iGod

10 Commandments for Church Planters and Pastors

A cracking top ten by Rich Nathan, Senior pastor of Vineyard Columbus, Ohio:

Pastors and church planters face enormous demands as we try to juggle family responsibilities, ministry, and often, school and part-time jobs. How can we live sustainable lives? We read of tragic pastoral failures on a weekly basis. Most pastors don’t last in the ministry for five years (perhaps the only way we pastors are like pro football players!). I’ve been a pastor for 25 years. Here are ten practices that have enabled me to pastor for the long-haul.

#1 Build a rock-solid daily personal devotional life with God. This simply means that you spend time every day soaking in God’s presence. You can handle an enormous amount of pressure, if your foundation is solid. Pressure is not the problem. Weak foundations are the problem. If your foundation is shaky, you won’t be able to handle very much at all. Maybe you’ve heard the expression: “You can’t fire a cannon out of a canoe.” If you are really going to accomplish something; if you are going to be able to achieve and do the great things that God has in store for you to achieve and do, you need a strong foundation. The cannon of your life needs to be bolted into granite. And the granite of your life is your rock-solid personal time with God every day.

#2 Choose a prayer partner, who is a peer and with whom you can be utterly transparent. What I have personally done in my own life for the past 20 years and what we require of every pastor on the staff of Vineyard Columbus is to have a prayer partner. At Vineyard Columbus we take one day every month outside of the office talking and praying with our prayer partner. We have a set of accountability questions that we ask each other such as:

a. Are you struggling with sexual purity in any way?
b. Have you seen any pornography, or anything on TV or in a movie that you shouldn’t have watched?
c. Have you done anything sexually you shouldn’t have done?
d. Are there any emotional attachments forming with someone who is not your spouse?
e. Have you handled your money and financial dealings with absolute integrity?
f. Have you experienced any breach in any relationship? Are you at peace with everyone?
g. Have you forgiven everyone for everything?
h. Are you experiencing intimacy with God on a regular basis?

#3 If you are married, schedule a weekly date night with your spouse. It is really important to stay current and to fuel romance and intimacy with your spouse. My wife and I have a regular date every Monday. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It could be coffee and a long walk through a park or a leisurely breakfast. But schedule a weekly date with your spouse outside your home.

#4 Get financial counseling from a professional financial counselor. Strongly consider (if you are married, with your spouse) going to a course like Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Life is sustainable when your financial house is in order.

#5 Ruthlessly avoid all compromising situations with the opposite sex. There are few things that derail people from the plan of God more than sexual impurity. Jim Downing, who is one of the patriarchs of the Navigator organization, was asked some years ago: Why is it that so few people finish well? His response was profound. He said: “They learn the possibility of being fruitful without being pure. They begin to believe that purity doesn’t matter. Eventually, they become like trees rotting inside that are eventually toppled by a storm.” Live a sexually pure life.

#6 Take care of yourself physically. Join a gym. Get into the habit of walking with a friend. Watch your diet. It is not enough that you’re involved in ministry. It is not even enough that you grow in internal purity and intimacy with God. You are a whole person. Your life is integrated - body, soul and spirit. You cannot neglect your body or your emotional life and continue to do well. So, take care of yourself physically.

#7 Do not confuse knowledge or skills or giftedness for spiritual maturity. You are gifted. You may know a lot. You may help many people. None of those things are the same as spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is a matter of your internal character, your honesty, your willingness to forgive everyone for everything, your joy during trials, your trust in the sovereignty of God, your endurance in hard times, and your unwillingness to compromise integrity. Don’t confuse knowledge or skills or giftedness for spiritual maturity.

#8 If you are married, take a great marriage inventory with your spouse and have a professional marriage counselor discuss the results with you. Here at Vineyard Columbus we offer a marriage inventory called LIMRI. We have regular marriage retreats. Do a marriage inventory especially at the front-end of pastoring, and every few years after that.

#9 Join a small group (and if married, join with your spouse). Christianity is a team sport. We cannot grow successfully apart from biblical community. Join a men’s group, a women’s group, a coed group, or a recovery group where you can know and be known.

#10 Cultivate the fear of the Lord and a fear of sin. We sinners always dreadfully under-estimate the cost of sin and dreadfully over-estimate our ability to manage the consequences after we choose to sin. Sin costs and once you choose to sin, the consequences are out of your hands. We read in Proverbs 14.26-27, He who fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for his children I will be a refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, turning a man from the snares of death.

Deuteronomy 10.12-13 says, And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

Psalm 34.9 tells us this: Fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.

Psalm 128:1 says: Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.

 

ASD

Sheesh! Another new year already. How are you feeling?

So here we are in 2011. How are you feeling? Excited? Apprehensive? Non-plussed? Made any New Year resolutions?

To be honest, I am not one for making any rash promises anymore. Goodness knows I have tried. When I was in my late teenage years and early twenties, before becoming a Christian, I can remember countless times after New Year’s Eve bashes promising never to touch another drop of drink again (now that’s original), never to smoke another cigarette (another cliché), never to eat so much ever again, go vegetarian, get fit, oh the list went on.

Maybe one of the reasons why we fail is because resolutions are made out of how we feel at that time. They are made ‘off the bat’. Some sagacious bod, probably not Plato, said, a quickly made promise is quickly broken. Yeh, true, but let’s give a nod towards human nature. If we feel bad about ourselves we tend to want to address it. It’s a natural and not a wrong thing to do I feel.

I was talking to a gym rep who came knocking at our offices one day trying to sell discounted membership, but the deal was you had to sign up in January and had to take it out for the whole year. He told me in an unguarded moment that most gyms heavily market themselves in January to cash in on people’s weakness.

Gyms also know that usually by March the seasonal angst of many of us needing to get fit starts to weaken its grip and its business back to normal so, of course, the trips become as rare as seeing My Little pony win in the Grand National.

It makes me wonder how people see Church. I accept the fact that some find their way to us because they are feeling guilty and need to find peace. They have tried all else, so we get a look in.

For others, it may just be a Christmas, Remembrance Sunday or Easter thing. Others still, it is for births, marriages or funerals or ‘hatch, match and dispatch’ as we colloquially say in my Anglican circles.

Now, I am truly not judging anyone as our road to God is often different and not without its encounters, but to be honest you don’t tend to come to church if you feel like your life is sorted, do you? Much like you probably wouldn’t go to the gym if you feel good about your body.

But we all have needs, it just some are less obvious than others. We also often need a trigger to get us there. I wish it wasn’t like that and we could come in our perfect, wonderful and healthy states, but actually I think that is a myth anyway. Anyone who says that they have life sorted and are unbothered by some sort of suffering probably has a long wooden nose.

Most people who come to Stour Valley Vineyard Church want to see real change in their lives. They are not happy with their lot and want life to have a greater significance for them. They realise that something is seriously missing, and it really doesn’t take long for them to see what it is.

For some, it’s true, they will drift in and out of church like gym membership, but for the others, they tend to hand around and want to go deeper in their experience of Jesus. Once they have worked through their misconceptions of church and experienced worship, the Bible and the power of prayer, they find people who accept them without judgement, who don’t make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves.

Yes, we have a ‘Get fit and stay healthy plan’, but it comes with a 'strictly no strings attached' policy. For us, belonging starts with relationships.

ASD

An Ikea flat pack gingerbread house with some thoughts

This weekend my family were forced to make the less than holy pilgrimage to Ikea.

It is something that we are obliged to do as part of our annual devotions of making our house more liveable. As we passed through the temple of all things MDF and colourful, we came across the ultimate in flat-pack products - the Pepparkakshus Gingerbread House in the food section.

Now admittedly I didn't buy it, but I was curious to know if it came with an Allen key and a 'how to assemble' instruction booklet.

After a morning of saying to my long-suffering wife, "Ikea - sheesh! They think of everything" I just sighed and thought this time they really have.

Of course IKEA is not everyone's cup of Sweedish tea. And if you are not into modern, practical urban living which comes in a flat pack I can quite understand, but there is something about it that draws you in. You try and be strong, principled and focused, but then something happens.You start finding the most bizarre and irrelevant item unexpectedly alluring. And then, before you know it, it's in your big yellow bag!

I find that once in Ikea it is easy not to have to think too much. If you have not come with a purpose, you can end up wandering around with the rest of the crowds, following the large arrows on the floors. Everything is thought out for your convenience.

Now I have heard it said by some respected people that some sections of the Church are in danger of offering flat-pack Christianity. You know, things like having our theology, teaching and worship neatly packaged for easy consumption on a Sunday morning. 

In fact, I can remember in the early days of the Alternative Worship movement, which I had been vaguely part of before it became the 'Emerging Church' movement, how some antagonists liked to mock traditional Evangelicals for just accepting what was put in front of them. It was easy pickings, but I found it quite harsh and judgementalist. It became a way to validate their own actions and reason for being.

The truth is 'flat-pack thinking' is everywhere and pervades most areas of our society at some level. I see even so-called New Atheists are now being accused of what amounts as flat-pack ideology. They have a worked out mantra with cliched arguments and seem incapable of accommodating other views of atheists of theists. Even spelling this out to them out can be met with a testy response.

Extreme political ideologies do the same. They offer one solution and one way of doing it. Isn't that how dictactorships start? Enough said.

One of the things I feel that we have to keep in our sights is the fact that Christianity has been called by academics, past and present, the greatest philosophical religion in the world. It is known as the 'queen of sciences'. By definition, it has required not only faith, but reason (the ability to think).

Peter in his first letter writes that we should "always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in us" (1 Pet 3:15). Our faith operates best using the head and heart, but lest it falls into a dry theoretical faith system, it also requires 'hands' - faith with action.

I find myself asking myself on a Monday morning: if the church we love really is to be effective and vital in a fast-changing geo-social environment, how does it exactly remain outward-focused - and in the world?  It must resist the temptation to withdraw and simply "huddle and cuddle" behind closed doors.

But I do recognise that there are risks with a truly outward-focused strategy. It means any 'flat-pack thinking' will get tested to the nth degree. At some stage, if we are doing it right, we will be forced to think outside of the flat, brown cardboard box. Now that has got to be a good thing.

We should all be able to agree on the basic materials, i.e., the Bible and doctrine, but we'll need to work out our own building solution, which is relevant and meaningful to our space and context.

Don't hear me wrong on this, ministries like Alpha are great, but they aren't everything. We need more entrepreneurs!

I believe that maybe the most successful building of the church in the 21st Century will require more work, more effort, more money, more hours... In fact, more 'carpet time' with God in prayer, but the end result will be worth it. And I bet stronger than a flat-pack programme!  If not, we will probably get frustrated with the instructions when 'A', does not going into 'B'.

As I reflected more on my Ikea flat-pack Gingerbread House, I thought of those words by Paul to the Church at Corinth: "We have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling." (2 Cor 5:1b-2a).

I'll put my hand up and say it is a struggle to continually think for yourself, pray for yourself, read the Bible for yourself (I say that as a church planter, husband and father), but we really are not doing it alone. We may at times groan for the burden of life to be lifted, but as Paul the apostle goes on to say we are "given the Holy Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come."  We live by faith, not sight. That should give us some comfort.

We might not have the nice catalogue picture that shows us the how the finished article will look, but by faith, and suffering, we get on and build it...one carpenter's nail at a time. 

Time for a ginger biscuit.

ASD

 

 

Church planting mistakes - yup, we all make 'em

I don't often write about my experiences as a Vineyard church planter. I sort of think most people in regular civvy life, Christian or non-Christian are not that interested, so if you aren't a leader and want to pop off and see how we are doing in the Cricket, I'll forgive you.

Still there?

I have put some thoughts from a church planting coach below, which I pass on to any other would-be church planter mad enough to answer the call.

But I have to first add that I recognise some reading this might think it is a weird thing to do.  Surely I could find myself a nice quiet hobby. For others, in a more traditional setting, they, perhaps, don't understand why I am not now ordained in the Church of England and making life easier for myself.

But the truth is I love the Vineyard's values and it has been instrumental in keeping me in the Church at a time when I was on the point of giving up. So it is not just a channel of service or an option, but my family. That is not to say the Vineyard is perfect. Far from it. But it one wonderful expression of the beautiful thing we call the Church.

So I find myself church planting because I love the Church and feel it is the best way to reach people with the good news I received myself - that being the gospel of Jesus Christ. To Him I am eternally grateful.

However, many church plants fail and that bothers me. I am told that for every three new churches started in the UK three are closed. If that statistic is true it is deeply depressing. So what can cause a church plant to stumble?

Via Rick Warren. David Putnam, a pastor at Mountain Lake Church, Stateside, makes some worthwhile quick-fire observations regarding:

1.  Underestimating the cost

2.  Violating the Sabbath

3.  Hanging on too long

4.  Not having a coach

Although you may need to read this through the lens of your own church situation, one thing that particular stood out at me was the fact that church planters want to rush ahead. David says:

"Most of us quick-start church-planter types are driven by the urgency of the calendar. We tend to focus on a launch date, and regardless if we are ready or not, we launch. Instead of being driven by the calendar, it would serve us well to be driven by milestones. Milestones focus on the accomplishment of strategic actions."

We can also look around and secretly harbour thoughts to be like such-and-such church down the road. It can become our model and benchmark for what we want our church to look like. The result? it can make us disappointed, ungrateful people.

When Jesus describes Peter as 'the rock' the Church would be built upon in Matthew 16:18 I have to smile. In Matthew's gospel Peter doesn't seem to fit the bill at all.  Not someone who you would naturally think is solid, reliable and go the distance.

You might also think, as Peter might himself, that Jesus was a lousy judge of character. But God in his infinite wisdom knows better. 

Peter made some mistakes, but was used amazingly by God. Any church planter should take encouragement from this example.

I have found a piece of old advice given by Vineyard's founder John Wimber to pastor Lance Pitluck (Anaheim Vineyard) useful and I pass it on as a last thought before the weekend:

"If you have oak, build with oak. If you have bamboo, build with bamboo."

In other words, be content with what you've got.

Whatever you have, the church still gets built. If He is in the centre of the plan and the plan is His, relax.  it might not look as you first might imagined or dreamed, but, hey, we go with it and enjoy the ride!

ASD