I found this quote in the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan.  Last week my ministry coach made a statement about hunger… like the “Eye of the Tiger” kind of hunger that drives you go at something with all that you have.  We were talking about some of the challenges of gathering people to launch a new church and wondering out loud about why some churches seem to explode with growth and others seem to meander along at a slow pace.  From his observation, it seems like many of the churches that do well have leaders that have this kind of hunger… this willingness to risk it all for the sake of the gospel.  Now, hunger and passion are certainly not the only factors involved.  There are hungry and passionate leaders who have not seen the kind of fruit that others may, and I’m not sure why that is.  The point, however, is that succeed or fail, win or lose, we are not called to pursue God’s dream for our lives with lukewarm sentiment.  God calls us to go all in and trust that he is going to be in the details.  I’m not always good at this… are you?

I sometimes like to watch poker on TV.  It’s amazing how compelling it can be to watch a few people sitting around an oval table in a dark room playing cards can be.  The game that they most often televise is called No-Limit Texas Hold Em’.  It is a simple game really.  One announcer says, “It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.”  I won’t go into the ins and outs of the game, but the “No-Limit” part means that at any given time a player can bet all of his/her chips by going “all-in”.  It can be a risky proposition to go “all-in” because the game itself can be so unpredictable… and these people (I’m not condoning gambling BTW) are often risking hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars in doing so.  That being said, if you talk to any poker champion they will tell you that to win a tournament and get the big payout you have to be willing to put everything on the line.

So the question for me is, am I willing to go all in?  In what ways have I held back so far in this new adventure of church planting?  Am I hungry enough, or am I resting too comfortably in the things that I can physically see and touch and taste?  Am I willing to risk it all for the sake of the call?

So today is just a normal day.  I am busy checking things off my to-do list.  I spent the morning delivering postcards about our church, I am polishing up my message for Sunday, and working through some details for our upcoming launch.  In the midst of this “normal” day, however, God’s majesty is at work as close to me as my breath… in the things I take for granted, or just assume will continue to happen.  Today as I read a chapter in Crazy Love I was reminded that there is no such thing as a “normal” day.  All of the things that have to have to come together just for me to wake up each morning are evidence of the wonder and power and creativity of God.  You don’t think about your breathing until you can’t.  You don’t think about your kidneys until they cease to function.  Our entire body and the way that it works together to keep us alive is a miracle that, when I think about it, makes me want to get on my knees and worship the one is brilliant enough to put this whole thing together.

So on this “normal” day may we all find comfort in the reality of God walking with us, but also wonder and awe and reverence at the majesty and holiness of God.

Now maybe it is really good spaghetti, but I’m not sure that anyone goes to a seafood restaurant looking for noodles in red sauce. My guess would be that this dish was added to the menu to attract families with kids… kids who don’t or won’t eat seafood. I understand things like that… more power to them, but I think this sign illustrates some principles that I have been working with in developing this new church.

1) We cannot be all things to all people. We have to do what we do and do it the best that we can. Especially in these early stages we need to focus on the areas that we feel are most essential first. Even as we grow and become more established, however, this principle doesn’t change. All that we do should be intensely focused on accomplishing our vision. We do no one any real service by trying to be something we are not.

2) In our marketing we need to say what we intend to say. Clarity is essential. If this restaurant wants to target families with kids, then just say “Check out out new awesome kids menu!” Otherwise I’m prone to think that they are making spaghetti because they aren’t very good at seafood… an unfortunate thing for a seafood restaurant. We are Graceway “Church” because we want to be clear about what we are. We are not a community holiness faith fellowship… we are a church. We don’t just post our worship times and hope people randomly come… we invite them to come. Generally, people will not come to something unless they are clear on what they are coming to.

The point is simply that as the leader of a church I have to be intensely focused on where we are headed or before I know we’ll be serving up all kinds of things that really have nothing to do with the vision we are trying to accomplish.  I don’t want to serve spaghetti when our “specialty” is supposed to be something else.  I would much rather have us continue to hone in on the things we can do to advance the vision and continually strive to do them better.

Any thoughts?

I thought this was interesting… and true.  Even in a down economy some people/companies just have what people want… and it doesn’t seem to matter what it costs, right or wrong.  No great wisdom (or even nominal thoughs) here in thinking about a local expression of the church.  I just found this interesting.  Enjoy.

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I took these pictures at the Stanford Shopping Center during the week after Christmas. Money sure talks now…

There were a handful of stores without sales signs, but only one didn’t offer discounts and had lots of people in it. We all definitely have our work cut out for ourselves in 2009. As a wise man once said, “Some things need to be believed to be seen.”

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1. We want to be present (and have a noticeable presence) in our community. I would (and we will) do this again in a heartbeat.  As a church, as much as possible, we want to be present where people are gathering.  An evaluation question for us is, “If Graceway Church ceased to exist in this community, would anyone notice?”  Our scorecard for success is not solely based on how many people we can eventually manage put in seats on Sunday morning, but is based also (and more primarily so) on the kind of impact we are having in the broader community.  If we are helping people grow in their faith then we believe that the evidence of our transformed lives should be reflected in the community around us.  This weekend was a place for us to start building the relationships that will allow for this kind of opportunity.
2. Keep it Simple. If there was one negative (outside of the rain) this weekend it was that we strayed a bit from our value of keeping it simple.  At our booth, we sold fair trade crafts from Ten Thousand Villages.  This was a reflection of our core value of “serving the world”, but for this event I wonder if it was too much.  Ten Thousand Villages makes doing a one-time festival sale pretty simple, but the primary purpose of us being at this event was to have the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the community.  It may have been more effective to simplify our booth to do something like an iPod giveaway to go along with our freebies (we gave out 500 super-cool light up yo-yos with our logo and website).  I don’t regret doing the fair trade sale, I just wonder if it made our primary purpose more labor intensive then it needed to be.
3. If you give something away, make sure it is something people want. There were a ton of people giving stuff away at this festival.  What was interesting was to observe the response different booths got to what they were giving away.  There were all the things you might expect… bookmarks, fans, pens, rulers.  We gave away light up yo-yos.  Whenever you go to an event like this, there is usually one thing that is being given away that every kid in the place is playing with… making others wonder where they got it.  Our goal was to be that booth with that one thing. I would say we succeeded in this.  As the weekend progressed we had people sending others to our booth to get the yo-yos.  Once night fell, you could see little red lights going up and down all over the park.  Pretty cool.  What was unexpected, however, was how many adults wanted yo-yos.  It was a new toy that some kids had never tried before, but for some adults it was a reminder of their childhood.  They shared stories of the “yo-yo man” coming to their school every year, and tried to do their old tricks, etc.  Pretty cool.
4. The conversations/connections were worth the effort. Because we are not gathering regularly at this point, and we are very early in the process of assembling our launch team I get very little one-to-one time with the folks who are the “early connectors” to our community.  This event gave these folks something tangible that they could participate in and it also gave me an opportunity to have some extended conversations that I had previously been unable to have.Some of the biggest highlights of the weekend came in the conversations/connections we had with folks who we had not yet met.  We met the director of organization called “Birthday Blessings” that provides birthday parties for homeless and impoverished children in our area, we met a woman who has dedicated her life to childhood cancer research through an organization called Cure Search.  We met a middle school kid who thought our booth was the coolest at the festival.  He ended up hanging out for over an hour and helped hand out yo-yos!  We met folks from other area churches, folks who have no church connection, displaced Lutherans… It was really great.

Here is my challenge for the week:

I do not always answer the question I am being asked. I have a tendency to make things more complicated for myself by, instead, trying to answer what I perceive to be the question behind the question. For example: At the pastor’s conference I attended this week there were several occasions where I was asked, “What style of worship will you have at Graceway?” This question bugs me anyway (that’s another blog), but people want to know. The assumption that I often make, however, is that people (particularly other Lutheran pastors) are asking because they are passing judgement. The result, then, is often me stumbling through some kind of unintelligible description using every 10 cent word I can think of to make it sound like, despite the fact that we will not be using any of the liturgical settings or much of the music found in the Lutheran Hymnals that I am not somehow “dumbing-down” worship and that, yes, our worship will be “Lutheran.” Truthfully, that may sometimes be the motivation behind the question, but then again maybe it isn’t always. Maybe the way I answer has more to do with my need/desire to be accepted/respected by my colleagues and my peers. Would it not be better for me to ask the question that I have been asked and then if the “real” question is something else leave it up to the one asking to actually ask it?

Would love your thoughts, insight, stories, etc.

http://churchrelevance.com/top-10-pet-peeves-about-worship-leaders/

I’d love to know what you have experienced that has caused stumbling blocks in your worship experience.

Is there anything that you are committed ot with such fervor?