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August 19, 2020

Building Vision and Culture

By New Churches Team

“Vision and culture are the things that build capacity and cause us to achieve the things that God has put in our hearts to do,” explains Chris Railey, lead pastor of Oaks Church in Dallas and former national director of the Church Multiplication Network.

There are two kinds of vision. There is vision that we sit back and applaud. Then there is the vision in which we choose to participate. This vision is more heartfelt and better communicated because we can find our place in it. Our goal as leaders should be to cast vision that people can find their place in. In Church Unique by Will Mancini, he explains that when it comes to vision, you have to discover, design, and deliver. We can be really good at discovering and designing, but not so great at delivering. And it’s in the delivery that we help people find their place and their role.

Engaging in Limiting Circumstances

Railey shares that he has relied on gatherings and events of all kinds in his leadership life as a place to build culture. Now, coming back into pastoral ministry and during this COVID season, he never imagined what this transition would have looked like. Church attendance was already a struggle. They were trying to figure out how to engage people who only attended once a month. They went from being a church of 4,000 in regular attendance to under 1,000 after reopening for a few weeks. But Railey encourages that we now have a unique opportunity for trial and error and experimentation in our churches. You aren’t going to hurt your attendance if you try new things. This is a chance to try things that you might not have tried before.

For example, Railey is making a change to his church’s preaching style. He has long felt that people want expository preaching to anchor hearts in the word of God, but that hasn’t been the style of preaching at this church. Railey decided to go ahead and make the change. They are launching a 30-week series preaching through the Book of John.

Railey is also providing a daily devotional which walks through books of the Bible and people are engaging online. He explains that first he had to begin by teaching and developing church staff around this idea. He also set up a teaching team to develop young communicators. The idea is that as he shapes culture on the staff that will shape culture in the church and anchor them in God’s Word. Railey admits it may not work, and they may have to rethink it. But this is an opportunity to do new things at a low risk time and see what God does.

Developing Leaders

Don’t just execute Sundays. Develop people. This comes down to two things: time and place.

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Home > Blog > A New Normal

A New Normal

By Ed Stetzer

As states have begun varied and nuanced approaches to reopening businesses, parks, and more, we find ourselves asking more and more “How do we move forward?” I’m concerned about life after the pandemic, but my concern is in a direction that may surprise you.

Many say they are concerned that after the pandemic the church will never be the same again. Some wonder, for instance, if the day of the large church is over. The thing that resonates with me is the statement that the church will “never be the same again.”

I’m more concerned the church will be the same again. Let me explain. For 2,000 years, we’ve had epidemics or pandemics. What’s happened in and during and after the pandemics hasn’t drastically changed the structure of church for most of the previous 2,000 years.

We built cathedrals and gathered in them. Then the Black Death came. After the Black Death, we gathered in cathedrals again. Don’t assume the church was unaware that gathering together accelerated the spread of sickness. They might not have known about flattening the curve, but they knew that gathering together exposed them to more illness.

I’m less concerned that the church will be forever changed and more concerned that we will snap right back into the status quo. Why? Because the best predictor of future behavior is the immediate past.

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it tends to rhyme. We must not go back to normal. Instead, we must take the best of what we are seeing now and continue those things. Let me share three things that I hope we will keep moving forward.

First, that God’s people would be deployed.

God’s people are deployed at a higher level, a more faithful level, and a more fruitful level than before this pandemic began. We’ve seen small group leaders functioning like pastors or lay pastors. We’ve seen ministry leaders engaged in new ways of doing things. We’ve seen people caring for one another at higher levels. We’ve seen people making phone lists and calling one another, praying for one another, and then serving the poor and the marginalized in their community.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we didn’t go back to consumer-driven Christianity where people line up like customers outside of Costco? Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t come in like consumers of religious goods and services but instead continued to see ourselves as the co-laborers in the gospel?

Some of those people who you’ve seen step up might meet those qualifications in 1 Timothy 3. You might think about how to raise them up as pastors and leaders. But how do we keep deploying people? We need to remind people that, in God’s good plan, he wants all of his people to join him on mission.

First Peter 4:10 says, “As each one has received a special gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” May this be true before, during and, especially, after the pandemic.

Second, that we would keep worship central but not at the center.

God’s gathered worship is central, but it’s not the center of church life. Conversely, the church is not the center of God’s plan in the world, but it is central to God’s plan in the world. Ephesians 3:10 says, “God has chosen the church to make known his manifold wisdom in the world.” God has chosen the church.

The church has not been able to gather in ways that we enjoy and love. Not only do we value that, but gathering is a mark of a biblical church. However, the lack of gathering has actually helped us to emphasize other areas in the life of the church.

I often use the example of chess. I played competitive chess in high school. Our chess club teacher taught us not to rely on the queen. He had us remove the queen, leaving two chess players with no queen on either side. When you do this, you are forced to use all the pieces: the pawns, the rooks, the knights, and the bishops.

The gathered worship of God is not the center, though it is important. Indeed, it’s one of the marks of the biblical church that was taken from us, which is why it was so hard.

But look at how the people are deployed. My hope is that God’s worship would be central to our lives but not but not the center of all we do.

Third, that we would see the heart of God more clearly.

I’ve heard a lot more people talk about the poor, the hurting, and the marginalized. There’s a fresh perspective on the “least of these.”

This crisis has focused us on the impact this has had on marginalized people. We’ve seen incarcerated persons who can’t social distance. We’ve seen the homeless.

We’ve seen the devastation in nursing homes, the elderly, the sick, and people with compromised immune systems. And, we’ve seen heroes like those who helped and served the poor, and stories of first responders and healthcare workers sacrificing greatly.

As we look forward, how can we continue on the positive movements and focus that we have seen emerge? Returning to normal after such a historic moment would be nothing short of missing one of the greatest opportunities of our lifetime. We’ve been handed the chance to be better and do better. Let us go and do it.

By Ed Stetzer: Three basic findings describe where North American organizations are collectively in adjusting their systems to equip churches to become church planting churches.

Implementation of Church Multiplication Practices

First, we are seeing significant attempts to implement church multiplication practices into church planting systems, particularly in an organization’s vision and training.

In our survey, we asked the question: Where does your organization use language such as (or similar to) church planting churches, church multiplication, Level 5 churches, sending churches, reproducing churches, or parent churches?

Almost half of the 130 organizations who answered have incorporated church multiplication language into either their mission or vision statements, and more than half have incorporated it into their value statements.

When asked about which competencies they provide training for, 73% of organizations indicated that they provide training in church multiplication.

 

By Ed Stetzer: People in your church are going to be nervous. They’re going to say, “Now, wait a second. If we send people out, won’t our church decline?” Statistically, the most likely scenario is that it won’t. Jeff Farmer (researcher and professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) did a comparison study of 75 churches and found that churches who planted, when controlling for other factors of similar size and passion, actually grew. When you send people out to plant, others will show up and step into leadership roles.

When I planted a church in Erie, Pennsylvania, we decided to start two daughter churches. We said we were going to have twins, so we planted two daughter churches on one day with residents. For six months, these residents were on staff where they walked with us and we trained them. We then gave them a three-month transition period where they had a fishing license to anybody in our church. We blessed and encouraged them to approach anyone in the church with a challenge to come and plant with them. At that point, we were running 350–400 in attendance, so when they got about 50–75 people to go with them, it hurt. It was a lot more than we expected.

One whole worship team and a drummer—we had two worship teams—got a vision for church planting and decided to leave. This meant we now had no drummers in our church when they would leave. We said to our church during one of the preview services, “Listen. We’re so excited about what’s happened and how you have rallied around these church plants we’re sending out. But did you notice there’s no drummer today? We had to use a track.”

After the service, one of the members came up to me and said, “You know, I could be the drummer.”

And I said, “That’s awesome, man. But have you ever been a drummer before?”

He said, “Yeah, yeah. I used to tour professionally as a drummer.”

“What?” I was shocked because our previous drummer struggled. I mean we had a drummer all these years and he was painfully bad, but at least we had a drummer. And now this guy, who was a professional drummer, who had played for a couple different famous bands, comes up to me and tells me this?

“Are you serious?” I asked him, “Why have you never said anything?”

“Well, you know, I just wanted the guy to have a shot who was up there.”

“Dude, you’re killing me.”

This is what happened throughout the church. After we sent out people, others began stepping up to the challenge and taking on leadership responsibilities. So, cast a vision for this and allow God to send people to fill the void!

This was an excerpt from the book that I wrote with Daniel Im, 1000 Churches: How Past Movements Did It—And How Your Church Can, Too. You can learn more and download it for free here.

By Ed Stetzer: It is important to remember that ‘missiology’ is not a thing. It is things.

Some people say, “We just have to think missiologically.” But, they need to know that a missiology of a tribal people group in Papau New Guinea is very different than a missiology of Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

As such, when we think missiologically, there is not one right way to plant a church, so it is worth looking at how churches are planted.

Let’s face it: sometimes, there is arrogance among church planters. Not you, but some of the others!

Often, this is just part of the entrepreneurial spirit that often accompanies people who start new things. Many times, new projects are started in order to ‘do right’ what previous starters ‘did wrong’.

In fact, you will find that frustration coupled with attempts to rebuild a broken structure often erupt into a drive to build something completely new. Building something new is good. But it isn’t good to plant a church for the wrong reasons, or to plant a church to show the world how it should be done right.

Today, church plants are everywhere, and cover a multitude of expressions and tracks. Let me share just two and talk a bit about the history that created the second.

Track 1: From a Home Bible Study Onward

Before the 1980s, people primarily planted churches along one track. You would start a home Bible study with a few people. It would grow for months, and then when you hit maybe 16-24 people, or a core of four or five families, you would move into the chapel stage.

This would include more traditional church elements. Then, whenever you had enough families to be self-supporting, and put people in place for leadership or church officers (depending on your denominational affiliation), you moved into the mission stage. You develop various ministries and outreach opportunities, and eventually you become an established church.

This is the way most churches where planted and what most groups taught.

Track 2: The Launch Model

Then, a conversation began in the late 1980s and early 1990s (which was greatly impacted by conversations at Fuller Theological Seminary) that would result in a major shift in church planting practices. Bob Logan developed a toolkit for church planters that was widely used (and is still on Amazon!). Kevin Mannoia wrote an interesting and helpful book about the history and development of this new phase of planting titled Church Planting – The Next Generation.

What grew out of the Fuller conversation was new and included varied ways to do something that already had a multitude of expressions for thousands of years around the world. Because we know that there is really nothing new under the sun, what happened was a revisiting of old ideas. Things that work in some areas, don’t work as well in others. Things that worked at certain times, don’t necessarily work well every time.

Missiology that marks your area and time is not necessarily the same missiology that should be engaged across the state or in 20 years.

One of the primary tracks that emerged from those conversations in the late 1980s to early 1990s was the launch model. The expression over the last 20 years looks something like this:

It begins with a team that has been built by a planter who went through an assessment and evaluation process. That planter often goes through some sort of church planter boot camp. The planter has been immersed in resources and understands the process. The person usually has some sort of financial support package that will diminish over time as the work becomes self-supporting.

The team meets regularly to prepare for the launch spiritually, emotionally, and strategically. Leading up to the launch, the team gets things in place. They secure a free or rented space and engage in a mass introduction to the people in their community or region through mailings, advertisements, social media, and other forms of technology.

This leads to a time where there may be a soft launch, practice services, and ultimately a launch service, which may have anywhere from several dozen to several hundred attendees. Because it is larger, it connects people to a larger group. To the guests, it looks like a church that is well established because the team and program work fairly smoothly and there are many people.

Is There a Preferred Way?

Each track takes dedication. Many people far from Jesus have been reached by both. Churches have both succeeded and failed in both models. There are other models as well. The key to all of this is listening to the voice of God, working for proper contextualizing in each context, and working within a framework you believe in.

However, we are now seeing a reengagmenet of the non-launch model. Sometimes it’s called different things, like missional incarnational. But, it is similar to what planters did 50 years ago—planting by relationship rather than launch.

Both matter. Both are being used today. But, the choice of which appoach should be shaped by the context.

In other words, the ‘how’ of church planting is, in many ways, determined by the who, when, and where of culture.

By Ed Stetzer: Most of us know how essential volunteers are to making sure our churches are as effective as they need to be. Churches need to develop an ethos of valuing volunteers, but in order for churches to thrive, they would do best to raise up volunteers who are leaders and choose leaders who have been volunteers.

When I look for a leader to oversee volunteers, or a leader to oversee leaders, ideally I look for someone who has gone through all the stages of the ministry he or she will be leading—someone who has set up the chairs if we’re starting a new church, led a Bible study, or worked in the children’s ministry. Then, once that person has volunteered in those positions, I say, “Let’s see if you can oversee others to do that.”

Furthermore, I love to challenge volunteers to go a little deeper. Challenging volunteers who show a potential for leadership to oversee other volunteers is a great way to do that. If I’ve found a volunteer who has gone through the different stages of the ministry he or she will be leading, then I want to be sure to equip the person with some training. Many people do not know how to delegate well. Have your leaders read a simple book on delegation. Send them to training opportunities and give them the tools they need to do well as a volunteer leader.

So, volunteers are a vital part of our churches running smoothly. Something that makes them even more remarkable is that they often go unrecognized. Volunteers must be willing to humbly serve Christ and their brothers and sisters without ever expecting to shine in the spotlight. One such volunteer I knew who embraced this humble servitude is Dale.

A good example

You wouldn’t have heard of him, but he was a guy in my church. One of the key ministries we needed to develop was small group ministries. Dale was a new believer—in fact, I had baptized him. I asked him to be the champion of small groups in our church. I asked him to learn more than I knew about it and paid to send him to a conference on small groups.

He went off to the seminar and came back with five or six books he bought on his own. He sat down and made a plan. We went through that plan together and I modified it here and there based on what I knew from seminars I had attended. Then, I had him go and do it.

Not only was Dale the champion of small groups in our church, but he led the leaders of small groups as well. He was the perfect picture of this model: he was a new believer in a small group, he led a small group, he oversaw small groups in a group zone, and then he oversaw all of our small groups, all while working at a tool-and-die in Erie, Pennsylvania.

He was an essential part in the leadership of our church. We need more volunteers like him, and perhaps they need to do the jobs that some pastors are now doing.

You see, too often, we hire people when volunteers could do the work just as effectively—if not more effectively. Volunteers who have been a part of the ministry, then lead as part of the ministry, then begin to oversee the ministry, are extremely effective and know the ins and outs in ways that a new hired staff person may not.

Volunteer vs. paid?

There is often a debate on this, but I believe churches ought to be hesitant to hire staff for all the positions, especially in smaller churches, because it sends the signal that people should be paid.

Some may wonder, “Why are you paying this person, but not that person?” If I do need to hire a staff member, by the time I do, I want the job to be to work with the leaders of leaders and have volunteers who are already in place. This expands our capacity for leadership without creating the mindset that everybody should be getting paid to do work and minister in a church.

Whether a volunteer is overseeing an entire ministry, leading one small group, organizing donations to the church, lovingly caring for infants during a service, setting up chairs, or greeting guests with a smile at the door, volunteers are doing a key service for the church. The church could not function as it does without each and every one of them.

Conclusion

One final note: pastors and church leaders should be cautious to never fall into believing that their own role in a church is better than the role of a volunteer, or valuing the volunteer who oversees the children’s ministry above the volunteer who takes out the trash. We are all humbly pouring ourselves out for others and for the church. Christ loves each of us equally.

As his life and example teaches us, true leadership is not about achieving the highest, most glamorous position. It is about getting down on your hands and knees in the middle of the mess and washing others’ feet.

Our churches could not reach the people they reach without our incredible teams of volunteers. So thank God for them. And tell them you appreciate them. Although the world may never recognize them for their wonderful service, let them know that you see what they do and that you are grateful.

To all volunteers, thank you for the ways you serve Christ and his church.

By Ed Stetzer: In every time period and historical context during which it has been shared, the gospel has confronted culture in one way or another.

During the years of Christ’s ministry, it challenged the mistreatment of the poor.

During the Reformation, it drove Martin Luther to condemn the selling of indulgences.

During the late 1700s, it inspired William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade.

The message of Christ’s redemptive love and free gift of forgiveness for all has been the force behind centuries of social change. Christians who understand the implications of this gospel can’t help but find ways to apply its principals as they live and work in secular society.

For obvious reasons, however, cultural engagement brings with it unique challenges and complications. Many find themselves wanting to charge in, speak prophetically, criticize openly, and then expect to wait and watch for meaningful change to occur. But as Christians work to identify issues of concern in communities—either our own or those elsewhere—a posture of respect becomes critical.

Ultimately, it’s not about forcing others into agreement or ‘winning’ a debate. It’s about sharing the message of hope that we have and trusting God to change hearts and minds.

Pursue Understanding

When we find ourselves in conversation with individuals from other cultures—particularly, those who don’t see eye to eye with us on spiritual matters—it can be easy to enter into ‘prophetic preacher’ mode. An attitude of superiority and condescension quickly cloud our witness and prevent others from receiving our message.

Sometimes, though, the most effective way to share is with our mouths closed.

When Paul visited Athens in Acts 17, we know he spent time reasoning with Jews, Greeks, and philosophers alike. But, he didn’t do so without first getting some context; he pursued understanding of these people’s culture before entering into the conversation.

We see him remark on observations of Athenians religiosity—he tells an audience of Athenians that he “walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship” reading their inscriptions and considering their philosophies (Acts 17:23).

Like Paul, we must practice a certain level of cultural literacy; before offering criticism or commentary, we need to understand who we’re speaking to and where they’re coming from. When we do this, we learn how to share truth in a way that others can recognize and relate to.

Build Relationships

People respond well to the gospel in relational contexts. While I’m confident that God can and does work through a variety of evangelistic efforts, I know from personal experience that the gospel is best shared between two people who’ve established a certain rapport with one another over a period of time.

When trust is established, people are generally much more willing to open up and share their story.

This is why it’s so important for followers of Christ to enter into community with those who are different from them. When we build relationships with people from other cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems, we build bridges and pave the way for the gospel message to be shared.

A relational approach to evangelism requires just as much intentionality as other forms; in many cases, even more. It means being diligent in the development of new friendships, prayer, and generosity with our time among other things. It means being the hands and feet of Christ in ways that take us out of our comfort zone and into a place of dependence on God.

Make the Message Relatable

Often when sharing the gospel with people of different cultural contexts, it’s easy to get caught up in ‘Christianese’ speak.

But what would it look like if we made the message of the gospel more relatable and easily understood?

There are certain things we all share as human beings; among them a desire to be known, loved, and valued. But so too there are aspects of Christ’s gospel that speak to each of us in different ways. For those living in want, Jesus as the bread and water of life are powerful metaphors. For children who’ve suffered some form of abandonment, the notion of God as a devoted, faithful Father is equally as redemptive.

As we desire to deliver the gospel far and wide, we must learn to show the ways that the message speaks to them specifically. How does it fill the empty space in their heart? How does it challenge their preconceived notions of the divine? How does it speak truth into and transform their life?

The gospel is powerful, but so too are the ways we deliver it to people. Let’s learn to share it through relationships, with understanding, and accessibility. Check out our latest resource, Our Gospel Story, to help you get started.