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  • Book Review: Developing a Vision for Ministry in the 21st Century by Aubrey Malphurs

    “ok” describes my experience with this book. It is a good read – but not great.  There are a lot of other great books (here, here, or here) on the topic of “vision” that say what Aubrey Malphurs says in a less antiquated way.

    Antiquated?

    Yes…outdated.  Old.  On the verge of irrelevant.  In fact, there is a section of the book that I literally marked in pen:

    “Warning: From here to the end of the chapter some/most of the advice is outdated”

    It’s also widely known that – in the world of casting vision for ministry – Aubrey’s protege, Will Mancini, has now become the master.  So if you’re looking for a defining book on vision in the same style and vein as Aubrey, pick up Will Mancini’s “Church Unique”

    With all that said, there were some bright spots in Developing a Vision for Ministry by Aubrey Malphurs.  As a “next-generation” pastor, I do find a connection to leadership models that are described as being more “flat”, but the longer I am in leadership in ministry, the longer I have realized that “flat” leadership is not only unproductive but unbiblical.  I appreciate Aubrey’s passion to communicate the need for Point Leadership with a God-inspired vision.

    Having now served in vocational ministry for over a decade, I do wish I had read this book early in my days of ministry to have been warned of the “dark side” of leading in the ministry setting.  Describing these situations is something Aubrey does a very good job with – remaining biblical and simply stating the facts without coming off as a “negative Nancy.” In fact, as I was reading this book, there were many times I would flashback to previous times in ministry.

    There are also other things that I found to be points with which I found either interesting or points that I resonated with. Here they are in no particular order:

    • an organization can sustain only a single ministry vision.  Most often a ministry with multiple visions ends with a split.
    • Today’s emphasis on coleadership, especially in the church where it is known as lay elder rule, attempts to be biblical but most likely is an overreaction to leadership by a single tyrant or despot, or in some cases to weak or unskilled professional leadership.  Not only is there a problem with finding a biblical foundation for coleadership, the greater problem is that people cannot follow a group.
    •  A church or parachurch ministry’s vision begins with and is the primary responsibility of the point person.
    • Cutting edge organizations are characterized by a whirlwind of activity and catalysmic change
    • There are “squeaky wheels” with solutions, but their solutions are characteristically out of touch with the ministry and its times…Visionary leaders are completely different from squeaky wheels
    • If people do not understand the vision, then in effect there is no vision.
    • [Other leaders] role is to follow the visionary’s leadership, aid in developing the dream, rally support behind it, and pass it on to as many people as possible.
    • Character is the foundation of Christian leadership….If the character is flawed in some way, then the ministry will be flawed proportionately.
    • …leadership is about comping with change, while management is about coping with complexity.
    • If an environment has not been established where people have freedom to fail then people will not take risks, and the ministry will either plateau or decline.
    • Human sources of discouragement
      • Vision vampires…well intentioned Christians who sincerely believe they are correct in opposing the vision…see themselves as courageous defenders of the faith rather than defenders of the status quo, for many of them confuse the status quo with the faith.
      • Vision vultures…people who like things the way they are, because they feel so intimidated and threatened by change
      • Vision firemen…when they hear of a good vision, run and grab the nearest fire hose to put it out…they are pure managers in leaderhip positions who do not properly understand leadership and its relationship to management…they feel threatened by innovative dreams and beleve it is in their vested interest to protect the institution from change rather than to work with leaders to procure change.
    • If the person who differs with the ministry leader is also a leader, then a decision will have to be made as to whether or not that person should stay with the ministry or pursue that which is closer to his philosophy in another ministry.
    • Some people in ministry organizations are well-intentioned troublemakers.  They work their way up through the ranks of a ministry organization until they reach a leadership position.  They appear to be loyal to the ministry and are very faithful to it.  In the church they are people who carry a Bible and are present at all the meetings of the church.  They give regularly and show up on church workdays…however, these people have a different vision with a different agenda.  They manifest themselves through their constant opposition to the visionary leader and the vision.  It becomes obvious that he will not be able to lead them.  This is because ultimately they, like Diotrephes in 3 John 9, want to control the organization.

    So…with all that said, if you are new to ministry or trying to sort out whether or not God is calling you to ministry, this book has some really great practical skills for not only finding God’s vision for your ministry, but it clearly gives you pragmatic – super practical advice – for how to handle opposition to vision and what that will look like in ministry.

    For those who have been in ministry for over 5 years, you will most likely read this book and cringe in remembrance of the times you faced opposition to vision, or even how poor execution of leading with vision effectively came back to impact you and your ministry negatively.

  • Book Review: Church Unique by Will Mancini

    I first mentioned Church Unique when I posted about it on my facebook page and have been chomping at the bit to share a review of it.  Well, I’ve finally found a day off to share with you some insight.  For the most part I really learned a lot from this book.  It challenges a lot of the perspectives I have been taught about strategic planning, casting vision, and creating a missional culture within your church – but it also confirmed a lot of thoughts that have been rolling around my head.

    Below are some quotes from the book that caught my attention.  Just because I mention them does not mean I agree with them.  Some I agree with, some I don’t, but all of them got me thinking.  If you are involved in church leadership at any level, I totally recommend this book.

    • reaching the surrounding community should be innate, driven by the church’s DNA rather than programming
    • The reality is that most people don’t think; they only rearrange their prejudices. Real thinking can be disruptive to the status quo and requires a great deal of courage.
    • The pastor on Sunday morning no longer speaks to a monolithic culture with shared experiences and anchor points….it is increasingly difficult to discern and then lead from a common DNA
    • (Defining the “stuck church”) They simply define their vision in terms of glorifying and propagating the past.
    • …strategic planning is no longer the preferred tool for leading the church into the future…change now happens so fast that the planning processes of yesteryear are obsolete.
    • Sending is not something you do, but being sent is something you are.
    • This is exactly what happens when church people resist change in a program. They simply don’t want their personal value to drop to zero (who does?)
    • Would you rather rally a hundred people into one effective initiative, or have a hundred people going in a hundred directions?  Inadvertently most churches tend toward the latter.  When they do, they often sacrifice their cooperative potential for the well-intended whims of the individual.
    • Missional leaders need to polarize this same reality for their people.  It should be clear that the most important people are those outside the church.
    • …differentiate or don’t exist…people desrve to know why your church is special, what God is doing uniquly through your leadership, and why they should sacrificially contribute.
    • You walk into a church you have never attended and pick up a guest brochure at a welcome center. On the inside flap you see a nice mission statement.  Then on the next page (and the rest of the brochure) you see umpteen ministries, listed from A to Z.  As you stare at the brochure, a paralytic effect ensues.  “What in the world do I do next?” you momentarily wonder.  Then you choose to do nothing at all.
    • Growing people grow people.  Consuming people consume programs.
    • …stop vision casting to making the church better and show people how the church makes life better…”Now is the time” is the mantra of the leader\
    • Everyone in your organization is in one of four categories
      • Stowaways: people who don’t know the vision and don’t want to contribute
      • Passengers: people who do know the vision and don’t want to contribute
      • Crew: people who do know the vision and do want to contribute
      • Pirates: people who don’t know the vision and do want to contribute
    • To want to contribute and to not agree with the vision is an act of piracy, whether the person has harmful intentions or not
    • role of worship is to keep the community so God-centered that the euphoria of being used by God doesn’t replace intimacy with God Himself.

  • Book Review: You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith

    DISCLAIMER: If you are a follower of Christ- who is already going to heaven – and talk about changing the traditions which define the methods of the “church” (lower case “c” on purpose) irritates you, you’ll definitively not appreciate this book…just sayin’ 🙂

    …we must be honest enough with ourselves to determine where our allegiance is merely cultural (like first-generation immirants) rather than biblical

    – pg 56 “You Lost Me”

    I had been waiting what seems like forever to get my hands on David Kinnaman’s new book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are leaving Church…And Rethinking Faith.  Almost as long as I have been waiting for an opportunity to share my thoughts on the book.

    Before I talk about this book, I should share that most of my excitement for reading this book comes from 2 reasons.

    1. Reading Unchristian (see my review here) totally blew me away
    2. My heart personally is deeply invested in seeing people live an engaged life as Christ Follower – and the question “How do we reach the next generation with the Gospel” is a question that is constantly on my mind.

    I’ve been joking with my fellow staff members that one of these days I’m gonna write a book for people I like to define as those who are going through a “Quarter-Life Crisis.”  Not because I am making fun of them or seeing them as a project to fix, but because they have a special place in my heart.  For one of the reasons, this book is timely.

    Young Christians are leaving the church – but they are not necessarily leaving Jesus.  This is what I have seen.  This is what You Lost Me affirms through its research.

    This should not be.

    Not for the sake of the institution that is the church in the western world – it’s for the sake of biblical mission.  If the local expression of God’s fellowship of believers is to remain a witness for Christ in their community then making sure the next generation is reengaged in church is important. If it is God’s design that the changing power of the Gospel is to find great effectiveness through what we have defined as the local church – then making sure the next generation not only finds value in staying engaging in church but finds meaning and purpose by being a part of it is mission-critical.

    Maybe I am old school. Maybe I am naive to believe that the church can become not only something followers of Christ live to be a part of, but even become martyrs to defend, then this is important.

    There is soooo much in this book.  I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of all that this book is, but I will share some of my favorite parts.

    • the cultural setting in which young people come of age is significantly changed from what was experienced during the formative years of previous generations…we …must commit ourselves to understanding our culture today to be effective translators of faith to the next generation.  We must come to grips with the challenges and with the opportunities for the gospel to advance.
    • I am concerned that too many Mosaic Christians are so interested in pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful that they forget to acknowledge and draw near to the source of those pursuits – Jesus.
    • …only a traditionalist would argue that all talk about sex is vulgar
    • How would the church be different if we were to reject exclusion as unacceptable and tolerance as not good enough?
    • The generation gap is growing, fueled in part by technology, so it takes extra effort to be on the same page.
    • New churches must be formed where all believers are expected to do the work of evangelism and discipleship.  This generation sees the potency of a church where pastors equip and shepherd disciple-makers rather than service-attenders.
    • (1) the church needs to reconsider how we make disciples; (2) we need to rediscover Christian calling and vocation; and (3)we need to reprioritize wisdom over information as we seek to know God.

     As I look over these bullet points I feel that I I am not even doing the book justice.  If you are a statistics junkie (I am not) there’s tons of info based on their research that you’ll love.  If you’re the type that doesn’t like books related to Christianity that are devoid of biblical passages and teachings on them – you’ll find plenty of that as well.

    I do not feel the need to go into all of the book – after all this is a review, not a summary.  If I could give a summarizing statement, it would have to be from the book itself.

    …the Christian community must rethink our efforts to make disciples.  Many of the assumptions on which we have built our work with young people are rooted in modern, mechanistic, and mass production paradigms.
    …We need new architects to design interconnected approaches to faith transference.  We need new ecosystems of spiritual and vocational apprenticeship that can support deeper relationships and more vibrant faith formation.  We need to recognize the generational shfts from left-brain skills like logic, analysis, and structure to the right-brain aptitudes of creativity, synthesis, and empathy.  We need to renew our catechisms and confirmations-not because we need new theology, but because their current forms too rarely produce young people of deep, abiding faith.  We need to rethink our assumptions and we need the creativity, honest, and vitality of the next generation to help us.

    Pick the book up.  You may not agree with all of it, but you’d be hard-pressed to not feel engaged by it and challenged to rethink the difference between defining the end result of Christian discipleship and defining the methods by which you have been exposed to and embrace for Biblical discipleship.

  • Book Review: Simple Church by Rainer and Geiger

    “Many of our churches have become cluttered.  So cluttered that people have a difficult time encountering the simple and powerful message of Christ.  So cluttered that many people are busy doing church instead of being the church.”

    When I read “Simple Church” it was both a breath of fresh air and a heavy blow at the same time.

    It was a breath of fresh air because it represented all the things that I and my colleagues in ministry have been discussing for the past 5-10 years.  We just were not able to “simply” put into words what we were feeling.  “Simple Church” described the problem we were feeling – but went a step further and offered practical principles that could be applied in the context of a local church – no matter where they are.

    It was a heavy blow at the same time because I know that as a pastor, I have been part of the “problem” as well.  Not that I intentionally wanted to make being the church more complicated than it should, but by asking people to “do church” at the expense of their ability to “be the church” – I became part of the problem.  What is that problem?

    “Simple Church” addresses these – in my own opinion – pretty well.

    I can’t give justice to the breadth of work this book contains, but here are a couple of quotes from the book that I am still “chewing on”.  Whether you agree or not, they are points to be considered and wrestled with if you believe that the local church is still God’s plan for bringing hope to world. In no particular order, here they are:

    •  Perhaps our church people do not know lost people because out churches have kept people at the church building, thereby nullifying their opportunities to deeply engage in relationships with lost people.
    • New programs and special events were constantly implemented to remedy the problem, but the busier the church became, the more the problem was amplified.  Problems are always bigger when everyone is tired.
    • It is hard to be excellent when you are focused on so much.
    • Simple churches pay attention to the handoffs.  They have grasped the truth that assimilation effectiveness is more important than programmatic effectiveness.
    • New members are told at the new member’s call that they should not join the church if they do not plan on serving.
    • Focus does not make church leaders popular.
    • In many churches the original tools for life change have created too much clutter.  Instead of uniting, they divide focus. The Programs have become ends in themselves
    • Every program must facilitate movement through a simple process.  Anything that facilitates movement is a “yes.” Anything that does not is a “no.”
    • Define. Illustrate. Measure. Discuss.  All these factors lead to understanding.
    • (Regarding staff and leaders) They must be committed not only to ministry but also to how your church does ministry.
    • Simple church leaders seek to meet the need through an existing program while complex church leaders add another program.
    • (From a university of Florida study)  hypothesized that churches that offered more programs would grow more than churches that offered fewer programs. [The] research proved the opposite.

  • Book Review: How to Start a New Service by Charles Arn

    This book found itself on my desk today because of changes that are happening in the fall at Maple Grove Free Church.  Because of the growth that we are seeing in our church we are running out of room and are in need of implementing a new service.  So this fall we are planning to start an 8:15am service.

    A staff person who had this book, How to Start a New Service (though had never read it) thought it might be a helpful resource.  I will say that after reading it I thought it was a helpful book, but not helpful towards giving us information regarding the direction we are moving this fall.  Actually, within the first few chapters of the book, the writer actually says that this book is not for churches that are looking to implement a new service – meaning an additional service identical to one that is already existing – as much as it is for churches that are looking to add a new service that is quite different for the type of services they are doing now.

    It was very interesting to read this book, seeing that last fall we actually implemented this type of change.  We used to be a church with only one style of worship service, but now we are a service of two styles.  Here are some notes I took during my reading of the book:

    • pg 15 Do not add a church service if community it the highest priority of your church
    • If your leaders and/or members…are primarily committed to preserving “one happy family,” an attempt to begin a new service will be frustrating and probably fail.
    • churches in the 60-80 percent range of sanctuary capacity-the point at which a new service is most likely to negatively affect the growth of the existing services
    • Members must ask, Who is the new service for?  Why are we starting a new service?  How are these new people going to be reached?
    • Pg 28 regarding new visitors….Are we a church that has a culture of inviting people?  Are we a culture that embraces the visitor?
    • Pg 31.  A mistake some churches make in an effort to broaden the generational and/or spiritual range of people attracted to their existing service(s) is to diversify the music or liturgical style.  In so doing, however, most churches actualy diminish the effectiveness of their present service(s) among every people group including their predominant one
    • PG 67 The visionaries go to more progressive churches and the stalwarts to more traditional ones.  The question is: Who would you rather keep?
    • pg 92 research says that 96% of all church services in america focus on either baby boomer christians (1946-64) or Senior christians (pre 1946)
    • pg 135 about going from 2 services to 3
      • Adding a 3rd service at 8:30am … places two burdens on your new service – it will tend to start small because it is new and it will tend to remain small because it is early.
    • PG 142-143 Among researchers and church growth authorities, there is almost universal consensus that planting a new church is the best means of reaching new people with the Good News.
    • pg 153-154 The keys to designing services
      • The service is not the message, the service is the message
      • Well attended services are well prepared services

    Overall this was a pretty good book, and by the metrics found here, you could say that our church has successfully navigated what could have potentially been a change with negative ramifications.  I will admit that there were many points at which the books information or suggestions sounded very outdated.  It was obvious that the information was when I finally looked at the front of the book and found it was published in 1997.

    So while this was a good and enjoyable read, I don’t really recommend it.  There are tons of other resources that have more relevancy for ministry in the year 2011.