Forget Evangelism Training...

Bring on the "How to make a friend" training. I really believe that there is a large and much over-looked reality in the church today. Many people are making the assumption that because 90% of all Christians will not share their faith this next year that:

1. They don't care about lost people, or
2. They don't know how to present the gospel (insert "feel confident", etc.)

I think a much larger reason that modern day Christians do not share the gospel is that they do not have any non-Christian friends. And, even more interesting is that the modern church system is getting exactly the results that it was designed to get. I will use my parents as a prime example.

There is something that happens in a parent-child relationship as the child moves on into adulthood. I think it was shortly after my first son was born and I turned 30 that I began hearing stories about who my parents were before I was around. I did not fully believe most of those stories as they described people completely different from my CPA dad and Kindergarten teaching mom. You see, my parents came to Christ late in life. Before their conversion they were a part of a good sized social network and attended events with these people both in their own home and other homes. These events would not be sanctioned by your average baptist church. In fact, they were strongly encouraged to break off ties with their former way of life, including the people who could "drag them down" into sinful ways. So, they obediently began breaking ties with their social circle and forming a new social circle... one comprised of friends from church, who just so happened to be Christians.

Fast forward thirty years and you have me, a Christian who has been raised in the way of the church, which is a way almost exclusively filled with Christian socials, Christian retreats, Christian sports, and so on. I believe we have an entire generation, and possibly two, of Christians who have been taught how to separate themselves from non-Christians and have lost the ability to make friends with them.

What strikes me is that as I read the New Testament and the life of Jesus I imagine that He would have had a much different response to my parent's situation some 30+ years ago. Instead of asking them to remove themselves from their social circle and make a completely new one, He most likely would have asked to join them at their next party (even though it may have had the evil alcohol in attendance!). Sure some of the friends might have decided that partying with Jesus was not their thing... but others most likely would have been intrigued. Regardless my parents would have maintained the skill of being friends with people who do not think, act, and dress exactly like they do.

That is the Evangelism Class we need today... "How to make a friend with a non-Christian 101". You might say to yourself, "But they work with non-Christians, their kids go to school with non-Christians, and they have neighbors who are not Christians!" All of those things may be true, but none of those mean that they would feel comfortable asking any of those people over to dinner just to hang out on a Friday night. And, if you can't see yourself asking someone to come eat burgers on a Friday night... how exactly are you supposed to see yourself talking to them about eternity?

The Future of the SBC

I spent a long week in Sacramento, California with the Healthy Church Group from the CSBC (California Southern Baptist Convention for all those who are not down with the lingo). It was a great week of training and networking. I also believe I got a little glimpse of the future of the Southern Baptist Convention.

One word that is being tossed around quite a bit lately is "relevance". Relevance is about meeting felt needs within a particular population group. Relevance is at the root of the currently popular question, "If your church disappeared would your community notice or care?" Relevance also plays a role in the current happenings within the Southern Baptist Convention.

I have not spent much one-on-one time around Convention people, but almost every time I do they are surprised to hear that I know nothing of SBC politics and procedure. I don't know the names of the presidents of my state convention or even our national convention. (Sure I could google them, but they most certainly do not come up in daily or even monthly conversation.) I don't attend association meals or budget/planning meetings or anything else. In fact, outside of a little line item on our yearly budget I am not sure my church is very connected to the SBC at all. When they ask, "Why?" our conversation inevitably moves to the issue of Relevance.

At first glance this seems like a case of local churches asking, "What does the convention to for me?" In reality I find that most of the people I talk to are asking the question, "What is the convention doing for the Kingdom?" Let me state here that I have been quite impressed with both the intelligence and the compassion of every Convention person I have met. These are people who care deeply about the local church and the lost. They also have brilliant ideas about how to reach the former and support the latter. What I have come to realize is that there is a great divide between what goes on at the State Conventions (and NAMB for that matter) and the local church. It does not matter how much you care and how brilliant you are if the people you are trying to reach and serve do not know about it. That is where the issue of relevance comes to play.

For decades conventions have attempted to bridge the great divide with conferences, seminars, and yearly associational meetings. If there ever was a day in which those strategies worked... it is long gone. If the State and National conventions are going to bridge the gap and become relevant to the local church then it is going to take a personal touch. That is exactly what the Healthy Church Group in California has begun doing. They transformed their traditional structure which was separate divisions for each function of the church broken up by age groups. Instead of being eight people who consulted with each other on the off chance that their specializations mixed they are now an eight-person consulting group that meets with local churches and works together to present unique solutions for church health and growth to each church. In the last five years they have consulted some 400 local churches in the California area, and now they are launching the second step of their plan... training DoM's (Director of Missions) to become consultants as well.

What they are finding is that instead of spending their time calling churches and convincing them to come to yearly training and retreats they are spending their time receiving phone calls and prioritizing which churches they can and will consult. The results that churches are receiving is creating an ever-growing demand for their services... something that many state conventions would love to say I am sure.

Perhaps the end system will look somewhat different than what is happening out in California, but I have confidence that they are on the right track. I hope we will see other states making similar changes in the years to come.

Avoiding the Conflict Cycle - Part 3

I became a youth pastor of a large ministry when I was fairly young. I was 21 years old and found myself responsible for 200 youth and 50 adult workers. I still remember the first time I learned the lesson of early confrontation. (I say the first because this is a lesson I have had to re-learn many times, and honestly it gets tested on a continual basis to this day.) I had a particular adult worker who was not performing up to par. My wife told me there was an issue and that I needed to go to the worker and have a direct, serious conversation. I told her that I was aware of the issue and that the person was going to try harder and do better. I felt sure that given time and space the issue would resolve itself without the need for a messy, confrontational conversation. As it turns out there was a messy conversation, dozens of them in fact, and I was not a part of most of them. The issue did not resolve itself, instead if festered until it became an oozing sore. All of a sudden an issue that once involved one person was now affecting an entire division. Conversations were going on behind the scenes, and though I was often at the center of them (or my lack of leadership to more specific) I was not actually involved in most of them.

Confrontation is not easy, especially if you do it correctly, but it is easier than complacency or procrastination. When I spoke about Regular Evaluation I used the well known analogy of beginning a trip and moving 1 degree off course. The fix might be painful, because there is a reason you are off course. However, when we combine Regular Evaluation with Early Confrontation we save Future Pain and Suffering.

There is a formula in which Course Error * Time = (Messier Issues + Deeper Hurt + Wider Conflict + More Difficult Fix).

I have found that the longer I let bad behavior or attitudes go unchecked and confronted the harder it is to confront them in truth and love. What happens is that instead of focusing on one example I have to deal with multiple examples. The more examples I have to use, the harder it is to separate the issue from the person. The confrontation gets messy. My goal in any confrontation is to deal with behaviors and attitudes that hurt both the organization and the employee. That is much easier to do when I only have to discuss one behavior or attitude instead of a whole list of them that cover months of time and multiple projects or interactions.
Messy issues lead to deeper hurts. When people begin to feel like you are confronting their personality, their desires, their abilities, or their worth they tend to get very defensive. That is understandable, because I do the same thing. When I wait to confront I open the door to cause real hurt and pain in the person I am confronting.

Messy issues that lead to deep hurts rarely stay contained. They have a way of spilling out and affecting more and more people. They become a festering sore, or boil that has split open. It may be a nasty word picture, but the effect of a bad behavior and attitude that has been left alone for a long period of time is even worse. We have a horrible ability to downplay the spiritual, emotional, and relational damage that is being done while we find reasons to not confront.

My son has helped me learn this lesson many times. I now know that when he says, “Daddy I need to go potty!” it does not mean that I should think about finding a place in the next 30-60 minutes. It means I need to stop whatever I am doing and get to a bathroom NOW. That lesson became extremely clear when we were at the large, downtown public library. Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to take my two kids to the library by myself and check out 6 huge books. After spending some fun time looking around most of the 4-story facility we were ready to leave. I had all of my books in one arm, my daughter in the other, and was using one hand to try to hang on to Jared. He started saying he needed to go potty, but the thought of setting everything down and finding a bathroom just seemed too difficult… it could wait a few minutes right? Next thing I know I am in the main floor checking out and my son runs up to the desk informing us all that he has peed. Not that he needs to pee, mind you, but that he has already done so… in the lobby. I recently donated several dozen books to the library. Hopefully they will renew my library card now.

The last benefit that Early Confrontation gives is that it leads to easier fixes. Just like it is easier to fix a course correction after 5 feet than 500 miles, it is easier to correct a behavior after 1 week than after 1 year. I am currently doing some coaching for church planters in my area. So far it seems to be going well, and my mentor says that I am doing a good job. He also told me this last meeting that I need to continually seek training and resources that will help me evaluate my coaching style and confront issues. There is a danger that I will incorporate bad habits into my style early on, and if they are not caught and corrected in the beginning they will be much harder to fix later on. What we often forget is that people affect other people. If I have a volunteer or employee who has behavior and attitude issues, then they are affecting everyone that they come in contact with. That means that if I do not confront those issues for 6-12 months then I have now multiplied my problems by the number of people that have been affected over that time period. The real kicker is that the secondary people affect others in their own circles of influence, and before I know it I find myself wishing I had dealt with that “difficult” situation 6-12 months ago, because it certainly does not seem so difficult now in light of the problem I face.

Moving Can Be Fun

Or so I hear...

Though I hate making excuses about blogging silence, if there was a good excuse then perhaps moving out of our house and into a friend's place might be it. That is something that was physically draining and too lots of time when I was single. It is even more interesting now that I am married with two kids... and my friend is married with three kids. We talk all the time about the church being like a "family", but I don't think many people get to experience that reality. I definitely have and it is a great testimony to the life change that God brings about. The crazy thing is that the family we are living with is only one of several who offered to help.

I will get back to the series on Conflict, hopefully without any real world examples from this week with our friends :). We are officially out of our house now... as long as you don't count the garage as part of the house (which after three days of moving I don't because I need to be able to say that I am out of the house! :)). As it turns out our closing has been pushed back for at least a week... but my June gets crazy starting Sunday (travel galore with some consulting tossed in between the trips), so I needed to get out of the house this week regardless.

So far our kids are doing amazingly well with this whole thing. Our son (the social one) is looooooving it since he now has three extra siblings (who actually enjoy playing with him). Our daughter has pretty much managed to keep to herself... which is a large feat in a house with 9 people living in it. But, the random screaming and throwing of things helps her keep a nice buffer.

Avoiding the Conflict Cycle - Part 2

We have already established that Clear Expectations are the foundation of a healthy marriage, parenting, or working relationship. They allow both parties to be on an even playing field and they are required in order for true communication to happen. The better we get at expressing our expectations the less we deal with those nasty assumptions that so often disrupt healthy relationships. (You know the ones like, “You saw the sink was full of dirty dishes… I just assumed you would go ahead and clean them!!”)

I have found that though Clear Expectations help create clarity and unity, they do not necessarily lead to efficiency or effectiveness. In order for expected behaviors and attitudes to move to accepted results there must be a system of Regular Evaluation that takes place. This is something that is quite obvious to most business people. Most of my friends who work in the secular, professional world take things like daily briefings and weekly staff meetings as standard operating procedure. It seems, however, that many churches still operate on a system of “shared trust” rather than regular evaluation. The thinking must go somewhat like this, “Since we all love God and want what is best for His Kingdom, surely people will work in the way I think they should, in the time frame I hope they will, with the effort and professionalism that the job deserves.” A quick look at the state of the American church will show that this just is not the case.

As I have heard countless times, you must inspect what you expect. I don’t believe people fail to meet expectations because they don’t love God as much as they should, or love their job, or love their spouse, or their children. They fail to meet expectations because they never inspect and evaluate their own lives, because they were never taught that they should. Our entire school system teaches people to perform up to the level of evaluation of their superiors. It is the extremely rare case that you find people who live up to an internal standard of expectations. That is partly true because in order to live that way you have to unlearn most of what society blasts into you from birth.

How do we change this pattern? We teach people what it looks like to regularly evaluate their lives, one step at a time. I know a church is struggling with this issue when I hear things like, “We cannot seem to get enough volunteers… and the ones we have are so unreliable!” My first thought when I hear that is, “What kind of evaluation methods do you use for your staff members on a weekly basis?” What I will often find is… none. There is a meeting where volunteer needs are discussed, but not a follow-up where the volunteer process is evaluated. There are no 3/6/12-month employee reviews. If you ask the average staff or volunteer “How are you doing in your job?” they would not really know how to answer the question.

When there is a culture of expectation and evaluation at the top of an organization, then it is natural for that culture to flow down to each level of the organization. Often times people believe that regular evaluation makes people feel like they are being micro managed or that you do not trust them to carry out their job. Though that can be true it is more often the case that regular evaluations can help cement positive behavior, provide a foundation for risk taking, and quickly deal with vision shifts.

I assume that most people working for me are going to do a good job. That is why I hired them (or recruited them if they are volunteers). If I did not think they could do the job I would not have asked them to do it. Therefore, I fully expect most of my evaluations to be good, reinforcing positive behavior. That reinforcement then becomes a new foundation upon which the employee can reach even higher to attain larger goals. Given time and consistency these foundations can lead to proper risk taking (which is something I love to see in people in my organization/church). Take my son, Jared, for example. He is an active, adventurous, risk-taking human being; in other words he is a “boy”. He has almost no fear when he is on the ground. He will jump, fall, fly, roll, to no end on the ground. If I take him one foot off the ground and set him on the couch he is able to take even greater risks as he can now perform greater leaps and daring acts. If I take him ten feet off the ground on a tree branch, however, he will cling to me with all his might. That is simply because ground-level to tree-level is not a regularly evaluated and reinforced position. Instead of encouraging him to take more risks I am actually killing any risk-taking desires he may have. When we regularly evaluate people and reinforce positive behavior, we provide them with an ever-higher foundation upon which they can excel. When we fail to regularly evaluate we will often find that they have either become stagnant (clinging to the tree trunk afraid to fall), or that they have moved way off course.

People move off course due to vision shifts. They move way off course because their vision shifts happened a long time ago and nobody ever evaluated them (or helped them learn how to evaluate themselves). A one degree shift in direction is not a big deal if I am correcting it every five feet or so. If I am only correcting it every five miles then it becomes a much larger issue. How many times have we seen marriages torn apart by seemingly minor things? How many times have partnerships and relationships ended and the people on the outside are left wondering, “How could that small thing have done this?” It is because small vision shifts left unevaluated over time lead to large separation.

In the church world this has often occurred because the vision of the church is not clearly expressed or evaluated. As a result people are left to create their own vision of what the church is and what it is about. So, you have parents with small children who love the children’s ministry and tell their friends, “Our church is all about kids!”. The parents with youth will say the church is all about youth. Those in the crisis food ministry will say that the church is all about helping the hungry in the community. The worship team believes the church is all about the Sunday worship experience. In fact the church is most likely deeply committed to all of these things, but is not about any of them. What has happened is that people have shifted off of vision and onto programs or strategies. The danger is often not seen until the vision requires that programs and strategies change. Then you face the inevitable conflict that arises when people complain that the church just does not have the same vision that it used to.

This leads to our last, and most uncomfortable, step towards avoiding conflict, Early Confrontation, which we will look at next time.

Avoiding the Conflict Cycle

This blog is a direct result of a question asked via Twitter by Tom Harper. Yes, after much denouncing of the tool/media I have joined the world of the twitterers (tweeters perhaps?). And, I find myself having virtual conversations with people that I otherwise never would have spoken with (or heard from), so I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised to this point.

The original question that I am answering had to do with why so many people seem to live in a continual state of conflict... and make no move to change it. I am defining conflict as an argument that is generally fueled by emotion rather than reason and that attacks a person instead of an attitude or a behavior. I believe it is a cycle that we get ourselves into when we do not operate on a model of Clear Expectation, Regular Evaluation, and Early Confrontation. I will go ahead and make this a three part series and begin today discussing Clear Expectations.

Clear Expectations are something that first became real to me shortly after I was married. It did not take me or my wife long to realize that we had some very unrealistic expectations about what it would be like to be married. We were one of those couples whose first night together was our wedding night. I soon realized that my expectation of going to sleep with my beautiful wife in my arms was quite unrealistic... I need my space when I sleep (and so does she as it turns out). So, order the King size bed and make sure there is plenty of room.

I wish that we had so easily discovered all of the other hidden expectations that we carried into our marriage. Expectations about things like how much money we would be making by year 5, how it would be spent, who would make those decisions and how, what kind of house we would be living in, what kind of house we would be aiming for, what type of job(s?) we would have and what types of jobs we would be aiming for. Those things (and many others) were constantly in our own minds, and rarely in our conversations. Until, that is, one of us saw the other living in such a way that went against our expectations.

Now when we do pre-marital counseling (or just talk to young married couples) we constantly talk to them about expectations. We spend some time on making sure they are realistic, but much more time making sure they are shared. The fact is you can even deal with impossible expectations if they are shared expectations. The expectations that lead to heartache are the ones that stay hidden and undiscussed until the explosion comes.

I have learned this lesson again raising my (now 4 year old) son. In the early days we would simply say something like, "Jared let's go we need to go to the store". That left Jared free to decide how we would go, when we would go, and in what way we would go. Sometimes he thought that going in the car, now, directly to the store was good... and everything went great. Other times he thought we should first visit the rock pile, run around the front yard a few times, and then dig through tools in the garage. You see in his mind part of "going to the store" involved going outside (where the car lives), and his expectation of going outside was much different than mine. I learned that it was much easier on us both if I would say things like, "Jared, now we are going to go outside, get in the car, get in our car seat, and drive to the store."

Amazingly enough I have found that employees often like that same level of courtesy in a work relationship. Instead of giving vague (or no) job descriptions and living under the assumption that we both know what is expected, it is often better to be overly specific and clear up front about what both sides expect to give and receive from the partnership/relationship at the beginning. The first few weeks of a working relationship often set the tone for the next few years, so it is important to be clear about expectations (from both sides) from the start. This is a continual thing as well, something that happens every week in staff meeting. When an idea gets presented and accepted we quickly define expectations by asking who owns the idea, what their next step(s) is, who will need to help them, and when it will be accomplished.

Setting Clear Expectations is the first step to avoiding Conflict. But, expectations are often powerless without Regular Evaluation, which we will discuss next time.

A City Full of Hurts

This post was inspired by a conversation between Steven Furtick and Dino Rizzo. The statement that got my attention regarded making the hurts of his community become the hurts of his congregation. In many of the books and blogs I have been reading the authors speak of a growing disconnect between congregation and community. I think this issue of shared felt needs is central to that disconnect.

The question that arises is, "What are the felt needs in my community?" I cannot just read the latest servant evangelism book, pick three projects I like, and think that I will connect with my community. It takes a little more effort than that... though not much more. Amazingly enough when you ask people, "Is there anything I can pray for you about?" they will often tell you.

In fact, I fully expect that if a local congregation got serious about discovering the felt needs in their community they would seen be overwhelmed at the sheer number of needs revealed. That is what happened when my church started looking at what our community needs. We soon realized that the need was bigger than us. I am convinced that this is God's plan, because it drove us to pray that He would raise up His Church in our city. We began to pray that God would bless other churches in our area and in our city; that He would call more laborers into the harvest and that He will unite us and help our local body become a working part of His Body in our city.

Then a City full of Hurts can finally meet a God full of Healing.