http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQY2auav8Qw
Treasure continues this Sunday at New Life. I will answer some frequently asked questions about giving, debt, generosity and tithing.
How much of your team’s time is spent organizing and administrating events? How much time does your team spend equipping leaders and empowering people to do ministry? If we really evaluated these two questions, the results would be shocking and would go a long way explaining why so many attend our events but so few are actually engaged in the mission of making disciples.
I am not saying that events are evil or that organizing an event is a waste of our time. Some of the most epic moments I have had with God have been at events that someone took the time to organize. What I am saying is that we must balance our time so that we are actually empowering people to be Christ followers who are making disciples and not enabling people to look at big events as the sum total of the Gospel experience.
A friend told me today that a man in our church is sitting on the sidelines and is waiting for a chance to do some ministry. I told my friend to tell this man to open up the newspaper everyday and look for an area in our city that needs serving and get busy serving. If this man is waiting around for me to plan and organize an event tailored to his passions, he could be in for a long wait. Chances are, we might schedule something that fires him up, but then again, he may pass on several outreach events because they do not fit his schedule or align with his passions.
The bottom line is the pastors and leaders of local fellowships should spend the majority of their time equipping, training, leading, praying and releasing people to serve. We can schedule a few events that are necessary to rally the entire family around a big need in our city, but the primary responsibility to get involved falls on the individual, not on the church leaders.
What do you expect from the leaders of your church? Can you support your expectations with the expectations placed on them by Scripture? The life of God is released in a church and a city when leaders are equipping the people for the work of ministry and events only exist to strengthen the mission of the fellowship.
The local church should be the most well funded group in our culture, but it’s not, and there are plenty of good reasons. Most local fellowships, including New Life, need to make some fundamental changes in the way they function in order for people to trust them with their finances. Here are a few thoughts to discuss and consider.
1. The church must be a storehouse and not a stockpile
In the Old Testament, there were regional storehouses, where people would literally bring their tithe of livestock, grains and produce. These storehouses had two primary functions – to take care of the needs of the priests and to distribute resources to the widows and poor. The New Covenant established by Christ did away with the Temple sacrifices, but the function of the local church was to be much the same. The elders should have the support necessary to pray and lead the church, and the local fellowship should be the distribution point for the widows and poor. The church was never meant to be a stockpile of resources that were consumed primarily by its members.
2. The church must be missional not empirical
The days of empirical church are coming to an end and the age of mission is returning. People are no longer motivated to build more buildings just for the sake of new buildings. There has to be a legitimate Kingdom mission attached to each project that can be clearly communicated. If there is even a hint that something is being done to promote a person’s ego or ambition, wary churchgoers will withhold their resources. However, if the real needs of humanity are being met with the project, you can expect extreme generosity, even in a down economy.
3. The decisions must be made by a team, not a person
The local church is designed to be led by a team of people with various strengths and differing functions. That’s why it’s called a body. One dominant person with a charismatic personality may get the crowd charged with excitement, but over the long haul, it will require a team of men and women, young and old to accomplish the audacious dreams that God gives us.
I do believe the local church is returning to its original design and just in time. Our culture is tired of the flash and hype and is longing for humility and authenticity in a local church. May we respond to the needs of our world and reflect the love of Christ to our city, using words only when necessary. When we do, we will never lack the resources required for His mission.
Regardless of our economic situation, most of us have things in our homes that are not being used that would be a huge blessing to another family. Starting this week, I have asked New Lifers to take a look at what they have and to give away anything that is not really needed. We are calling this “Freely Give and Freely Receive.” To find out more, go to:
http://www.newlifechurch.org/nln.jsp?id=205
There are only five ways to use money – give it, save it, invest it, lend it or spend it. I hope we all choose the first three more often and think of spending it less often. This would take a huge amount of stress and worry off our lives and allow us to be the generous givers and producers God needs us to be.
I do believe that God wants to bless us and I certainly believe it’s appropriate to enjoy the nice things God gives us. However, our possessions cannot ever be the focus of our worship and we must be willing to give any of it away. That is when we begin to take hold of a life that is truly life. (1 Timothy 6:19)
It will be great fun the next two weekends to watch as huge trucks are filled with the surplus of our homes and given to families in our city and in our own fellowship who are in real need. Better yet, it will be liberating for all of us to finally find freedom from the stuff that can so easily become the focus of our worship. Godliness with contentment really is great gain.
Can you leave your church for the weekend and not fret? Can you not show up one Sunday and the worship services continue? Are most Sundays built around your charisma, your strengths and your talents or can someone different than you lead a weekend service? Do you have to be at every public gathering so people will feel the meeting is important?
I believe the real test of a leader is not so much when they are up front but when they are away and someone on the team is leading. Too many churches are built around one set of spiritual gifts and around one personality. The healthiest churches I know have empowered a diverse group of people to lead so that many spiritual gifts and many perspectives can be on display to the congregation.
This is one reason I have not embraced the video campus model and instead I am experimenting with another pastor leading a Sunday night campus who preaches my message live instead of asking people to watch me on a screen. There is nothing wrong with the aforementioned model so I am not challenging the leadership of many of my friends who do this at multiple campuses. What I am saying is there is another option that may work just as well.
My model is messier, requires a lot of relational equity with the campus pastor and demands loyalty and trust from one another. But in the end, it allows me to mentor young communicators and helps build our fellowship around a multitude of gifts and personalities and not just one. I am still the primary leader and I have final say on the sermon topics. We preach the same main points and use the same Scriptures, but a team is formed and many players get in the game.
This is just one way I am purposely leading New Life while purposely staying away from many of the gatherings. I want to lead, at times, from a distance.
Have you empowered people around you to lead or does everyone look to you to oversee every gathering? Are you preaching in your own pulpit more than 48 times a year? If so, can I suggest you immediately begin mentoring your replacement, because unless you are spiritual Superman, you are headed for burnout.
Step away and lead from a distance. You will find rest for your soul, and the church will get to feed from a buffet of teachers and not from just one menu item. Your team will rise to the challenge and your church will become healthier than ever. Try it for a year and let me know if I am right or wrong.
Recently, New Life Church was accepted as a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. I know that sounds as exciting as a root canal, but it is a big deal to me. ECFA sets very high standards for membership and only a handful of churches even bother trying to meet the requirements.
When I came to New Life in 2007, we did not have the internal structures or policies to be a member, but we were determined to make the changes necessary to hit the mark. The first thing we did was change the way decisions were made about spending money. We had always done a yearly audit, but we then added a purchase order system, a more detailed budget and we changed our elder structure. Under the old system, the Senior Pastor had a lot of autonomous, independent spending authority, but under our new system, spending decisions are made as a team with a lot more accountability from elders who are not a part of the staff.
Why did I make all these changes? The old system was not corrupt or necessarily broken. I could have continued with the status quo and no one would have been alarmed or concerned. The reason is simple. I want to be able to stand in front of our fellowship and challenge everyone to give and for them to know that we are operating with complete integrity and maintaining the highest standards available.
This removes all suspicion and brings everything into the light for all to see. Our finances are posted at www.ecfa.org and will be updated regularly. I want people to know we are committed to being good stewards, living below our means and giving generously at every opportunity. These are the principles we live by in the Boyd house and I want the same principles to apply at the church I lead.
Check out the website and give me your opinion. Is this important to you as a New Lifer? Does this help clear up any confusion or is it no big deal?
Life is better when there is someone to celebrate all the victories with you. Phil Mickelson just won his third Master’s golf tournament and I have seen all three. The first one was great because it was his first and it got the proverbial monkey off his back as “the best golfer to never win the big one.” However, the third one made me teary and I am not a man who cries very often. I realized that life is better when the people we love are there to celebrate with us.
Phil’s wife, Amy, almost did not see this victory. She is battling breast cancer and the announcers said she traveled to Augusta, Georgia and the tournament under great distress to watch her husband compete. At the 18th green, she stood with family and her two daughters and watched Phil drain a birdie putt to win his third green jacket. As he embraced her, I realized just how fragile life can be and how wonderful it is to share the highs and lows with people who really love you.
I am a sports fan but I am a bigger fan of family. I love the unbreakable bond of marriage that can withstand anything if we stay committed to God and to one another. Thanks Phil and Amy for reminding all of us today that nothing can separate us from our love for one another and nothing can separate us from the covenant love of God.
A good meeting sounds like an oxymoron. Meetings are normally not the highlight of the day at the office or at the church. People dread them like a root canal and for good reason. Usually, a lot is said, nothing is decided and very little is done after the meeting is over. Either the meetings need to be cancelled or we need to change the way we do meetings. Let me make four suggestions.
1. Don’t put anything on the agenda that cannot be debated
Patrick Lencioni wrote a classic book on this idea called, “Death by Meeting.” It should be required reading for anyone who leads. Lencioni compares a great meeting to a great movie – both need tension to be awesome. There are lots of rules that need to be made clear before you launch into a meeting filled with debate. First, all debate must be respectful and never become personal. Throw the grenade in the middle of the table, not at one another. Second, no one can be punished for asking the tough questions. Third, the leader of the meeting must encourage input from everyone in the room, not just the three or four strong personalities who love debate. Often the best ideas come from the people in the meeting who actually think before they speak.
2. Start on time and be on time
My time is valuable and so is yours. If there is a meeting at 2pm, the proper time to arrive is 1:55pm. I am not a military dictator, but I do think it is rude to arrive late. It is also bad manners to start a meeting late and to go longer than announced. Start on time, be on time and finish on time.
3. Hold each other accountable for what was decided
Lencioni has another classic book called “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” He believes most teams have little or no accountability and I agree. Meetings should produce action steps or resolves. Someone in the meeting must take ownership of each decision and be expected to report on the progress after a reasonable time.
4. Debate in private, support in public
If the team makes a decision that you do not agree with, the time to bring up your concerns is in the meeting and not later while in the break room. To be clear, the leader of the meeting needs to make sure everyone is heard and all the debate has happened before a decision is made. But once that happens, it is required that everyone own the decision and be willing to defend it publicly.
I must confess I have led a lot of sloppy meetings and I’ve attended many that were a complete waste of sunlight. For those on the team at New Life, I ask them to hold me accountable to practice what I blog. I know I will die someday. I just don’t want to die while sitting in a pointless meeting.
What qualifies someone to be a leader in the church? Can someone just announce to the rest of us that “God called me” or “God spoke to me”? How can we evaluate maturity and health in a person who wants to influence others in the local fellowship? What about a Bible school degree? Isn’t that enough? What if the degree has lots of letters and abbreviations after it? Surely that’s enough? Timothy had the same questions for the Apostle Paul and here is his answer as recorded in1 Timothy 3:2-7 (NIV),
“Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how he can take care of God’s church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.”
Paul was clearly pointing out that the bar should be raised more for leaders of the church than for others in the fellowship. Paul was not giving a long list of impossible rules – that’s what the Pharisees were known for doing. No, Paul was giving a short list of reasonable expectations for a significant leader such as an elder or what we would call a pastor.
Paul was also saying that other people should evaluate potential leaders before they could lead. So often, I hear people say, “God is the only one who can appoint me” or “God is the only one who can restore me”. It’s true that God is the only redeemer of our souls, the giver of all our gifts and the only one who can forgive our sins, but God has always used delegated human authority to evaluate men and women who desire to lead a local church. Paul was writing to humans who were trying to choose human leaders. Paul did not say, “take everyone at their word and give leadership to whomever wants it.”
This same list of requirements is meant for those who have disqualified themselves from pastoral leadership and want to be restored. The same requirements that originally qualified us for leadership are the same for those wanting to start over. It also means that once again delegated human authority will have to recognize the work of God in a person’s life the same as in the beginning of their ministry.
Basically, the three areas mentioned in 1st Timothy 3 and again in Titus 1 involve faith, family and finances. If a leader has a personal mature relationship with God that is evidently growing, has a vigorous, vibrant family and has healthy personal finances, then leadership in the local church should be considered. If any of these three areas are unhealthy, it is a sign of either immaturity or a lack of character.
Let’s not substitute health and maturity for talent, charm or charisma. The local church is the Bride of Christ and she deserves and requires our best care, forever and always.
I signed a contract today with Zondervan to write two books and thus, my literary journey has officially begun. Today was the culmination of a lot of prayer and waiting. Almost three years ago, people began to encourage me to write, mostly because I was the pastor of a large church and it seemed like the logical next step. However, I never felt right about writing just for the sake of writing. So I waited and prayed.
When the shooting happened on our campus five months after I became the pastor at New Life, the offers to write only increased, but I still felt no peace when I prayed about a book. So I waited and prayed some more.
Looking back, I know now why I was led to wait. The book I am writing is a reflection of the last three years – my journey to New Life, the shooting and the great pain we experienced as a fellowship, what we learned about each other and about God. It is a story of a miracle. It is the story of an amazing group of people who trusted God in the darkest days and decided to worship, pray and love one another.
I believe this book will help anyone who has ended up in the “valley of the shadow of death” but does not want to live there forever. It will help parents who have lost a child, the single mom who has lost a mate, the middle-aged man who is starting over after bankruptcy, the student who is trying make sense of life and anyone who is wondering where God is in the midst of suffering. I am praying that God will use the story of New Life to encourage others that there is often beneficial rain in even the most severe storms of life.
The working title of the book is “Everyone Overcome” which is from the song, “Overcome”. This song was the anthem of our church during our darkest days and was the song we sang at the end of Wednesday night family meeting following the tragic shooting on the previous Sunday. My book should be released sometimes in the Spring of 2011.
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