Does our organization help or hinder?
My people ask this question of the church: Why do you have to make life so hard for regular people? Why all of the gridlock?
They don’t like the way we “do business.”
Guess what? The Church planter needs to laugh more than worry!
Although I understand the need for order out of chaos, church has become a “Type A” place, filled with boring meetings, and anal about some things.
It’s part of the Church Planters job to figure out the difference between bare-bones necessary and anal, and ask “does this prevent Christ from moving?”
I am learning not to care so much about the structure, as I do the aliveness factor. I want to hear laughter and joy bubbling through everything we do. I want there to be less intensity and gritting of teeth, and more of wonder and hallelujahs. I want that, because I believe Christ wants it!
Repercussions for the church planter: If it can’t get done this week, then don’t spin into a frenzy trying to make it happen. God must not need it done this week! If it’s distracting you from following Christ in your “main disciple job” with Him this week, let it go!
Do less, not more. As you’re doing less, ask yourself this question: Is this thing on my plate simply to dot an “i” for the “church business” OR … does it really affect people’s lives I am being sent by Christ to touch?
Stay in the Spirit, light-hearted with a gleam in your eye.
Here are questions I’d like to ask my people as we go forward with developing this new church:
- What fills your heart with laughter?
- What is one way we can keep a flow of laughter in everything we do?
- How can we take ourselves less seriously, and focus upon Christ’s movement (rather than organization) as our primary shaping factor?
- What is one check-in question we could ask in a meeting which would remind us of Jesus’ joy?
- How are we doing at celebrating?
I found this recently in the archives of the Baltimore-Washington Conference’s website (www.bwumc.org).
“”Lighten up, loosen up, and have a little fun,” Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton from the Pittsburgh Area, told the ordinands and those being commissioned in a sermon during the service.
Too many people today sleep too tight, are too intense and unhappy in the way they live, he said. Likewise too many churches today are the same way: too intense, skeptical and afraid. Too many pastors, people and churches have become mechanical and indifferent.
Bickerton encouraged the new pastors to do as John Wesley did, ”He walked out of his high steeple and got his hands dirty where the people were. We’ve talked too long about our (United Methodist) demise,” he said. “Culture has more influence on the church than the church has on culture. But God wants us to loosen up.”
To loosen up doesn’t diminish the call of the clergy or the ministry of the laity, the bishop said. “You have been entrusted with a gift, the gift of your call, to nourish and carry on faithfully. Today is a day to celebrate that you said ‘yes’ to the call and the joy you feel inside.”
Bickerton further instructed the ordinands and those being commissioned, “In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, aim for perfection, be of one mind, and live in peace,” as Paul directed in 2 Corinthians.
The bishop told of his friend and district superintendent who recently suffered a severe stroke and doctors discovered a massive tumor on his brain. After surgery and intensive care for several days, the man slowly began to gain consciousness, and faces a long recovery. “I encouraged him to draw on the faith stored up in his own body,” Bickerton said.
Like his friend, the bishop said, we are prisoners in our own bodies, struck by an inability to make disciples for transforming the world. “There’s a disconnect inside. We’re biblically illiterate and joy-challenged. We lie paralyzed in the midst of it all.”
Turning directly to the ordinands and probationers, he said, “This is what you’re walking into, where you’re being called. You’re not here to maintain the machinery of the church. We need to transform the church, to lead in the name of Jesus Christ.”
One day, as Bishop Bickerton sat at the bedside of his friend, deep in a coma, the doctor pounded on the man’s chest and shouted, “Wake up, Lamar, squeeze my hand.”
Lamar did. The doctor said not to be afraid to “get loud” with him, “to get this guy awake.”
“Maybe that will work today,” Bickerton said, and shouted over and over into the audience, “Hey church, wake up! Wake up!”
Then turning to the Class of 2008, he said, “Hey church, trust the gift God has entrusted in your care.”
–> Read Questions to Ask a Church, Part 1 here.
