“The business of the church is to tell and embody a story." Lesslie Newbigin
My church has a big goal: Launch seven satellites in seven venues on seven days of the week.
We’ve had our first “preview” for the first satellite that will meet in a diner on Monday nights, an idea we picked up from reading “Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch,” a book by Nelson Searcy (an alum of Duke Divinity School and former director of Saddleback Church’s Purpose Driven Community).
My church is in the process of launching a new satellite venue, with the audacious goal of launching seven satellites in seven venues on seven days of the week.
Mainline churches have a problem. It costs too much to start a new church. There are two big expenses: salary and space. UMC ordained clergy cost at a minimum roughly $70,000/year when you include benefits (anyone have data on other mainline salaries?) and my church rents and pays $2,100/month for worship space and $700/month for office space.
No, I’m not talking about Aimee Semple McPherson. I’m talking about foursquare.com, where I was last seen at the Capital Area District Library as the mayor. Yes, I am the mayor of the local library. I proudly sport my Bookworm “badge” right alongside my Local and Greasy Spoon badges.
In a recent article on Faith & Leadership, Verity Jones points out how many Christian leaders talk about how to use social media, but few if any offer a theology of it.
Well, I’ll give it a try. Here’s a brief theological sketch for social media using four biblical-theological concepts: people of the Book, the ascension, perichoresis and the parousia.
Sometimes things are better said in the negative. Have you ever tried to rephrase the Ten Commandments in the positive? It’s not quite so easy, and something gets lost. Marcus Buckingham wrote about the one key to success in his book, “The One Thing”: find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it. So in the spirit of Buckingham, here’s my list of five things I’m going to stop doing in 2012.
I am haunted by the Crystal Cathedral. I cannot get it out of my mind. It is the nightmare of every second pastor, or every pastor who follows a personality pastor. I suspect it is on the mind of many at Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Bible Church following his recent announcement to step down as pastor. While I haven’t kept up with what’s happened since Francis Chan stepped down as pastor at Cornerstone Community Church, I suspect they are asking similar questions right now. Are these churches built on the personality and ego of one pastor?
I was wandering around Faith & Leadership checking out articles the other day. Timothy Larsen’s article “More Relevant Than Thou,” which he wrote earlier this year, caught my attention, because I had just had a heated discussion with a colleague about the word “relevant.” I’m the second pastor of a ten-year-old UMC church plant and we’re supposed to be relevant, but the word sounds so cliché to my ears. Every hip new church today and even some old stodgy ones advertise that they are relevant.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to grow my church. I know “church growth” is sometimes a bad word for us mainliners, but at its best, church growth is about making disciples of Jesus Christ. So I went with my worship leader, Jeremy, to Michigan State University’s campus and tried to hand out worship invite cards to students. This was way out of my comfort zone, but I was asking my congregation to push themselves, and I thought I ought to push myself, too. I found it a lot easier to tack the invite cards up on bulletin boards than hand them out to people, but we did both.
While I was an undergrad, I took all the photography classes my small liberal arts college offered. I took them because it helped me remain sane amidst the stress of all the studying. I found evenings in the dark room relaxing (yes, this was in ancient times before digital photography really took-off).
Simplify – From Overscheduled to Organized* Sycamore Creek and Potterville UMC October 2016 Tom Arthur Peace friends! Or should I say: Overwhelmed, overscheduled, and exhausted friends! We’re currently in a series called Simplify. We’re figuring out how to unclutter our souls so we can focus on what’s really important. Many of us wrestle with being […]
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