Swindoll to Ministers: Rip the “S” off your chest

One of the greatest lessons Chuck Swindoll, Senior Pastor of Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, TX, and Founder of Insight for Living, has learned in his fifty plus years in ministry???

Serve in weakness. Ministers are NOT self-sufficient. They have cracks they must not hide. They need other people.

In other words, ministers suffering from “The Superman Syndrome” need to rip off the “S” and be authentic. Here’s his advice:

Some churches today have adopted a professional mind-set entirely. Like the consumer culture they live in, far too many pay the pastors to do the work of the ministry for them, while they sit back, passively watch, and offer comments now and then. Where is that in the Bible?

A pastor who allows this approach to occur has fallen for what I call “The Superman Syndrome.” I’m not talking about pulling on a pair of blue tights and a red cape and putting a fancy “S” on his chest—though I heard of a pastor who did exactly that on Easter Sunday (I wish I were kidding). I’m talking about an attitude that says: “I am self-sufficient,” “I need no one else,” or “I will not show weakness or admit any inadequacy.” These words betray the presence of the Superman Syndrome—that particular peril for pastors who go it alone and become “the star of the show.” Any pastor sets himself up for letting people down when he poses as Superman.

Read the full post on Chuck Swindoll’s blog “The Pastor’s Soul, Role, and Home”

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the fully online course “The Theology and Practice of Ministry” may want to reflect on Swindoll’s comments in light of one of your course textbooks, Greg Ogden’s Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God.

Not unrelated, Nancy Ortberg, founding partner of Teamworx2, recently spoke of “the seduction of influence”:

It’s tempting to [seek influence] for all the wrong reasons.

Word 1: Ego. We’ve brought the celebrity culture into our church and overlook people who are so like Jesus. We attribute more to up-front people than we should, more to attractive people than we should. The solution is to live more deeply into our brokenness.

Word 2: Burden. We place on ourselves a burden in leadership—our numbers, the highs and lows of leadership—it’s about power, control, and outcomes, and Jesus didn’t talk fondly about any of those things. Free leaders—free of the need for certain outcomes—are the best leaders.

Hat tip to Kevin Miller, Off the Agenda: Conversations for Building Church Leaders

Also, see Tony Morgan’s blog “5 Warning Signs of a Personality-Driven Church” and the posted comments

10 STUPID THINGS that keep churches from growing

Geoff Surratt, pastor of ministries at Seacoast Church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, wrote  Ten Stupid Things That Keep Churches from Growing: How Leaders Can Overcome Costly Mistakes. Here are the 10 stupid things, according to Surratt, that keep churches from growing:

1. Leaders do it all
2. Establishing wrong role for the pastor’s family
3. Second rate worship experiences
4. Low quality children’s ministry
5. Promoting talent over integrity
6. Clinging to bad location
7. Copying another successful church
8. Favor discipline over reconciliation
9. Mixing ministry and business
10. Letting committees steer the ship

The Christian Post wrote this about #1 on the list (“Leaders do it all”):

Out of the 10 mistakes he covers, the most common and the first to be addressed in the book is “Trying to Do it All.”

A comical quote at the bottom of the chapter page cleverly conveys the problem that pastors often find themselves in: “Just because I’m the janitor doesn’t mean I can’t perform your wedding.”

“Pastors tend to default to doing everything themselves rather than working through people in the congregation,” Surratt explained to The Christian Post. “They take on a lot of different hats and wind up overworked and underproductive because of that.”

When Surratt was the pastor at Church on the Lake in Texas, a small church with less than 50 people when he took over, he was simultaneously the head pastor, Sunday school teacher, bookkeeper, worship director, administrative assistant, groundskeeper, maintenance man, and janitor for a time.

“As I look back on my time at Church on the Lake, I can’t help but wonder what I was thinking,” Surratt confesses. “Trying to do all (or most) of the work themselves is the number one stupid thing pastors and leaders do that inhibits their church from growing.”

Listen to Geoff Surratt and his wife Sherry discuss the book on Leadership Network’s The Show:

Rockbridge Seminary students may also benefit from:

• Ed Stetzer’s interview with Goeff Surratt
• Reading Goeff Surratt’s blog

Brian McLaren – why we must rethink evangelism

In a chapel address at Anderson University, Brian McLaren shares incredibly helpful insights about how people today want God in their lives and how the people of God can help them.

On his website, Brian McLaren states that more background on the chapel message can be found in his book More Ready Than You Realize (Zondervan, 2002).

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the online course “Contemporary Evangelism” may also want to check out William Lobdell’s sad and disturbing journey described in his book Losing My Religion: How I Lost my Faith Reporting on Religion in America – and Found Unexpected Peace (Collins 2009).

Barry Minkow, senior pastor of Community Bible Church in San Diego, writes about this book on the back cover:

I wholeheartedly believe that every Christian who wants to equip themselves to do the Great Commission, and not just talk about the Great Commission, better think through the passionate and detailed account of William Lobdell’s de-conversion. The book did not harm my faith in the Lord Jesus, it just demonstrated that the emperor has no clothes — and I am one of the emperors.

Depression and Ministry

Licensed marriage and family therapist Rhett Smith posted several informative blogs about depression and ministry. Rhett’s blogs quote extensively from Howard W. Stone’s Depression and Hope: New Insights for Pastoral Counseling (Kindle edition also available), including Stone’s “4 spiritual experiences that compare strongly to depression”:

Dark night of the soul: This term is in reference to the sixteenth-century spirituality, specifically that spoken of by John of the Cross. Often when this term is used the verse that is referenced is Psalm 63:1 “It is a ‘purgative stage in the contemplative journey during which worldly life loses all its attractiveness and even the life of prayer dries up so severely that the self feels utterly cut off from God’ (Bringle 1996, 333). It is a time of yearning for connection with the Other but with little perceived response. It is a period of aridity, and it ordinarily includes some flatness or darkening of emotion. ‘Dark night of the soul’ refers to the experience of being alone, of seeking closeness and a connection that is not there, of being vulnerable and recognizing one’s own finitude….But the dark night of the soul is part of the journey of faith” (Stone, 21-22).

Accidie: “Early in the Christian church, the desert monks began writing of a condition they called ‘accidie’, one of the seven deadly sins. The term (also known as acedia or akedia) has gone through several transformations of meaning through the centuries. Evagrius of Pontus (fourth century C.E.) described accidie as a struggle with temptations, boredom, weariness, and difficulty maintaining attention or focus which lead to a physical and emotional exhaustion. At first ‘accidie’ was used to describe a state that afflicted the hermit monks; later, its meaning expanded to apply to all Christians. In English-speaking countries ‘accidie’ has been translated as ’sloth’, which misses the mark. Today its real meaning seems to be a lost concept” (Stone, 23).

Desolations: This concept derives from Ignatius of Loyola, who is the sixteenth century founder of the Society of Jesus. “In Spiritual Exercises, he explained his method of deepening one’s relationship with God. The Exercises were written and revised over a long period of time; his ideas for them germinated during his reading while he was in Pamplona convalescing from a war wound….In short, desolations are interior movements away from God. It is hard to read Ignatius’s description of desolations without noting the similarities to depression. Over the years various authors have disagreed with whether the two are the same. Most believe they are not identical, though the affective experience of spiritual desolations can be very similar to depression (Loftus 1983). According to Ignatius, the key theological distinction was that desolations signify a movement away from God. People can be depressed without experiencing religious desolations; they can experience religious desolations without depression; or they can experience both at the same time” (Stone, 25-26).

Anfechtungen: “Anfechtungen has no English equivalent. Literally it means ‘to be fought at.’ The term refers to the despair, doubt, perplexity, and aloneness that humans experience. Anfechtungen is the recognition that God’s commands cannot be met. It includes trials and temptations that can lead to despair. For Luther, Anfechtungen was a part of his struggle over the righteousness of God and the sinfulness of humanity. Eric Gritsch suggests that Luther experienced periods of ‘anxiety ranging from simple doubts to deep depressions, which he labeled Anfechtungen’ (1983, 11). Luther contended with acute bouts of depression throughout his life. ‘I myself was offended more than once, and brought to the depth and abyss of despair, so that I wished that I had never been created a man’ (quoted in Gritsch & Jenson, 1976, 153).”

Read all of Rhett’s “depression series” blogs (including links to related LiveChurch tv video clips):

• Are You Experiencing Depression?
• Of Course Christians Can Be Depressed
• Depression: Discernment in Pastoral Caregiving
• Depression: Christians and Medication
• Depression: Hope through Hospitality

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the online course “Personal Counseling Skills” may also be interested in Barbara Crafton’s book Jesus Wept: When Faith & Depression Meet (Jossey-Bass – also available on Kindle) in which she so graphically describes her personal struggles as a minister with depression. In the Prologue she wrote:

Sorrow comes and then, after a time, it goes. Almost always, it leaves a scar–a big one or a little one, depending on what it is. But sorrow is the usual human response to loss. Sorrow is as normal as toenails. And it’s not what his book is about.

Depression isn’t something everybody has. It is not normal. While it may take root in the shock of a sudden sorrow or a profound life change, it may also just come for no reason at all that the naked eye can see, invited in by a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time neurochemical moment which is hidden from public view. Depression is the sapping of spiritual strength and joy, the graying of everything. Its onset can be sudden–or it can be gradual, a growing awareness that something is missing and nothing is working as it should, a creeping inability to honor any of one’s own achievements or claim any of one’s own blessings.

Govt report: online learners perform better

A report just released by the U.S. Department of Education:

“Evaluation of Evidence-based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”

The May 2009 report is based on the review of 1,000 empirical studies of online learning from 1996-2008. In particular, researchers were interested in studies that “(a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size. As a result of this screening, 51 independent effects were identified that could be subjected to meta-analysis.”

The study found that …

“Students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

An analysis of 51 study effects found in part:

1. “Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”
2. “Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning.”
3. “The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types.”
4. “Elements such as video or online quizzes do not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes. The research does not support the use of some frequently recommended online learning practices. Inclusion of more media in an online application does not appear to enhance learning.”
5. “Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.”

The advantage found in online learning apparently has nothing to do with the medium but rather time spent, curriculum, and pedagogy:

“Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction.”

Download full report

Read Inside Higher Ed review (July 11, 2009)

Hat tip Tony Bates (e-learning & distance education resources blog)

Fall campaign takes Celebrate Recovery churchwide

Celebrate Recovery is a Christ-centered recovery ministry program that helps people find freedom from hurts, habits, and hang-ups. Since its start in 1991 by Saddleback Church member John Baker, the program has been completed by 500,000 individuals in 10,000 churches.

Celebrate Recovery leaders often look for ways to convince church members that the program is not only for those with serious addictions but also for any believer who struggles with a hurt, habit, or hang-up.

This fall, Celebrate Recovery is going churchwide with a new, 8-week campaign called “Life’s Healing Choices.” From a promotional email:

Life’s Healing Choices is a church-wide weekly study of 8 principles from the Beatitudes taught by Jesus for finding the path to spiritual renewal, true godly happiness, and healing. This eight-week journey, led by Rick Warren, will encourage spiritual growth in every member of your church.

Your people will be changed in dramatic ways as they learn to
find hope from their hurts, help from their hang-ups, and
healing from their habits by allowing God to renew and
transform their lives.

Here’s how your church will benefit:

• People will discover how to find freedom from their hurts, hang-ups, & habits
• Evangelism opportunity
• A strong opportunity for your church to grow
• Small groups will expand
• Participants will mature in their faith
• A great way to serve your community

Rockbridge Seminary students who completed the online course Recovery Ministry may find the campaign useful in their churches.

Go to Life’s Healing Choices website for more information

Dave Gibbons on the “third culture”

How willing are you to adapt your culture to share the Light of Christ and build bridges so that others may know God?

In his new book The Monkey and the Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third Culture Church, Dave Gibbons defines “third culture” and the “third culture church” this way in his interview with Church Relevance:

Third culture in a word is Adaptation. In two words, Painful Adaptation. The longer definition is “the mindset and will to love, learn and serve in any culture even in the midst of pain and discomfort.”

It’s a church that is able to flow with the Holy Spirit, choosing to live out the two great purposes of the church: Loving God and Loving Her Neighbor. The Neighbor though being someone NOT like you even someone you would hate or not want to forgive. It’s a church that chooses obedience over passion as well as radical sacrifice over comfort.

Dave Gibbons is senior pastor of the multi-site New Song Church with locations in California, Texas, Mexico, London, India, and Bangkok. He knows something about cross-cultural ministry.

Greg Atkinson on Books @ Leadership Network wrote this about Dave’s book:

I especially like Dave’s insight into the second greatest commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”). My heart for the poor and homeless connected with his vision as he described our neighbor as “instead of being someone like him, was someone not like him at all, someone he would be uncomfortable with or even hate.” He goes on to say that the second most important commandment “is all about loving people we don’t understand… People who are misfits. People who are marginalized. People who are outsiders… Instead, it’s about people I would not normally choose to befriend, people who might make me feel uncomfortable to be around.”

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the online course “The Theology and Practice of Evangelism” may want to learn why Gibbons was not satisfied with terms like “diverse” and “multiethnic” when describing his church and why he started using “third culture”:

Also, see Charles Lee interview Dave Gibbons at The Idea Camp on The Digital Sanctuary

Learning to say NO in ministry

It doesn’t seem right … saying “no” sometimes in the practice of ministry, especially when the “no” is to people and rather than projects.  In a recent blog post, Seth Godin commented about the importance of saying “no” in business leadership. Perhaps he comments apply to ministy leadership as well.

If you’ve got talent, people want more of you. They ask you for this or that or the other thing. They ask nicely. They will benefit from the insight you can give them.

The choice: You can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often.

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Who are the loud people in your life getting more ministry attention than they truly need? Who are the quiet people in the background who really need you?

I’m thinking in particular of Rockbridge Seminary students who completed the online course “Pastoral Care” and the difficult ministry priority choices that sometimes have to be made. Should you be saying “no” more often as a ministry strategy of caring … to reach the people who really need you?

Go to Seth Godin’s blog post

Dino Rizzo’s new book Servolution

Dino Rizzo, pastor of Healing Place Church (Baton Rouge, LA), conducted a blog tour recently introducing his new book Servolution: Starting a Church Revolution through Serving. Here are excerpts from blogger questions:

Catalystspace:

Dino, there is an idea out there, held by many Christians, that the job of the Church is to meet peoples’ spiritual needs (salvation) and then, if we have extra time or money laying around, meet their physical needs. How do you address this mindset?

I don’t believe we should have to choose between the two. At the end of the day, we want to see people come to Jesus. And serving is a means to that end but it isn’t the end itself. What we really want to do is help the cause of Christ come alive in people’s hearts, but the path to that is serving people where they are. It’s all one package – one goal – seeing people live out God’s plan for their lives. And we need to be willing to do whatever it takes, whenever it is needed.

Greg Atkinson:

What kind of potential does the servolution vision have if it is trully embraced by the Church (capital C)?

In John 13, Jesus was getting ready to hand off the work of the ministry to His disciples, and He wanted to make sure they got serving right. If they were going to be the ones to establish and continue the work after He returned to Heaven, they needed to really grasp the concept of serving. And so He chose to demonstrate it one more time to them through a footwashing lesson. These men would revolutionize the world – and the book of Acts story shows that they got His message. If you want to be great, be the least. Serve each other. And this truth has the same potential today for the Church as it had then.

Serving isn’t a new idea – Jesus launched the Church with a serving lesson. When a serovlution culture gets in a church serving gets in people’s lives, and when that happens, the potential is there for them to live out the story of the book of Acts.

The more we serve others, the more we look like the Church Jesus had in mind.

Solar Crash:

Dino what are your thoughts on inviting those who have yet to stumble into Jesus to serve along side of us? And what are some good ways of doing so without it being too weird as our intentions in serving may not entirely overlap?

If someone wants to serve alongside you in an outreach, there’s a good chance they’re already curious about something they’ve seen in you. Sure, there’s a chance their purpose isn’t the same as yours, but I’d guess the root of their intentions is to find out what in the world is making these people want to get out on a hot day and give away free bottles of water – no strings attached. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use wisdom – don’t put someone you don’t know in charge of children’s church.

Leadership carries with it a different requirement than simply joining you on an outreach. But by all means, I’d encourage you to take people with you on an outreach who haven’t made the decision to follow Christ yet. It just might be what draws them all the way across the line.

Eric Bryant:

How have you been able to fight against the tendency Christians have to look for churches to serve them rather than as the church willing to serve the world?

Servolution is largely based on the principles Jesus demonstrated and taught in John 13. He and the disciples were in a borrowed room for a meal, which meant that one of them would need to take the towel and basin and wash the others’ feet – the role of the lowest-ranked servant. Each of them passed up the opportunity – until Jesus, their leader, took on himself the towel and began washing their feet. Jesus didn’t sit back and wait to be served. He served others willingly – and this is the example he set for us that we have tried to unpack in the book. Servolution isn’t just doing some cool outreaches. It is a culture to be developed in you, your staff and leaders. And when you serve others, it is amazing the life that will begin to well up inside you.

Since that’s true, I guess we don’t exactly fight against the tendency we all have to just be served. We just serve and when people begin to see the joy and excitement and life that there is in serving, it usually is enough to make them want to be a part.

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the online seminary course “The Theology and Purpose of Ministry” may be helped by exploring the Servolution website and reading Servolution: Starting a Church Revolution through Serving.

The key to forming community? Missional small groups

Here’s one pastor who would admit it- his church stinks at forming biblical community. 

Matt Carter, senior pastor of The Austin Stone Community Church, realized that their small group ministry was not working at building biblical community. The challenge sent Matt and his leadership team back to Scripture to rediscover what formed community. The answer? Mission! Mission is what forms the bond of community.

Here’s how the Austin Stone website describes a “missional community”:

A Missional Community is a partnership of Christians on mission with God for our city, who demonstrate the gospel tangibly and declare the gospel creatively to each other, their neighbors, and to the world.

A Missional Community is not JUST a:

1. Small Group
2. Bible Study
3. Support Group
4. Social Activist Group
5. Weekly Meeting

It can involve these sorts of things, but it doesn’t stop there. Our missional communities Worship Christ, Live in Community, Get Trained for ministry, and Make Disciples together… over time. Being involved in community is critical to being in church rather than simply attending church. Missional communities are different from “small groups” or “community groups” that function as a program in the church; for us, they ARE the church.

Rockbridge Seminary students who have completed the online seminary course “Building a Small Group Ministry” may be helped by listening to Matt share about his journey in leading his church to form missional small groups.

Hat tip Learnings @ Leadership Network 

The Show: Strategic Conversations on the Church takes a look each week at what is happening in the church world- the innovative, the provocative, the interesting, and the important things that are changing the way we all do ministry.