From maintenance to mission
(listen to the talk here part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4)
I suppose that you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want your church to grow. The rhetoric of the conference title is challenging and demanding, but then Christians love rhetoric and we have a real problem getting beyond it. We are full of brave words – but we are going to need more than words if we are going to have an impact on our culture.
In a lively evangelical church it is possible to fool yourself that everything is be fine. So it is hard to move our people to a mission mentality; to put the church on a mission footing – “Why should we”, our people are thinking, “Things are fine in my church”.
The last church survey from Christian Research put the decline of evangelical churches at 17% over the last seven years. Who will be the last Christian in Britain? If it is you, would you put the lights out as you leave?
We can no longer continue without shifting gear from a ‘maintenance’ footing to a ‘mission’ footing. I am going to talk about how we can make that shift, but let’s start with another question…
What on earth is wrong with maintenance?
Our church office is located in a thirty year old church building near the centre of Sunderland. It is a great location, but the building was put together cheaply and the dwindling congregation never had the money to maintain it properly. Two weeks ago, as I was leaving at the end of the afternoon, I let a door slam and a large double radiator in the room next door fell off the wall with an enormous crash. The moral of this story; maintenance is essential if your church is not going to fall apart!
We should never forget that church leaders are, first and foremost, shepherds. A shepherd knows that, if he wants a decent crop of lambs next spring, he must look after the sheep through the winter.
So Christians need to be taught, encouraged to pray, to enjoy supportive fellowship with one another and worship together. If you do this well then your church will grow – I call this Church Growth Without Really Trying and we are going to think about it in more detail in tomorrow’s session.
These four ministries (word, prayer, fellowship and worship – see Acts 2:42) are core activities in a church and really ought to be done with excellence, but because churches who do this well tend to grow without really trying everyone thinks things are fine and you loose a sense of urgency in mission.
Christians need to get out more, see where their communities are heading. We should let people stare in wonder at the statistics on the Christian Research website. Someone in your fellowship could have the distinction of being the last Christian in England.
Jesus – the man with the plan
Jesus looked with sorrow at his own community. You get the feel of this in Jesus’ Galilean ministry as he looks at the size of the job he faced, Matthew says he “Felt great pity for the crowds who came, because their problems were so great and they didn’t know where to go for help, they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36 NLT)
This passage is worth a careful look, because it is going to provide us with a template; a working model to move our churches from maintenance to mission – Matthew 9:35 to 10:8.
Jesus’ sorrow over his own community may have been spontaneous – powerful emotions released by being face to face with human helplessness. However, his response to the overwhelming need was, I believe, anything but spontaneous. Look carefully and you see a thought-out strategy to tackle to problem. Let’s look at this in detail:
First, he had a clear focus for his mission (10:5-6), it was to Israel. This is absolutely clear. Gentiles like us are often shocked when they realize that Jesus hardly ever ministered to non-Jews! He had a very clear goal. Whatever ministries the disciples were to use in their mission trip, they were to stick to that goal single-mindedly.
Second, he had already trained the team to achieve that goal. When Jesus told his disciples they ought to pray for workers, he fully intended to name them as his squad for the task in hand. He knew that they were to become the answer to their own prayers. Actually, he had already trained them enough to send them out immediately to start the job!
Some of us are suspicious of goal setting and planning to achieve a spiritual goal, we note that Jesus made this a matter of prayer. That is right, but if Jesus is your model for a pietistic response to the needs of the world, you need to realize that he is also our model for a businesslike response to the needs of the world. Jesus was a man with a plan, he believed in prayer, but he also believed in planning to bring about answers to his prayers.
Third, he empowered that team and told them to get on with the job (10:8). They had a lot to learn, but they knew enough to be let loose in the real world.
Fourth, he told his team to find others and train them to do the job too (see Matthew 28:19-20)
So when Jesus told his disciples to pray, called twelve of them to be workers and told them exactly what he wanted them to do; his friends must have looked at one another and said, “He’s already thought about this!” They were right; he was working to a strategy, and so should we.
If you want to transform your church from maintenance to mission, you need a vision. Every church ought to have a vision – a clear sense of what God wants us to achieve and what things would look like if we achieved it. In addition we need a plan, a carefully thought through means of achieving the vision.
Now if God has a plan it seems to me (forgive the simple theology here) that we ought to have a plan too – there is nothing humanist or worldly about this; it is godly to have a good plan to do what God commands us to do. We are commanded to ‘go into all the world’ – but what part of that task is the specific responsibility of your Christian community?
Seeing a vision – a clear focus for your mission
Our fellowship has a simple vision statement that tells people what we are doing:
We are building a community whose aim is to live and love like Jesus and get the people of Sunderland into heaven
Identifying your vision is not a task for you alone – the whole leadership and the whole fellowship need to own their vision passionately – so we all need to be involved in drafting… then refining… and finally defining our vision. It can be a tremendously uniting experience for a leadership team and a church to work together on identifying their goals for the future. Leaders must lead, and leaders must listen.
Leaders must lead – so you set the agenda, you come up with the big picture. It is your job to get the process going.
Leaders must listen - one of the jobs a leader must do is work out how best to involve the fellowship in this process. Wise leaders will invite the church to participate in serious discussion and prayer as they work their way towards defining what their vision of the future is.
Leaders must lead – you need to refine and define the vision. Stripping out the superfluous and sharpening it into something powerful and meaningful. You then present it to the church in a way that excites and motivates people.
Leaders must listen - invite the church to participate in monitoring your vision and checking what you wish to achieve against your actual progress.
There are books that will tell you how to set vision and goals for your church. I am not going to do that here, but here are some hints on how you begin, what kind of things will help to clarify a vision. Let me suggest three that I have found helpful.
First, find out what good looks like - When Cathie and I arrived in Houghton le Spring (a small northern town with about 26,000 inhabitants) in 1997 the church had about 160 people regularly attending and an uneasy relationship with the community. I wondered what could be done about that.
It had struck me that the best churches I had ever seen were lively evangelical parish churches where Christians worshipped on Sundays but the world and his wife visited during the week for all kinds of reasons. It seemed to me that one simple goal would advance the gospel in our town; let’s make Bethany Christian Centre into the parish church for our town. So we got to work on that vision, opening the place up to all kinds of community groups and activities that in time increased our contact with the community.
A breakthrough came when we entered a float into the local carnival parade during Houghton’s annual feast. Joe Lawson, our local councilor, told me, “I’ve always felt that Bethany held itself aloof from us, but now I feel all that has changed, you guys are really part of our community”. Seven years later the church was full, with about 400 in attendance each week, most of these people are local. For sure, Houghton people still get married and buried from the Anglican parish church – but for most other things they come to us!
Before you set a goal or define a vision – visit churches that are successful in their mission and find out what good looks like. Learn from other churches that are growing and doing things well, do some research. Sit down together and compare notes. What would good look like in your fellowship?
Second, avoid B.H.A.G. s – Big Hairy Audacious Goals. When we started Bethany City Church one of our team wanted to see one person converted every day. It was pie in the sky! During our discussions on vision recently I suggested to the church that we ought to have a vision for growth by conversion, “Imagine if we doubled the congregation in three years”, I suggested. People did not look too stunned at the thought, “That would mean we need to see 50 people come to faith every year for three years”, nobody burst out laughing, so I kept going. “Can you see that happening?” I asked, heads were nodding and it is part of our vision document for the next three years.
Third, pay attention to strategy and tactics. Strategy is a plan to achieve something worthwhile. Let’s say that you feel that the church ought to pray more than it does. So you have a strategy to encourage people to pray. If you do the strategy and leave it at that you will have a fine-sounding vision statement but you won’t be going anywhere!
Tactics are about how you will achieve the strategy. So to encourage more prayer in the church we will:
- Open a home for prayer from 9-12 on one Saturday every month
- Get a team to produce a regular prayer magazine
- Take people on retreat days to teach them how to pray
These are your tactics to achieve your strategic goal of making prayer more central in the life of the church. Your vision needs to be both tactical and strategic or nothing will change.
Jesus had a strategy, and he had thought through the tactics – so should we!
Training the team
Jesus had already trained his team. We need to train our team.
I like reading old speeches, it’s exciting to read what moved people to do great things in the past. One of my favourites is this speech by John F. Kennedy
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold.
John F. Kennedy – September 12th 1962 {
On a later visit to Huston, Kennedy bumped into a janitor as he came out of the toilet. “What are you doing”, he said to the janitor. “I am helping put a man on the moon”, the man answered. I wonder what response you would get if you asked that question of one of our church members, “What are you doing?”
Everyone in City Church has a copy of our vision document. The simple summary statement is on the front:
We are building a community whose aim is to live and love like Jesus and get the people of Sunderland into heaven
Underneath it is another phrase:
and my part in this is…
The hope is that everyone would have a clear idea of the mission of the whole church and what they are doing to make it happen. The church is the team and the team need to be trained and empowered. Once more, let’s think of three areas:
Welcome – a friend of mine bought a garage recently. It was not, on the face of it a wise move, it was a failing Vauxhall dealership in Scotland right in the middle of a huge car-retail centre, and they were only selling 50 cars each month. Most people thought that he had no chance of success.
My friend believed they had a good product, and he tweaked the packaging a little to make things more attractive. He re-trained the workforce into a different way of doing things. Two years later they are selling 200 cars each month and they do not advertise! What makes the difference? My friend is quite certain – he welcomes each customer into the showroom personally, makes sure they are happy and when the time is right introduces them to a sales executive. The difference is in the welcome.
What does good look like in a welcoming church? Find out and train your folks to do it!
Identify people’s gifts – seven years ago we began running a four session course called Bodybuilding. Based on Willow Creek’s Networking course, Bodybuilding helps people identify their spiritual gifts and their personal style of working. Then each course member is interviewed and advised on how to fit into the workforce of the church. Identifying gifts and releasing people into the work is utterly fundamental. It is what some people call a ‘hhigh leverage’ activity – you put in an hour of effort but you get hundreds of hours of work out of it because you are releasing people into useful ministry. Start doing this immediately you get home!
Jean Scott is a housewife with no academic qualifications who did the Bodybuilding course about six years ago. Her kids were grown up and she was wondering what to do with her time. At the interview it became apparent that she had a longing to be a children’s storyteller, and the gifts to do it. We gave her the job of telling a story at the toddlers group each week. Six years later, Jean is a legend in local primary schools with more opportunities to tell Bible stories than she can cope with. Jean would never have discovered her potential if she had not done the Bodybuilding course.
What does good look like when it comes to recognizing gifting and abilities? Find out and start doing it as soon as you possibly can!
Train leaders – how many people do you have in your church who are involved in leadership at some level. There are probably dozens. Our leaders need training and personal development and we ought to be intentional about providing it.
Can I suggest that training ought to be along three lines:
Theological – have you noticed how many of your youth leaders, when they pray, thank the Father profusely for dying on the cross for them? You think that’s OK? Then you need some theological training! Now, maybe this is not serious, but the truth is our weapon in the battle and our leaders need to be equipped to teach and defend it.
Practical – leaders need to know how to do their job. They may need to know about food hygiene, the child protection policy, or how to do a five minute talk. They may need to understand the development of an adolescent, how to interpret the bible competently or what to do if an old lady had an epileptic fit.
Personal development – leaders at all levels benefit greatly from on-going one-to-one or small group nurturing.
I can really recommend David Clarkson’s Learning to Lead course, especially for churches who are keen to train and develop competent mentors. We run a programme we call Leadership Academy – small groups of leaders, each with its own leader – they meet once a month and read together through theological, practical or personal development material. It’s informal and it works.
Now how do you fit all this into a busy lifestyle? We need to make leadership development do-able by everyone, not just the retired! Let me make two suggestions:
First, plan this into your church life carefully and think in terms of a two to three year period. Small aliquots of training delivered regularly over two to three years is better than great big sessions. You can not do this quickly.
Second, you need more full time staff than you think you do. Your good people are busy and don’t get home ‘till six thirty in the evening. Then after a rushed tea they are out leading a youth group or something. This lifestyle is not sustainable; you need full time staff to take the strain. In my last two years at Bethany I got a reputation for being reluctant to delegate. It was not true, in the leadership team everyone was overworked, one of our best guys was clinically depressed (in my opinion) but would not go to his doctor. I had a limited options when it came to delegation, and it almost killed me. We needed more people on the full time team – so do you!
Find out what good looks like in leadership training and get it going in your church as soon as you can!
Empowering the team
One of the first times I ever preached was in a church in St Albans. I didn’t know my bible very well and I had only been a Christian for a couple of years… I asked, “What do I do”. My pastor said, “Stick to what you know; tell us what God has been telling you recently”. He was taking a risk, but it was good advice. My pastor knew something; we are ‘ready’ long before we think we are ‘ready’!
Jesus had half-trained his team, they were half ready, the next stage in their growth was to be sent out to do it themselves without his being there to bail them out of trouble.
We planted City Church for two reasons. The obvious one was to reach into the City of Sunderland, but there was a second reason, to push people with leadership potential into a position where they had to use their gifts and not rely on others. The day we started, we had two congregations led by people who were half-trained!
Are you in a church full of talented people who cannot achieve their potential because other talented people are in the way? Then you probably need to plant!
Whatever you do – empower your team!