Party Time
Message preview for April 25.
"Party Time", part 4 of Crazy Love series.
Main Idea: It's crazy that we celebrate in the Father's grace rather than suffer in his wrath.
Main Text: Luke 15:11-32 - The father's feast.
Main Points:
• We are always being sold the newest upgrade or improved version of a product. We often want to upgrade and improve our lives. Six of the 10 best selling books of 2009 were self-improvement books.
• Many treat Jesus as an upgrade to their lives. That is, adding Jesus to your life will improve your life. The truth is my life doesn't need an upgrade, it needs an overhaul, transformation.
• Jesus didn't come to upgrade our lives, he came to change our lives.
• The party represents the Father's salvation and the change that happens in our lives.
Four ways the Gospel changes us:
1. Joy: My condition is changed from lost to found, so my joy is "in Christ" not in my circumstances.
2. Gratitude: thankfulness isn't a means to get something, it's a response to something that's been done for us. My response to the Gospel is gratitude - "thankful in everything."
3. Grace: I am no longer a "doer" trying to ascend to and attain God's grace; I am a recipient of grace, a beneficiary, no longer the object of the Father's wrath. My response: good works, "invest and invite" evangelism.
4. Full: my satisfaction is no longer anchored in the temporal, material, or emotional. The "Bread of Life" sustains me and satisfies me - I go to the party and I am full.
Clear as Mud
You can never be too clear. Like a window can never be too clean, or water can never be too clear.
Clarity is something we're working hard on at GBCK. Here are some things we're learning, and re-learning, about clarity:
• It may be clear in your head (or in your staff meeting) but it takes a whole lot of work to make something clear to the rest of the congregation.
• Clarity can never be assumed. It's safer to assume things are still unclear, and then keep working at clarity.
• Pop quizzes: one way we want to determine clarity is short "quizzes" that will help determine if something that's being communicated is going in.
• Say it often, differently, and creatively.
• Clarity empowers others and frees them to act. Lack of clarity paralyzes.
• If the leadership is unclear then it's over; what you're trying to communicate will end at the leadership level and never go to the congregation.
• Use sounding boards to gauge clarity. One of my most important weekly meetings is our "Word" meeting where Dane and I go over Friday's and Sunday's sermons. We spend a lot of time clarifying big ideas. "If there's a haze in the pulpit, there's a fog in the pews."
Here are some of the things we're trying to clarify:
1. The vision of GBCK
2. Leadership roles and functions
3. The Gospel
Again, you can never be too clear.
Breaking barriers
Yesterday Dane and I listened on CD to the first hour of Nelson Searcy's Breaking Growth Barriers workshop.
One of the first growth barriers a church will face is space. At some point your facility begins to feel full even when it isn't full. Searcy uses the "70% rule": when you are filling 70% of your seats your are full. Technically, the space isn't full, but people perceive that it is.
When this happens people
• stop inviting guests
• stop talking/connecting to others
• attend erratically
At GBCK we are facing this barrier in our 10am service. We are hovering right at 70% capacity. In order to create more space we will shift our service start times a half-hour later to 9am and 10:30am in order to give people more options to attend and to invite. The change happens on May 16.
I believe GBCK is poised to reach our next growth increment of 300, which means the Gospel is growing and bearing fruit (Col. 1:6) and that disciples are being made (Matt. 28:19).
As we heard on the CD, sometimes all it takes is one little tweak to bust through a growth barrier.
Asking people to leave church
Donald Miller has an interesting blog post about asking people to leave church. He writes:
"A couple times at a church I’m familiar with, here in Portland, the lead pastor, has very kindly asked people to leave. I remember a specific time he just stood up and asked how many people had been coming to church for a year or more but hadn’t found a way to plug into the community. He then invited them to plug in, (which at this church means to serve or find a home group or work in a ministry) and then asked them if they hadn’t found a place that fit them, it might be time to try another church." You can read the rest of the article here... http://bit.ly/dyHkHg
Some thoughts on the article:
- You have to be very secure as a pastor to ask people to leave, especially if you pastor a smaller church. Are you willing to risk lower attendance, or are your emotions and identity too knitted to good attendance? When just two families leave in a smaller church you feel it big time.
- I think asking people to leave is giving permission for people to leave. Some might feel it's wrong to leave so they need "permission" to leave.
- Asking them to leave is pruning by values and leadership. As the article says, it's an act of leadership (and love, I believe) to lead people to better pastures even if that means going to another church.
- On the other hand, so what if someone is attending church and the person is not serving, reaching, giving, worshiping, small grouping, joining, etc.? Could it be that God has them there for a reason? Could it be that part of their conversion/sanctification is to sit there? Could it be that there is something happening in their lives but it's just not visible yet? Could it be that pastors get nervous when we don't see activity and "doing", and assume the person hasn't "bought our values"? Could it be that God, in his sovereignty, has chosen your church as the environment for the invisible to happen?
- I believe it's fine to ask people to leave your church, but if they decide to stay, then so be it.
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