WORSHIP EVANGELISM

Increasingly the traditional church is learning what has been an open secret in youth ministry for decades. Worship is evangelism. When seekers come into a gathering where people are transparent and passionate to worship God, there is an electricity present that captures their attention and begins to open their hearts and minds to Him.

We are not talking about worship as a perfunctory act of obedience, all about form and language. We are talking about that humbling of one's heart, that unashamed and unscripted abandonment of oneself to the transforming power of God. "Let love be genuine" is the command of scripture. When worship is a genuine expression of a heartfelt love for Jesus Christ, it illumines the dark places of our world with the awesome, supernatural light of the world. No one has to explain God or even defend Him. Worship reveals His presence.

Christian preachers are learning to communicate to emerging generations in effective ways. And churches are learning to worship in ways that communicate meaning and invite new people to enter into the flow of worship. Creative tools and worship arts create an atmosphere for worship that helps engage people of many personalities and passions as participants.

But in the end, worship that is genuine -- in Spirit and in Truth -- is what lifts up Christ and draws all people -- old and young, modern and postmodern, traditional and contemporary, raised in the church or one who will be the first generation of their family to find faith -- and ultimately (to quote Dan Kimball) to be the bridge to the Bridge that reconciles people to God.

WE ARE MISSIONARIES

BEING A "GOD" INFLUENCE - 1

The Outward Focused Church understands that it is called influence its world. We tend to think of influence as a political act. Influence that is a result of living with Jesus' DNA is an act of love for our neighbor and faithfulness to God. The description of Christian influence is found in Jesus' declaration in Matthew 5:18ff. "You are the salt of the earth ... you are the light of the world."

Intentional ministry is intended to be an influential ministry. A missional church in focusing on living according to its mission asks the question, "How will our actions lift up Christ before this community?" Such churches know that to misrepresent Christ is an act of disobedience to God with perhaps tragic consequences because it might influence people to embrace a false understanding of Jesus. Or if the non-Christian has a sense of what Jesus truly is like, our behavior in Jesus' name may influence them to reject Christ, or at the very least cause them to want to have no part with His Bride, the Church.

An inward-focused church often has little influence because its has little contact with or relevance for the community that surrounds it. That is more a tragedy than anything. And if the people surrounding that church see that the church is basically occupying space in the neighborhood and little else, they can easily (and perhaps appropriately) say that the church does not care. And that influences them to seek love from some other source than Christ.

Influence, therefore,requires involvement--on a daily and basic level. The church, to truly be influential intentionally builds (what Bill Hybels calls) redemptive relationships--relationships intended to assist God in His work of salvation and life transformation.

Influence is not throwing your weight around in the public square, it representing the name and the aim of Jesus to a world that has grown skeptical and suspicious about the value of God in their community.

(c) 2010 by Stephen L Dunn

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR DREAMS?

Outward-focused churches are dreaming churches. Not wandering daydreams or mere wishful thinking. Dreams that comes from the mind of God into the hearts of His people. Yet dreams themselves are not enough. Mark Batterson shares a formula that is helpful in explaining this.

Doing – Dreaming = Waste of Energy
Dreaming – Doing = Disobedience
Dreaming + Doing = Exponential Kingdom Impact

The key here is first to dream God-sized dreams. That means dreams that transform lives and worlds. It also means dreams that cannot possibly be realized by mere human planning and power. Dreams that drive us to an utter dependence upon God and result in people saying not, "What a great church," but saying "What a great God!"

The second is to understand that although God's resurrection power is the force by which we achieve those dreams, we cannot sit idly back and merely let it happen. God has given each church gifts and passions and abilities for the exact purpose of using those things to bring that dream to fulfillment. We must be preparing to dream and to do in order to have the Kingdom Impact God intends.

THE EXECUTIVE TEAM

Good planning and timely decision-making are essential to a church seeking to be faithful to God's leading. Sometimes mission drift occurs because it gets bogged down in the inertia of church governance. Who is responsible for what? How do you get action on an idea that has implications for multiple ministry teams? How do you be certain that your mission is working out of your vision from God and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit?

Last weekend I was privileged to be a part of Houston 2010, a conference sponsored by Global Media Outreach. GMO is a division of Campus Crusade and specializes in internet evangelism (more on this in a later post). The conference was put together in 40 days to respond to an immediate and critical need in their ministry. They succeeded incredibly, in part because they had an executive team that used its best skills and clear lines of responsibility to respond to a leading of the Holy Spirit to conduct this event. Watching them at work, God gave me a sense of how an executive team might truly help a church produce God-class ministry.

The Executive Team would be composed of four persons:

THE CEO (or to use a popular term, Chief Cultural Architect) This is the Lead Pastor whose job is to be the vision-caster of the church and the chief teacher of its core values and identity as the Body of Christ.

THE COO or your council chairperson. This is the one who sees that a church board and its ministry teams are working in a coordinated manner. He or she also sees that the proper decision-making occurs in a timely manner that keeps the church "legal" constitutionally or structurally and with the denominational body and the state.

THE CPO or chief planning officer. This person heads a Strategic Advisory Team that works with Commissions and your church board to help evaluate ongoing ministry and develop a unified ministry that plan that keeps your church faithful and fruitful to its mission statement. Both this office and this team would have to be created in most churches.

THE CPI or Chief Prayer Igniter. In most churches this would be the chairperson of your elders. In my church the elders have the responsibility for spiritual oversight of the Body and to keep the church in tune with God as a spiritual organism in all of its efforts. Since prayer is the most critical element of any spiritual enterprise, this person sees that the church is at prayer for its decisions and its operations.

Together these persons work to see that ministry ideas and needs are assigned to the proper are to become the incubators out of which action is derived.

Next post: SPIRITUAL INCUBATORS

KEEPING THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING

What is the purpose of the Church?

From time to time an outward focused church needs to stop and ask that question. If not the church can subtly veer from its mission. It can slip from being missional to maintenance as we begin majoring in keeping doing what we have been doing lately.

The purpose question also requires a parallel one --- Whose church is it? As we invest our time, our energy, our resources in the ministry of the church we also subtly develop a mentality of "my church" or "our church" instead of this God's church. Even churches engaged in an outward focused mission can plant the seeds of failure to live out its purpose when it ceases to consciously and continuously see itself as God's church - the Body of Christ!

THE FIRST QUALIFICATION OF LEADERSHIP

I have been doing a lot of prayerful reflection on leadership in the church--and the lessons I have learned. Sometimes those lessons have been learned through mistakes. Sometimes they have been learned through the insights of others accompanied by the Lord saying "Think outside your box and pay attention." Here is something that has become a firm conviction for me and was recently reinforced in reading the work of Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordeiro in their book Culture Shift: Transforming Your Church From the Inside Out.

The first qualification is a spiritual one. Lewis and Cordeiro write: "... the cultural epicenter of a church is not a static code or rules, but life-on-life equipping that ultimately allows a person or a team you trust to apply biblical principles your your specific context." (SPECIFIC CONTEXT=THE PEOPLE GOD HAS GATHERED TOGETHER IN 2010 TO DO MINISTRY AS THE CHURCH OF GOD OF LANDISVILLE."

When we design a church's mission and ministry, we really cannot step away from a reality that impacts our ultimate frutifulness. The church is not an organization--it is a spiritual organism. It is the continuing body of Christ. Our DNA is Christ's DNA and our character should reflect Jesus Christ's values and our behavior should quite literally be defined as what Jesus would do as the Church of God of Landisville.

Being the people of a great God requires us, to use Lewis and Cordiero's words is to "incarnate not duplicate." We are not trying to reproduce successful programs that others have used in their specific settings. We are trying to incarnate (give life to) the mission God has called us uniquely to carry out as a congregation on the mission field that is Landsville in 2010.

This is what the first qualification of leadership is a spiritual one. In Acts, David is described in such a way that defines this qualification: "He’s a man whose heart beats to my heart, a man who will do what I tell him." The Message translation.

If this is not true of a church leader, then that leaders ideas, plans, and actions will not result in a church that truly honors God or that God blesses.