American marriage go-round.

Posted on April 16, 2009 by PaulVK

American marriage go-round. A sociologist’s diagnosis. only a glancing blow at romantic idealization USA today http://digg.com/u119oK

Why can’t Americans stay married? We’re looking to get something from marriage that it can’t give.

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Why Pastors Should Twitter

Posted on April 10, 2009 by PaulVK

Four years ago I wrote the post “Why Pastors Should Blog” (reposted below). I reread it and still agree with it. Few of my pastor friends actually do blog and I’m really fine with that. Having a blog is kind of like having a pet, it’s a commitment. Not all pastors want to take the time to write. They may not enjoy writing. The thought of publically pondering may (quite reasonably) give them pause. I understand.

Lately I’ve been playing around with Twitter and I think I’m starting to get a sense for its usefullness for me. I’ve dabbled with it on and off for the last few months but was uncommitted. I wondered how it related to Facebook which I’ve also enjoyed.

In case you haven’t explored Twitter, some call it “micro-blogging”. Essentially you have 140 characters to make your point. I’m finding that a helpful discipline. There are of course ways to cheat, compressing URLs, abbreviations, etc. but the discipline forces you to get to the point. (Something I obviously need from time to time.)

Here is what I think it has to offer:

  • It is more of a “push” vehicle, rather than a back and forth vehicle, like Facebook. Facebook is a relationship, Twitter sends a message.
  • Twitter requires a far lower level of commitment from “followers” than a blog RSS reader does. You can easily follow a good list of twitters without getting overwhelmed because the messages are short. If there is a twitterer who is tweeting too often or whose tweets you aren’t finding helpful it is is easier to stop following them than it is in Facebook to “de-friend” them. Twitter may have the implicit, soft side of the social network thing worked out right for it’s purpose.
  • Twitter is a good way to get quotes, idea seeds, links, book recommends, etc. from indirect mentors, public figures, and people who you really can’t claim as a “friend” yet whose offerings you find helpful. The choice of “friend” for Facebook is significant. Even though many Facebookers aren’t necessarily active, Facebook is more “high touch” that can get awkward. There are a good number of people out there who you may or may not know personally (or may not have time to know or care to know on that level) yet they have helpful things to offer. Twitter allows them (like a blog) to share, and get feedback, without necessarily having to manage the encumbrage of a broader relationship. That isn’t to say relationships won’t develop or can’t, but they don’t have to.
  • The 140 character limit means that you can’t be held accountable for having missed something or failed to say that something in a way that doesn’t upset someone else. A lot of blogged discussions gets into what one said, didn’t say, or how they said it. That’s a fine activity, but it can get troublesome. Twitter will allow you go share something, an idea, a link, whatever, without necessarily having to stand trial for it. It’s just a tweet.
  • Twitter Search is more helpful than Google in certain circumstances. Spam bots have not yet taken over Twitter and there is a sense in which seeing the stream of tweets gets around the marketing filter that can clog many Internet channels. Take some time to search some things and you’ll see what I mean. You don’t have to be using Twitter to use the search site.
  • Twitter is easier to get into than blogging. It is free, all you really need to do to begin is to pick your user name and in most cases that will probably be your real name or some reasonable facimile of it. It was easy for me because I am the only paulvanderklay in all of human history to the best of my knowledge. You don’t have to commit to a domain, a service, or anything like that. Just start.
  • Twitter is early in its lifecycle. There are a variety of tools out there for phones, desktop applications, etc. It is still developing. Hopefully it will grow in a helpful way. At this point my thinking is that it is a helpful tool to invest the learning time in.

I’ve just started to explore Twitter and I think it will become more useful as I learn the tricks and the tools. At this point I am recommending my pastor friends to start to dabble with it. These are of course the same people that I told to blog, and most of them did not, but I love them anyway. 🙂 I know that many of them won’t start now, soon and some not ever, but I’m recommending that they give it a shot and see if it is helpful.

How might it help pastors in particular?

  • Increasingly members of your congregation and community will be using it. It is one more way to stay in touch and to keep in touch in an efficient, managable way. It doesn’t replace other aspects of relationship, but it opens another channel.
  • Many of the points I made in my old post on pastors blogging are still valid and valid for this. If you are blogging it is easy to tweet a link to your most recent blog post.
  • It will help your people, and people on the fringe of your community get a sense of who you are. I think that is always helpful just in terms of communication. The better they know you, the better they will understand what you are trying to say and where you are coming from.

If you don’t have the time, interest, income, energy, motivation, or whatever to make the larger commitment to a full time blog, Twittering may be a very good substitute. If you are blogging, it is a nice enhancement.

pvk

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Why Pastors Should Blog

Posted on April 10, 2009 by PaulVK

This is a repost from April 1, 2005

I believe pastors should consider blogging. There are a lot of good reasons not to, and I understand that, but I think there are some good reasons why pastors and church leaders should blog.

Understanding the Blog:

Blogs do not normally reflect someone’s polished work or their final thoughts on a subject. Nearly everything in a blog is “off the cuff” and it is important to understand this in reading a blog. You will find typos, unfinished sentences, immature thoughts, etc. On a blog that is OK because it is supposed to be a work in progress, not necessarily the publishing of a final position. Why is this helpful? For many of us “thinking out loud” is an important part of the thought and reflection process. “Thinking out loud”, however, is of little use if no one else hears and no one else pushes back or responds. A blog simply allows you to articulate some thoughts you may have today on a subject with the understanding that these thoughts are tentative and in process. Everything on a blog is stamped with a date and time. That means that this is what I thought and wanted to express at that time. It may change in the future. It is part of a process.

How Blogging Helps the Community of Christ

I believe blogging can be of use to the overall building up of the church and the development of its leadership. The Internet in general allows pastors and church leaders to communicate in a way that gets around the obstacles of time and space. Communication is vital for the health and growth of church leadership and via the Internet church leaders can talk together, share ideas, share resources, challenge ideas, and post these things so that other can read them, and even refer them to others. Here are some ways that church leaders and pastors can use blogs:

  • Share helpful books, movies, articles, music, etc. with others
  • Allow church shoppers a window into the mind of a potential pastor. Who is he? What does he like? Some may decide to NOT attend your church after reading your blog, but maybe that is OK too.
  • Keep things that you have to repeatedly share available to others: There are times when multiple people ask me the same question or request the same resource. Via my blog I can point them here for an answer, more details on something, or a resource that really doesn’t work to pass via e-mail. Also, if another pastor made an interesting point that I think a third party would find helpful, I can simply pass along that link and they can find it too.
  • Sometimes people say “well can’t you just send it e-mail”. Yes you can, but it is even more convenient and helpful often to send a link to a piece that I have been working on over time.
  • Blogs allow other people with similar interests and gifts to find to, helping to expand your network
  • Blogs allow you to accumulate in a searchable database references to things you have found helpful. I often have ideas, hear about resources, discover books and movies, etc. that I found valuable but in the rush of things I forget about or misplace. I often simply just put an entry in my blog where I can search for it later and find what I had written or found earlier. The blog then becomes a personal librarian that isn’t tied to my computer in the office, or my computer at home, or my computer on the road. It is accessible to me from anywhere and I can refer others to it if I want to pass something to them.
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Searching for Old Content

Posted on April 8, 2009 by PaulVK

If you want to find content on the old blog software the easiest way is to use Google. Open Google and type in a search string like this: “site:leadingchurch.com whatever_you_want_to_search” and it will give you a page of links and those links will take you to the old posting on the old software. The comments no longer work, sorry. You can send me an e-mail (paulvk@leadingchurch.com) or post a comment here.

I hope to be manually migrating selective stuff from the old software but I’ll do it as time permits.

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Changing Focus on church mission statements

Posted on April 8, 2009 by PaulVK

Repost from Oct 23, 2006 (I’ll start reposting old content selectively)

Individual/personal transformational mission statements vs. city/community/world transformational mission statements.

I don’t know if churches had mission statements before the seeker movement. The Seeker movement employed business tools in churches and part of what came along with this was mission statements. Mission/Vision statements are supposed to help churches get specific and focus their efforts and energies. It’s a good goal. Most churches wind up with mission statements that are a hodgepodge put together by committee. They accurately express the diffused assumptions and aspirations of churches that at one level kind of know what they want to do/ought to do but struggle to put it into one tight sentence.

The flagship of the seeker movement is of course Willow Creek in Chicago. Before I say anything else I want to say that I’ve visited Willow twice for their Church Leadership Conference and deeply appreciated both experiences. The first time I visited it really shook me out of my missionary slumber and showed me that I had to be just as much a missionary in North America as I was in the Dominican Republic. I believe that God has done a wonderful thing through Willow and the seeker movement and I respect and admire Bill Hybels as a Spirit filled, grace giving leader. I want nothing I’m about to say to detract in any way from their work or the positive ways they’ve impacted the church world wide. So many statements echo in my mind: “lost people matter to God”, “the local church is the hope of the world”, etc.

Willow had the keynote mission statement: “to turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.” This is a great mission statement communicates a great missionary message cleanly and succinctly. Churches around the world soon began to copy and tweak this statement. Many many churches today have similar mission statements most centering around individual, personal transformation. Isn’t that what the church should be about? Of course.

How did the Seeker movement pursue it’s mission? It was clear that in the 80s and 90s as Americans were generationally moving further and further away from their Christendom roots that common sinful maladies were wreaking havoc on their experience of wellbeing. Divorce, addiction, work-a-holism, etc. combined with affluence were increasingly making life unmanageable. In the words of an older mission maxim: find a need and meet it. The Seeker Movement found a broad, common need and were able to address is in a compelling way. The church has wisdom about discipline and self-control that can reign in the sinful nature and in the words of the 12 step movement restore your life to sanity. Credibility is earned through the performance of lives saved from the out-of-control American dream and an opportunity to “present the gospel” becomes more inevitable. Not only does Jesus and the Bible give us wisdom to curtail our avarice but they also resolve the unfelt (post-Christendom) need hell by means of the cross. The Contagious Christians helped newly churched Joe and Jane draw the cross on the napkin and lead their neighbors who are already coming to church now to Christ. It worked and in many ways it still works in many places.

Willow did not in any real way tweak the gospel presentation or understanding from it’s earlier iterations by Bill Bright or Billy Graham. The 4 Spiritual Laws and Evangelism Explosion basically needed an additional front end (the Seeker Service, wisdom preaching, 12 step small groups, etc.) The American suburban world was changing but it was still mostly haunted by it’s Christendom past.

In Tim Keller’s address to the Desiring God 06 Conference he referred to a sermon given in the 50s by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones claiming (even then) that the world was changing. Allegorizing the story of the demon possessed boy in Mark 9 he claims that the “demon is in too deep”. In the Christ haunted Christendom evangelism required a rousing of people slumbering within a Christian worldview. They needed to be awakened, reminded and energized by a program and could be revved up and sent out. The Seeker Movement demonstrated that the population was moving away from this state quickly and so via Wisdom was able to once again restore credibility and be fruitful in evangelism.

Twenty years into the Seeker Movement many are seeing a dark side to the movement. The next cultural church wave, the emergent movement would, like each succeeding American generation it seems, find cause to disparage the faith of their parents. Part of it may just be youthful rebellion, but some of it (as usual) has some validity. The Seeker Movement hooked out of control affluent suburbanites by offering a way to make their lives work. Now again, in Willow’s defense their standard or definition of a “fully devoted follower” was not a watered down discipleship. Every time I heard Hybels preach I was deeply convicted of one thing or another. Too often as is common the copies are not as sharp as the original.

As Americans find full blown secularism and consumer culture hollow they seek to fill the void and gap with lots of spiritual means to “make life work”. Older cultural observers like Luther and Chesterton noted how incurably religious creatures we are and how fast we fall for the latest sexy “making life work” Baal that comes our way. The difficulty with the Seeker Movement and the individual/personal transformation promise they offer is that it fits so well into the religious “making life work” spiritual/self-help market place. It is too easy to leave the central idolatry of our hearts in place. We already deeply want God to serve us, bow to us, and cede to us the throne of the universe. We are already too prone to see God as the genie that rubbing the Christianity bottle releases. If we don’t directly confront this deep addiction we will simply seek to use God and his stuff for our own schemes of divinity.

It is for this reason that I think churches should move on from individual/personal transformational mission statements and look at broader community/city/world transformational statements. When we say that God is saving the world we have to cut people off at the unconscious mental translation pass which still hears that as God keeping disembodied souls from hell. God does that, but God does so much more. He is saving the world and we are the tools he is using to do just that. Expressive individualism wants to turn Christianity into merely a personal relationship by which God exalts me. Yes God wants a personal relationship with us, but it isn’t about us, it’s about the world.

This isn’t just good soteriology, it is good missiology. Brian McLaren noted this in his book A Generous Orthodoxy :

“One of my mentors once said to me, ‘Remember, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefits it brings to its nonadherents.’ This surprised me, and I thought about it for days. Many people think the opposite of what my mentor said: that religions offer benefits to adherents and catastrophic threats for nonadherents. This offer/threat combination motivates people, they assume, to become adherents out of fear of catastrophe and desire for benefits.” p. 111

If you take this and see it through the lens of Keller’s Gospel vs. Religion matrix it becomes even more clear. With an individual transformational mission focus we too quickly wind up with a self-salvation scheme which the adherent intends to yield all of the goodies any normal religious consumer desires. Grace works in the opposite direction:

1. We have no coin with God, just our crap.

2. We contribute nothing to our own salvation, we are utterly dependent upon God’s grace

3. When we really begin to see our salvation (Misery, deliverance, gratitude), it changes us from the inside out. It transforms our value system making the American dream look shabby compared to this strange suffering path of Jesus. It changes us from calculating American pragmatists to in-love Jesus followers who gladly sing hymns in Roman prison cells.

The church is then no longer simply yet another corporation seeking to enlarge it’s religious market share, it is a community of servants who are joyfully and deeply committed to seeing the flourishing of community/city on planet earth at whatever the cost. We don’t seek the supremacy of our organization or party, but we seek the well-being even of the pagan enemies around us. It is the reverse of the Christian culture war. We want our unbelieving neighbors to praise a God they don’t know for the presence of Christians in their city rather than resenting and fearing them in the public square.

The transition from an individual transformational statement to a communal one apart from the church itself helps us to bear a better witness to a Christ who came not for himself but for the rest of us.

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Pastorpreneurs

Posted on April 7, 2009 by PaulVK

First saw the word here: http://digg.com/u1SQy

I was listening to a geek podcast where they were talking about the revolution from traditional print media to “new media” (blogs, podcasts, etc.) and what it means for those who got into journalism assuming they’d have an assumed salary in a differentiated corporate setting. (http://twit.tv/189 at minute 55:45) “We’ve entered the age where everybody needs to think of themselves as an entrepreneur even if they work for a company. You need to think of yourself as a personal services corporation with a staff of exactly one.” Another chimes in “Self-sufficiency, there’s nothing more important than that.”

Would you give a cash prize to the person who brought the most visitors to your Easter service? Would you pay a non-Christian family $1000 if they attended your service every week for a year? Are these any different from offering free breakfast or free family portraits to visitors or a free car wash?

Rick Warren in is Purpose Driven Church book said that step one was “draw a crowd” and cites Jesus as his source. Was Jesus a pastorpreneur?

We’ve had pastorpreneurship for a long time where there aren’t institutions mediating the transaction. Storefront churches, tent revivals, Christian radio and cable TV.

There are lots of angles for reflection on this. Theological, ecclesiastical, sociological. Institutions tend to thrive in times of social stability but in times of rapid social change (which can be triggered by technological upheaval as well as political or economic change) they tend to struggle. Churches as institutions tend to be collective expressions of more organic communities that are created by the combinations of leaders and consensus. Times of change tear down institutions that cannot adapt and usually create new ones that better suit the new context. These times of change also prompt questioning of many past assumptions.

One thing beneath all of this in our context again is the oracular function of the market. In our culture the market is almost assumed to be a sort of oracle that points to the hand of God amidst the clutter. The pastor who enjoys market success is “approved by God” and awarded the label or title “apostolic” . There is of course the reactionary market that wants to play the game in reverse by saying that anything popular is of course approved by the devil, unless they are approved by our own filters as faithful and then the market validates them.

In places of downside institutional transition there is of course increasing pressure on pastors to be pastorpreneurs. If a pastor has moved the numbers in the yearbook up during a tenure at a church this adds to his/her value. Paul Borden in his book “Hit the Bullseye” directly advocates this for those who wish to see their regions grow. Get rid of pastors who are not meeting attendance numbers and only allow new pastors into your classis or region if they have a proven track record of increasing attendance in their congregation. Pastorpreneurship on a classical level.

Is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? I wonder what this reality does inside my head in terms of how I relate to people. I find it tends to tempt me to use them rather than to love them. I tend to increasingly see others as potential assets to my own popularity and career aspirations. I find it subtly tempts me to please and to pander and to shade and to spin. But aren’t those also functions of community that are healthy? Doesn’t avoiding disapproval of others also bolster making moral choices and keeping well within community doctrinal lines?

One thing that I can certainly say about pastorpreneurship is that it makes me feel like an individual who is the captain of his own destiny. I am, in the final analysis what really counts and what really counts about me is my performance within a pretty narrow range. This can be an economic range (financial “net worth”, what a lovely phrase) or ecclesiastical: members, converts, disciples, etc. The institutional church too becomes a vehicle for personal renown and ambition. It’s not too hard to imagine how Christ might feel about me using his bride for personal advancement.

The pastor-bureaucrat is not a very flattering image either. The company man who faithfully does his duty within the corporation (isn’t that word related to “body”) in hopes of respectability, medical benefits (for US folks), a respectable retirement and a gold watch. Pastors in this view are people who have learned to moderate their expectations and find that success is mostly a function of coloring within the lines. Don’t do things that will get you fired!

Sorry, no glorious conclusion for you. I’m just mulling it over. pvk

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New look, still a work in process.

Posted on April 1, 2009 by PaulVK

Here’s Leadingchurch on WordPress. All of the old posts are still on the server. I’ll have to figure out what I want to migrate to WordPress and what I don’t.

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