World Evangelization Map

Over at worldmaps.org, you can view a variety of gorgeous map graphics that show you the status of world evangelization. I’ve ordered some for our church and some extra to give away during services. You can also download the images for use as desktops, etc. Here’s what I’m currently using as my desktop:

Journey Church 2007 highlight video

The Lausanne Covenant

If you’re a Christian leader or committed to uplifting the cause of Christ among the nations of the world and have not read the Lausanne Covenant, I highly encourage you to do so. It’s an excellent expression of theology, thought and mission from Christian leaders and denominations worldwide.

Raising money for a Mac Mini at church

Well, I put the little ChipIn widget on my blog more than a week ago, and to date… nada. You can see the page here.

Sniff.

However, I thought I’d try a plug here in an entry in case some of you might not have seen the widget on the bottom right. We’re trying to raise $500 to purchase a Mac Mini for our church.

We’re currently using an indigo iMac – one of the older bubble iMacs, and it’s just a little too slow for productivity purposes. We mainly use it for doing Quicken/Quickbooks. It’s much to slow to use for design purposes.In fact, how’s this… we’ll be glad to give the highest ChipIn donor our old Mac! (You gotta pay for shipping if you’re not local.)

Signs that someone is leaving your church

“I don’t like my/your church.”As a church planter and pastor, I honestly don’t know that I’ve ever heard those words or even read them in reference to our church; however, I am confident that they’ve been said, or at the least, thought. I continue to be astounded at the volume of people who silently leave churches, whether ours or others with that thought in mind. After many years in collegiate and now church ministry, I think I can describe some of the signs that someone is leaving your church:

• Increase in “clan-nishness” – This happens when folks begin to associate only with a select few people within your church. It’s an unhealthy indication that they are not willing to plug in to other’s lives, only those who make them comfortable.
• Arriving right on time and leaving quickly – When church becomes simply an event to attend, folks begin to treat it as a religious meeting. They are not interested in meeting, hanging out, or in depth fellowship with the people of the church.
• Fault-finding – It becomes more and more difficult for them to identify anything wonderful or positive that’s happening in the church or the members’ lives. They only seem to be able to identify and zero in on things that bother them.
• Undermining leadership or church vision – Rather than being supportive and helpful, they seem to want church done on their terms and in their prescribed way. They are unwilling to invest wholeheartedly in the vision of the collected leadership of the church and instead find ways through conversation, attendance and giving (or lack of it) to express their dissatisfaction.
• Attractive absences – It seems that “whatever” will be enough to cause a person considering leaving to miss a gathering of the church. Different excuses are offered, but the end result is that they could “take it or leave it.” The gathering of believers at that church is no longer compellingly attractive to them.
• Determined Discontent – It doesn’t matter that whether or not their concerns are addressed and their questions are answered. In some cases, it appears that they just don’t want to hear explanations. They are determined to be discontent.
• Invitational Death – A sure sign for someone considering leaving is the absence of invitation in their life. If they had at one point been bringing guests and “talking up” your church but do so no longer, then it is probably because they don’t want to involve someone that they know in a fellowship that they know in their hearts they may soon be leaving.
• Lack of Conversational Intimacy – People who are on the road to leaving suddenly talk about sports, the weather and movies more than they ask you about your faith, your prayer needs or dreams and hopes. They don’t want to engage you on an intimate level in conversation because they know that your relationship with them will be changing soon. Rest assured, if a person doesn’t ask you questions about you, they are most likely consumed with themselves.

Confusion of church and relationship to Christ
Many folks who leave a church do so for arbitrary reasons. The worship is more appealing at So-and-So Baptist Church across town. Most Holy Methodist Church just got a young preacher who is a dynamic speaker. The Jump-Up-And-Down Program at One Heckuva Steeple Presbyterian suddenly seems to “meet the needs” of their family better than your pitiful programs. Whatever the reason, they all seem to sound hollow when compared to the mission of Christ when He said that He came to “seek and save the lost.” (Luke 19.10)

In fact, in our Americanized, drive-through religion world, there is a huge confusion about religion and a relationship with Christ. It was so in Jesus’ day as well. He found Himself (and even initiated) in conflict with the religious leaders of His day often. The problem was that the religious leaders had more head knowledge about God than they knew God Himself.

The same is true today. Wherever you have a gathering of people who embrace facts and doctrines about God without pursuing intimacy with Him through a love relationship with Jesus Christ, you have religion. However, it is not ultimately fulfilling to just show up at all the proper religious events and services. A lifetime of simply “showing up” doesn’t transform us. An intimate love relationship with God opens our lives for His gracious work within us.

“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17.3)

There is a huge difference in knowing about God and knowing God.

Paul said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…” (Philippians 3.10)

One can know about God and not love Him with all their being. However, that love relationship is what Jesus described as the first and greatest commandment in Matthew 22.37. He also said, “If you love me, you will obey my commands.” (John 14.15) When you truly love another person, you will want to please them in your relationship with them.

It all hinges on a love relationship with God, and that’s where many current and former church-goers today are confused. They think they can love God without loving His people. The New Testament is loud and clear that a Christian was not created to live in isolation. The Spirit within us places us in fellowship with other Christians – not for personal growth and enjoyment – but to accomplish and fulfill the stated mission of Christ. We are the body of Christ, and it takes all of us, working together in mutual humility and service, to extend His kingdom.

There are, of course, good reasons for leaving a church, but in our society it seems that few folks leave for good reasons. A church is so much more than just a random collection of people. It’s the bride of Christ expressed locally. Few consider that when they stop attending that they are rejecting people who make up the bride.

The need for church planting

In a recent sermon (11/11/07), John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis made eight observations about church planting (sermon text link):

I’ve summarized them here:

1. There are 195,000,000 non-churched people in America, making America one of the top four unchurched nations in the world.
2. In spite of the rise of megachurches, no county in America that we know of has a greater church population than it did 10 years ago.
3. During the last 10 years, combined communicant church membership of all Protestant denominations declined by 9.5% while the national population increased during the same time by 11.4%.
4. Each year 3500-4000 churches close their doors forever, while only as many as 1500 new churches are planted.
5. There are now nearly 60% fewer churches per 10,000 persons in American than there were in 1920. (1920 – 27 churches for every 10K Americans, 1950 – 17 churches for every 10K Americans, 1996 – 11 churches for every 10K Americans).
6. Today, of approximately 350,000 churches in America, four out of five are either plateaued or declining.
7. One American denomination recently found that 80% of its new converts came in churches that were less than two years old.
8. “The single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches.” – Peter Wagner

I listened to the message on my way to Little Rock for Thanksgiving and was greatly encouraged by it. It simply echoed what we already knew to be true in our own experience in our context here in south Arkansas.

It’s a strange and often disconcerting revelation to learn of a reference to our four year-old church as a “cult.” We usually shrug off such statements, attributing them to ignorance. We prefer not to think that they may have been said in malice. However, the fact remains that planting a church in rural America is exceedingly difficult, draining, and may be one of the least appreciated enterprises in American Christianity today.

While the church planting movement in our country continues to pick up steam and grow, let me make a few observations of my own about it:

• Church planters often resort to “business models” and demographic studies to determine where to plant their church.
• After such studies are made, inevitably a growing suburb of a large urban area is selected.
• Few churches in the rural South have ever intentionally started another church. (There have been many unintentional church starts; we call them splits.)
• Even churches reknown for their focus on planting other churches tend to use an event model, even though the church of origin most likely did not start that way. You hear of “Launch Sundays” and the like, but there is no space shuttle, only a church-in-a-box, complete with musicians and in some cases, fully-supported, multiple staffs.
• Our current church culture encourages new churches to be “up and running” as soon as possible, and as a result, seems to discourage a bivocational model for church planters.
• There is an unhealthy preoccupation with numbers, buildings, and programs.

Honestly, it’s exhausting to continually have to redefine what church really is for people in our community. While they know it’s not about essentially about buildings, budgets, and butts in the pews, they unfortunately reduce church to that by their actions and preoccupations. Even this month, in talking with one denominational leader, I was asked early on in our conversation about our church, “How many are you running?”

When did spiritual success come to mean anything less than transformed lives and focusing on the glory of Jesus Christ?

As I pondered Piper’s eight points, I knew I had to proclaim them here for your own pontification. ;)

Simply put, it’s a proven and much better strategy to start new churches than to expect established ones to be able to penetrate their their communities anymore than they already have. In fact, in response to one pastor’s earnest questions about why we were starting our church four years ago, I did some research on established churches in our own town.

I discovered that the church population of Monticello has not grown at all in the past 30 years! Sure, there have been some surges of growth in different churches, but the net result has not increased.

That’s why our church hopes to become a church planting center for our region. Our leaders are actively praying and looking for families and individuals in towns near ours who are open to starting a new work, most often in their living room.

Whatever you may have thought about the church in America before, I hope you at least pause long enough to pray for it. The Bride of Christ must make herself ready for her Groom. It is far past time for us all to be content and happy with status quo Protestantism. We must vigorously pursue the glory of Christ by proclaiming his love to our neighborhoods and the nations.

Perhaps you would be willing to begin praying about starting a new work? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned for Back Porch Chronicles

I’ve been so intrigued by the effectiveness of video podcasts. Turns out, so has Taylor. Since he’s extremely talented in the video department and a member of Journey, we’re going to try our hands at producing a video podcast, beginning next week!

Called the Back Porch Chronicles (so named until someone comes up with something better) because it will be filmed on… you guessed it, my back porch… the short segments will seek to encourage, inform, inspire and sometimes simply make you laugh.

We’re hoping for guests, and would love to get some suggestions as to content after we get the hang of things.

Here’s a segment I created by my lonesome today with my Macbook. It’s extremely cheesy, but the whole process of video to Youtube was fantastically easy.

A plethora of Journey Churches

I was doing a search just to see how many “Journey Churches” I could find on the net. It’s a little overwhelming. Our church is unrelated officially to any of these, but I thought I’d take you on an internet stroll to show you some of their websites…Let me know which ones interest you and which ones you think most compare to Journey Church Monticello!

LifeChurch.tv

How did a small, church plant in Oklahoma go national in the past ten years? Such is the story of Life Church, now known as LifeChurch.tv. From its beginnings in Edmond, Oklahoma, Life Church now has twelve different campuses across the nation (including Arizona, Texas, Tennesse, Florida and New York.

Admittedly, not all of these campuses are new church starts. Several of them involve existing churches coming into the LifeChurch.tv network.

However, this year Lifechurch.tv launched what it calls “Second Life,” which is a fully interactive, online church. Yep. You can do church online… Hooboy.

According to their website, “Currently LifeChurch.tv is hosting nearly 20,000 people every weekend across all its campuses during 47 worship experiences.”

Life Church is a part of the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination, and it has a well-expressed, though abbreviated, set of core beliefs:

• The Bible is God’s message to us (2 Timothy 3:16)
• Jesus Christ changes lives (John 3:3, 14:6)
• The church is a spiritual family (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)
• A Holy Spirit empowers us to live for God (Galatians 5:25)
• Freedom comes from Jesus Christ (John 8:31-32; Galatians 5:1)

I’ll admit… there’s enough there to intrigue me and want to know more about Life Church. Do you realize that there’s not an Evangelical Covenant Church in Arkansas? Neither is there a Life Church here… yet.

Shane and Shane’s website

OK, I know this isn’t a church website, but I’m going to stretch the series a bit and include it because it is a ministry website. It may be one of the more innovate sites I’ve seen lately. I found myself playing with the floating notes. (By moving your mouse, the notes follow it.)

Shane & Shane are a dynamic Christian musician team that play upbeat and meditative worship music. The lyrics to their songs are, at times, deeply prophetic. It’s reassuring to know that in today’s cotton candy theology world there are still many artists out there truly concerned with theology as art.

Dever’s forthcoming book

Mark Dever is a dynamic expository and biblically-saturated preacher. He pastors at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which Carolyn and I visited on our trip to D.C. earlier this year. He has written a book called What is a Healthy Church? that looks to be extremely challenging.

For those who would say, “Eeew. That book is for my pastor or church leaders,” consider Dever’s words:

“If you call yourself a Christian but you think a book about healthy churches is a book for church leaders or maybe for those ‘theological types,’ while you would rather read books about the church life, it may be time to stop and consider again exactly what the Bible says a Christian is. …you and all the members of your church, Christian, are finally responsible before God for what your church becomes, not your pastors and other leaders–you.”

Bring on the Reformation…

Vintage Christianity has a pretty powerful polemic regarding the need of fresh reformation in the church at large. Read the 25 theses there and let fly your thoughts and comments on which ones struck you deepest.

7 Summers to Change the World…

Wow, where are these provocative videos coming from that challenge us to be strategic in the church? Check out Community of Dreams…

If you haven’t seen this video as well, check it out.

Aim lower; think smaller…

I’d love to know your comments about this video… Since our church has thousands of kids (it feels like that when we’re all together), it’s a wonderful reminder and encouragement to continue being strategic in family ministry and discipleship.

Gumbo lunch fundraiser for mission trip…

You’ve got to see this!

Ghandi on Christianity…

Hamo takes off on this post. He uses the following quote by Ghandi to ask some profound questions:

“It is my firm opinion that [the West] today represents not the spirit of God or Christianity but the spirit of Satan. And Satan’s successes are the greatest, when he appears with the name of God on his lips. [The West] today is only nominally Christian. In reality, it is worshipping Mammon. ‘It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle that for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus really spoke Jesus Christ. His so-called followers measure their moral progress by their material possessions.”

-Gandhi (Speeches & Writings of M. Gandhi: p.336, Feb. 14, 1916)

Then he poses some significant questions. I’d be interested in knowing what you think and how you feel this might apply to your own life.

Do a church a favor… use Goodsearch

I’m excited to be able to inform you here first that Journey has been approved as one of Goodsearch’s charitable organizations! That means that if you’ll designate Journey as your charity, every time you do an internet search, Journey will receive a penny! That adds up!

Click on the graphic above to search on Goodsearch, and please consider making Goodsearch your default internet search agent.

Here’s the code if you want to paste the graphic above on your site:

<A href=”http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=834233″ TARGET=”_top”>
<IMG src=”http://www.goodsearch.com/_gfx/gs-church-120×60.gif” WIDTH=”120″ HEIGHT=”60″ ALT=”GoodSearch: You Search…We Give!” BORDER=”0″></A>

• Use this link to add Goodsearch to Internet Explorer’s toolbar.
• Use this link to add GS to your Firefox toolbar.
• Change your computer’s homepage to GS.

Emerging controversy… fun or foolish

I just had to laugh when I saw the opener over at teampyro this morning…

The primary point of this post is to really bring all the people we have had consistent adversarial interaction with out of the woodwork to see if we can’t make a comment thread go past the 1,000 mark—because after all, we get thousands of readers every day. Everyone should have something to say for himself.

They go on to ask some pointed questions about the emergent movement, many of which I’ve addressed at Notes before. However, I just don’t feel like chewing on sawdust today. I think the bigger question for me, in the mood I’m in, is simply… why in the world would Dan and the guys want to deal with 1000+ comments on Labor Day?

However, tucked away in some very funny graphics and tongue-in-cheek pander is really a great post. They reiterate their defense and stand on scripture:

Sixty-six books chock-full of revelation. So much that most professing Christians (to our shame) have never even read it all.

It’s refreshing, really, to see a group of guys so passionate about the truth of the Bible and it’s life transforming power over those who submit their lives to its author. I still have a lot of doubts as to whether the “emergent” movement actually exists and can be point and counter-pointed. Yes, it has its prophets, but its difficult to paint such a broad stroke of criticism when speaking of them. It’s like denominational churches… you just never know what you’re going to get from one church to another – unfortunately.

However, the post is worth the Labor Day read, if for nothing else for thoughts like this:

And if the most central issue of the Bible—how can man be just before God?—has been misunderstood by basically every one of the holiest, godliest, most consecrated and devoted men of God for centuries; if, that is, our most elder brothers in the faith have, every one of them, answered that question wrongly, and only a specialist engaging in specialized sub-category studies can unearth the true answer to this basic question…

…it makes you wonder not only why God wrote the Book, but why He made such a poor job of it.

And you might as well leave a comment while you’re there…

121 Community Church

Based in Grapevine, Texas, the 121 Community Church site is very attractive, but also pretty basic when it comes to some of the sites I’ve been reviewing in this series. One of the reasons I wanted to give it a good once-over is because a fellow OBU grad and Southwestern alum is the senior pastor there – Ross Sawyers.

One of the things that struck me about their site is first of all life and then second of all busyness. There were so many to click and pursue from the main page. Drop down menus, flashy things, glitter, a new CD coming out by their worship team, the ability to register to become a childcare worker, etc… Whew.

They have a well-developed site, and I know they’re proud of it; however, after reviewing it, I began to wonder if perhaps simple isn’t better? The positives are that a person who has time to research and wants to find out more about 121 CC can certainly do so! Everything is there to be discovered. The downside to the site (and many church sites) is that just because you can design a site to contain everything and the kitchen sink doesn’t mean you ought to.

It made me wonder and begin to brainstorm a little about how to use your ministry site as a steamlined pointer. Identify one or two central purposes for your site and then funnel all the design technique into directing vistors toward a certain place. I think Northpoint Community Church has done an excellent job with their landing page that directs first-time web guests or church visitors to a certain spot, members to a spot, church leaders from around the world to a spot, etc.

However, I’d encourage you to stop by the church site and tell me what you think. If this is your first time to visit one of the church sites in this series, look at some of the others I’ve done and compare 121CC to them.

I’d love to visit 121CC someday, and I’ve subscribed to a few podcasts in order to catch up with Ross.

Journey small groups start tonight

Check out the Journey site for more info. If you’re interested, we’re having a group at our house. We’d love to have you! There are other groups as well, but none of them offer free iPods for coming. would you come if they did?