsiders anymore.

I know that not one word typed here is original in the least bit – it’s all been said somewhere by someone else before. But I do have a series of questions to ask, and I would like all the feedback from you guys I can get.

I’ll try to post my first question in the next day or so, but until then – what about you guys? Have you given up on the church? Do you see it wrecking more lives than it’s redeeming? And I am talking about the church as an institution, not about the leaving breathing body that exists whether there are buildings or not. Sound off . . .