Great post by Jared Wilson over at Shrinkthechurch.com on the “Simple Church” concept. In it, Jared gives us 10 reasons to under-program the church. Here are a few that resonated most with me:
You can do a lot of things in a mediocre (or poor) way, or you can do a few things extremely well. Craig Groeschel has some great things to say about this subject. Also check out Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger’s Simple Church.
Over-programming dilutes actual ministry effectiveness. Because it can overextend leaders, increase administration, tax the time of church members, and sap financial and material resources from churches.
Over-programming leads to segmentation among ages, life stages, and affinities, which can create divisions in a church body. Certainly there are legitimate reasons for gathering according to “likenesses,” but many times increasing the number of programs means increasing the ways and frequencies of these separations. Pervasive segmentation is not good for church unity or spiritual growth.
You can read the rest of them over at Shrink The Church by clicking here.
I’ve been very intrigued by the idea of de-programing the church, so to speak, since I read Andy Stanley’s The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry (affiliate link), in which Stanley talks about having a singular mission and creating steps to the end goal rather than programs that are ends within themselves.
I encourage you to check out both Jared’s blog and Andy’s book. I think that the Simple Church movement is an important development in the US church both to focus mission and combat Christian consumerism.
What are your thoughts? Are you taking steps to revamp your church programs? If so, what are you doing?
As a writer and editor of books, most of my thoughts on Apple’s new iPad were centered on its capabilities as an ebook reader. The industry is abuzz about the coming showdown between Amazon’s Kindle and the iPad. But in the end, the ebook discussion, while important, will not be the deciding factor in the iPad’s rocket ride to success.
What will?
Porn.
A great article (warning: there are some risque pixilated images, but no nudity) in Fast Company hits it on the bulls eye.
Its laser-like focus on cash has given porn an edge in technology development history. And it’s a business that’s always looking for new and novel ways to deliver its product through systems that appeal to its consumers–the one who gets there quickest gets the biggest share of the booty. Pornographic Web sites test drove online payment systems as ways to make quick bucks while everyone else bit their nails and waited years for PayPal. Broadband crushed slow dial-up in part due to users’ hunger for speedy, sexy data…porn. Going back further, porn was thriving at the dawn of cable TV and photography itself. One of the first popular uses of the printing press was to publish pornographic writing and imagery.
Today it’s a multi-billion dollar industry powered by the human psyche and high technology. It’s hard to put a finger on it precisely, but the U.S. porn industry alone is probably worth a long way north of $10 billion per year. Remember the famous adage: “If all the porn was clensed from the Internet, then there’s just be a single Web site in the world. It would say–’bring back all the porn!’” Porn has always been with us, and probably always will in one form or another.
Continuing:
But if there’s one single industry which is agile–aggressively so–and ready to quickly adopt a new technology fast in order to make a quick buck, it’s the adult content industry. You can bet many sites’ll be wrapping video content in iPad-friendly code before too long, and charging visitors handsomely for the privilege (or embedding the sites with ads, and making a profit this way.) Then, because HTML5 video is also compatible with desktop browsing too, Flash might well go the way of Betamax and HDDVD.
As we all know, porn is a huge industry and a huge problem for the church. Not only our young men and women, but also our pastors and leaders are being aced out by addictions to porn. Marriages and families are being torn apart. Churches are being devastated.
The rise of access to porn on devices like the iPad should be of great concern. One, because just as with the iPhone, there will be a significant lag between access to content and porn filtration software development. Two, because access to this content will become that much easier for both people in the church and for pastors.
This furthers the need for the church to provide a holistic healing of the mind and spirit when it comes to porn. While blockers are great, they are merely a stop gap. Our minds, and the minds of the people in our churches must be transformed to the point where we can overcome temptation rather than just manage it.
This will also create a greater need for openness and accountability among brothers and sisters in Christ.
If you’re not praying for the sexual health of your church, I encourage you to do so. We’re in a war and new weapons are being deployed every day.
Josh Harris writes a pithy post on the wrong reasons we often have for loving the church. It’s worth the read, and worth reflecting on even more.
Don’t love the church because of what it does for you. Because sooner or later it won’t do enough.
Don’t love the church because of a leader. Because human leaders are fallible and will let you down.
Don’t love the church because of a program or a building or activities because all those things get old.
Don’t love the church because of a certain group of friends because friendships change and people move.
These seem simple and obvious, but I’m willing to bet we rarely give thought to them. I hear of people leaving churches all the time, and usually it’s because they’ve put their hope in one of those four things instead of fully in Jesus.
A fascinating piece this morning over in Fast Company on the future of the PC, as imagined by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, which for all intents and purposes predicted the netbook revolution.
Basically, OLPC envisions a mashup of the rumored tablet PC technology just around the corner and a full netbook experience. It calls the prototype XO3. Fast Company describes the project like this:
Designed by Yves Behar, the XO3 is a totally different 21st-Century beast compared to the classic notebook design of the original XO: It’s a super-skinny plastic tablet/slate PC. Suited for its intended use out of the normal environment of PC use, the screen is actually plastic, so it’s resilient and slightly flexible. It’s also a multitouch device, laden with sensors so it can transform into book-reading or web-surfing mode. And, just like the original machine it’s got a dual-mode screen that works both in daylight or as a self-illuminated LCD (no surprises that the OLPC team has links with PixelQI).
But that 8.5 by 11-inch screen makes this device far from being a curio destined to transform the education of kids in far-flung, poor corners of the world. As does the design, which was driven by Negroponte’s request to make the thing “extremely simple and practically frameless.” As a result, there’s practically nothing separating the computer from the screen, just a thin trademark green rubber edge, a camera on the back and a finger loop for steadying the PC while it’s hanging from a belt. The screen and body of the XO3 mean the machine itself practically vanishes when it’s being used–the experience is delivered entirely on screen.
Here are some conceptual shots of the product:
Pretty cool, huh? The best pat is that the XO3 is targeted for a $75 price point. At that price, most people will be able to afford one, or a similar competing device.
No doubt this type of technology will happen. And it will continue the progression of the necessity of personal technology becoming synthesized into our daily lives.
I actually get excited when I think of the applications this type of technology can have in a church liturgy. Back in the day, churches used hymnals and prayer books to help guide people through the church service. Today, we use projection screens for the same purpose. This type of PC technology could usher in a new era of prayer book type liturgy with a digital twist, whereby a dedicated church worship planning program creates a file that has all the readings, songs, and accompanying multimedia streamed into each persons’ personal computing devise.
Does this type of technology excite you? What are some other applications you can think of for church services and ministry?
This is the third and final post in my series on ministry and the internet. You can catch up on the other posts here and here.
What is the Church?
Just what is the church? It seems to me that is the central question when we begin to think through the implications of digitalism. As Mark Driscoll stated in his talk at Advance 09, the digital age is forcing us to reexamine and redefine our ecclesiology.
In my study, I’ve come to believe that the church is defined by:
The preaching/teaching/proclamation of the word
The administration of the sacraments (in my view communion and baptism)
And the fellowship of the saints
As seen in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
I don’t think there are too many people who would argue with such a definition. The real debate comes when we start asking whether this type of community can be done in the digital world.
Can the sacraments, for instance, be rightly administered online? Some people think so, as evidenced by Flamingo Road’s internet baptism as posted on Church Crunch. How about communion? Can that be administered online and still embody the New Testament concept of “breaking bread together”?
The Purpose of the Church?
I’m not going to debate here the intricacies of the sacraments and their relevancy online (mostly because I haven’t studied much on it). I’ll save that for another time. But what I do know is that the sacraments are a sign of coming into Christ, and traditionally (and scripturally) a first-step in joining the body of Christ that is the Church. They are not the end-all.
In looking at the purpose of the Church, I believe that the it exists primarily to:
Equip the saints for the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:11-16)
To make disciples (Matthew 28:16-20)
These commissions are best accomplished by preaching, teaching, and proclaiming the word and by doing the word. As James says, you cannot do one without the other, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” And while some are called expressly to do the teaching and preaching (Ephesians 4:11-12), we are all called to proclaim the gospel and to do it.
When thinking of the purpose of the church in the context of Internet ministry, it’s easy to see how it is useful for proclamation – the preaching of the gospel. In that sense it is an excellent tool. It becomes harder to think of its usefulness in discipleship and in being a catalyst for bringing people beyond hearing the word to doing the word. This is because the Internet is an uncarnate environment that, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, is inherently geared towards engendering a people who consume rather than pour out. Yet, as a community of believers, we are called to do just the opposite – we are called to incarnate the gospel to the world.
The biggest challenge I see in the future of ministry is the pervasive acceptance of digital interaction as true community, replacing, not supplementing, physical community. Yet, in a Christian context, it is the daily interactions between believers that leads to discipleship. As Tim Chester and Steve Timmis write in their book, Total Church, “In becoming a Christian I am a disciple, but that is an identity, not an event. I never stop being a disciple, and I never reach a point where I no longer require daily discipleship by the gospel word in the gospel community.”
Event Driven Church vs. Rhythm Living
Ministries that are diving full force into the Internet by forming Internet campuses, doing online administrations of the sacraments, and more, are indicative to me of the more American expression of Christianity and church, which is an event driven model. For many people, church is just one of a many obligations or events that must be attended, consumed, and completed – an X on the calendar. It’s easy to say you go to church and believe you are part of a church in an online forum if you believe that church is about the Sunday event where you sing some songs and hear a sermon.
But that is not church. If anything that is evangelism, which to be clear is very important. But it is not true Christian community. It provides no true venue for discipleship, or the rhythms of Christian life that are depicted in the New Testament (eating together, praying together, serving together, etc.).
When you approach church as an event, it is easy to leave that church if the pastor says something that pisses you off. It’s even easier when all it takes is a click of a mouse, where no actual physical connection is severed. A rhythm centered approach to church where people are eating together in homes, giving to and taking care of those with need, discussing the scriptures in late night gatherings over coffee or a pint, serving arm in arm in doing the word and incarnating the gospel, and more creates bonds that are not easily broken – and ensures that if a fellow believer is straying, you have a real, valid, and tangible means to confront him or her in love.
Conclusion
Steve Knight, who was kind enough to reference this series on his blog, has written about the importance of reverse incarnation in the digital age. In that sense, the Internet is useful. But in reality, reverse incarnation is simply a fancy word for what we’ve already discussed is part and parcel with being the church – proclamation. We are to preach the word and proclaim the gospel in the digital world. But the digital world cannot replace the incarnate body of believers gathering together in community. You must have both.
I find it hard to understand how we can theologically justify Internet campuses as autonomous and fully functioning churches. Many will speak to their practicality, but we must be cautious when we move to speaking pragmatically without undergirding our pragmatism with theology.
In the end, the Internet is useful, but it can also lead to a disembodiment of the church that is not biblical. It is my prayer that as we move forward we don’t wholesale dive into new technologies because our culture demands it, but that we carefully, prayerfully, and with measure engage new technology in a way that continues the Church’s long and grand tradition of being in the world but not of it.
I invite your thoughts, beat downs, and undying adulation.
This is the second post in a series on doing ministry in a post-Christian, digital society. In the first post, I explored what I perceive to be a cultural shift from post-modernism to what I defined as digitalism. Here I want to lay the foundation to explore some of the ecclesiological implications of the Internet.
You Have No Idea
Seems you can’t go anywhere today without running into some conversation, blog post, or story about how such and such church is integrating the Internet into their ministry. The rise of social media and the popularity of such platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have heightened the sense within the Church at large that we must figure out what our online strategy is. Some people doing great pioneering work in this realm are John Saddington and his site Church Crunch, Kem Meyers, Tony Steward, the good folks over at Church Marketing Sucks, Drew Goodmanson, Church Communications Pro, Tim Schraeder, and many more.
I say it’s pioneering work because, though it doesn’t seem like it, the Internet as a daily and vital component of our lives is really only about a decade old. And we really have NO IDEA what it’s doing to us, our society, our children, and our ministries. Yet, we’ve (society at large) embraced it wholeheartedly as not only a norm, but also as a great advancement in human society and interaction. Perhaps this is because, as I alluded to in my last post, it appeals to our ego in a way no other medium has.
I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.
I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.
I am Ego
As I sit in my office with my headphones on, having spent the last three hours staring at computer screen, I am completely isolated in my world and thoughts, yet I am also connected to more people than ever in my life through Twitter and Facebook – at the same time. But the important component is that I have the power to engage or not engage. I create the reality of my relationships and the context in which they are acceptable to me. And others do likewise.
Of course I don’t have this luxury when my fellow office mates tap me on the shoulder. In those moments I don’t have complete control – at least not without looking like a total jerk. The rules – the norms – of physical community dictate that I should interact with my community, even when I don’t feel like it. And it has been that way since the dawn of human society.
Not so anymore. As a digitalist, I can be a hermit and connected. Picking and choosing which interactions best suit my ego and my desires. It is pure, white-hot consumerism.
When Fools Rush In
My fear is that as the Church we are being swept up in this NEW cultural shift without engaging it correctly. Too often our online strategy is not a strategy at all but a blatant and often poor imitation of the way the world and businesses use the online medium – as a subjection of authority to the individual. Marketers often talk of this great shift from one-way interactions between businesses and corporations and their customers. A new day has dawned. Your customer is in charge, and you must engage them in conversation. The consumer has always dictated product in a sense, but only in so much as the producers made it available. Now it is the consumer that drives everything.
Our job as a church is to create disciples and equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. How do we do that effectively when we’ve never met our people face to face? Is it possible?
Consumerism is not a new problem for the church, especially in America. But I fear the rise of digitalism will make it much more so – and that we will gladly embrace it in the name of going where the people go, without ever actually going to them.
Here are hard and honest questions we should ask ourselves:
Are we doing online ministry and online campuses because they further the Gospel or because people want them?
Is our online strategy full of practical implications but lacking theological ones?
Have we critically examined what implications for the shift to online community are for Gospel formed community?
My inclination is that you have answers to these questions, and I’m not the first to ask them. I’m interested in the answers you’ve come up with.
My next and last post in this series will deal with my thoughts on how we balance the Biblical conception of Christian community with the prevailing culture of the digitalists. Until then, I’d value your feedback on my thoughts here – and your ideas for a path forward.
Last March I was in Raleigh, NC for the Acts 29 Network (A29) Boot Camp with the Praxis Church elders and some of my fellow elder candidates. It was a great time of worship and teaching, with some world-class speakers and a lot of very practical information.
Everywhere I looked MacBooks were open and people were clicking away little “tweets” about the conference using the #a29 hash tag. If you don’t understand any of what I just wrote, God bless you. They were on Twitter. It piqued my curiosity, and I signed up for an account to follow the goings-on.
Fast-forward seven months or so, and today you’ll find me very active on Twitter (to the point that Pastor Tim unfollows me regularly because I tweet too much!) And as someone who is very active with many social media forms, including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging, I can attest to the fact that they can be both significant time wasters and narcissistic vehicles that give the appearance of community but lack any true substance. And before you know, if you let them, your social media accounts can take over your real life! Yet, they can also be very valuable and rewarding tools.
Internet Ministry?
When I came onto staff at Praxis as our communications manager, part of my job was to create a comprehensive strategy that used social media.
Early on, the biggest danger I recognized was that our online efforts could create a community that was engaged online with each other and church information, but that had little-to-no engagement with the actual body of Christ outside of that.
So, from the beginning I’ve intentionally not been satisfied with just interacting with people online. Rather, I want our online efforts to result in what I call incarnational interactions. The word incarnation is a theological word that refers to Jesus coming down from heaven, becoming human and taking on a body like ours, and living among us. Paul talks about the incarnation in Philippians 2:5-8:
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.”
For me, it’s important that our online interactions as a church result in incarnated moments – times when we come together in person, ditching the computers for a deeper, more fulfilling relationship. At Praxis, we have no interest in building an awesome online community in and of itself. Everything we do online is engineered to bring you into physical (incarnate) community with our church. It’s easy to hide behind a monitor, breaking off relationships with people who challenge you with the click of a mouse. It’s much more messy, difficult, and challenging to walk shoulder to shoulder with the people whom God has called you to be in community with, a community that celebrates with you in the good times and mourns with you in the bad times. A community that is called to incarnationally live out the gospel, just as Jesus did, to each other and to the world.
The Kentucky Connection
I’d like to share a story that illustrates how approaching social media this way might work. When I first started using Twitter, I naturally spent most of my time finding interesting people to follow and interact with.
My first searches were for people who were connected with the A29 network, since I have a vested interest there. One person I came across was Chris St. John, who is now a good friend online.
Chris lives in Somerset, KY. As we began to interact, I learned that Chris had a brother in Scottsdale, Craig. Later, I learned that Craig went to Praxis on and off, but wasn’t sure he wanted to commit. Chris in Kentucky introduced me to Craig in Arizona. As I got to know Craig better online, we decided to get together and hang out. Today, Craig is now a part of my missional community and a regularly attending Sunday services at Praxis.
In Craig’s words, “He was ready to get off the wall and commit.” All this happened because I met Chris in Kentucky, who introduced me to Craig in Arizona, and because I intentionally moved the relationship from behind the monitor to a handshake. That is the essence of an incarnational interaction.
So I encourage you to put some thought into how you use the Internet and social media. Are there ways that you can better utilize them for the gospel? Are you taking your online interactions and turning them into incarnated moments? If not, please consider doing so. As a body of Christ, we’re called to live life together – both online and offline.
You can follow Praxis Church on Twitter @praxischurch and on Facebook – just don’t make that your only interaction with the church!
This weekend we are launching our annual Missional Community Kick-Off at Praxis Church, which will focus on our vision and passion for growing smaller throughout the Phoenix valley through small communities of people who strive to live life together. More than the traditional model of small groups where people gather once or twice a month to do a Bible study or do a prayer group, Missional Communities are dedicated to living out the gospel and furthering the kingdom of God in their local context through what Ryan Eland, who oversees the Missional Community ministry, calls missional rhythms:
Eating
Celebrating
Recreating
worshiping
serving
investing
learning
The goal is not to be an insular group of Christians, but a group of disciples that employ the tools the elders and ministry leaders have equipped them with to do the work of the ministry. There is no prescriptive formula to work this out practically. Each MC leader and community is charged with prayerfully considering how they might reach their community with the gospel, whether that be through BBQ’s or theology pubs.
Below is a video my Communications Team put together to promote the event, and you can also hear some stories of those who have been involved in MC’s here. Big props go out to Silas Kyler, David Hildreth, and Adam Watson for their great work on this.
As a writer and editor of books, most of my thoughts on Apple’s new iPad were centered on its capabilities as an ebook reader. The industry is abuzz about the coming showdown between Amazon’s Kindle and the iPad. But in the end, the ebook discussion, while important, will not be the deciding factor in the iPad’s rocket ride to success.
This is the third and final post in my series on ministry and the internet. You can catch up on the other posts 
This is the second post in a series on doing ministry in a post-Christian, digital society. In the first 
