Fear and Faith

I attended a great retreat last week with a dozen wonderful church planters. My sense, again, is that leadership is all about fear management. When we walk by faith we are either walking into the unknown (which we all dislike doing) or into something that we know includes risk.

The beginning point of fear management is to identify of what we are afraid. This may be harder than it first appears. As in sales, the easiest identified fear may not really be the real reason we are afraid. The reason for this being that if we solve a psuedo-fear, we can still harbor our real fear (sounds kind of strange doesn't it) and still keep in reserve a good reason to not walk by faith.

Being honest with ourselves about what we really fear is often embarassing. We think more loftily of ourselves, but most of us have garden variety fears--failure, embarassment, fear of pain, fear of consequences, fear of ridicule. The old playground wisdom, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me" is totally false, even though we wish it were true.

Seth Godin in Tribes paraphrases the Peter Principle as leaders rise to their level of their willingness to assume risk.

Every leader is afraid. Good leaders identify their fears, lay them before God, and continue walking forward anyway by faith.

Heb 13:9 "It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, . . ."NIV

Good saying

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

Heard it this morning on a Zen sportstalk radio (it's Northern California--give me a break).

Years ago, Dr. Bryce Jessup, after one of my wild-eyed vision talks, gently said to me, "What is your plan?" "A vision without a plan is only a pipe dream." Those words have served me well.

Vision casting and more importantly, vision fulfillment always requires hard work, sacrifice, commitment and dying to self.

For church planters, it's often easy to have vision. I often must be reminded to count the cost before I start building the tower. By disciplining myself,(which is not as common as I'd like, I am able to avoid vision-hopping. When I don't I find myself jumping from one dream to another and nothing gets accomplished except frustrating those around me.

Tribes

I've been reading Tribes, by Seth Godin. I'm a big fan of Seth, I like what he writes. I also like most of Tribes. If it is read in the vein of servant leadership it can help change the face of the church for the better. If it is read in a spirit of self-centeredness, what can I get, then I'm afraid of some of his followers.

And that is the crux of the matter. Many times followers of authors or disciples of leaders, take the themes to extremes.

I have watched this past couple of years, from very close proximity, 6 or more church coups. It seems that the spirit of Absalom is alive and flourishing in our culture. I will grant that there are some old guys (my age) who have decided to hang on rather than grow. But the tragic part is that always there are people lost to the Kingdom of Christ by the strife that happens.

For the next week, I am going to reflect on Tribes. I encourage your dialogue because I'm not always the most critical reader.

In the meantime, I suggest reading one chapter of Philippians for every chapter of Tribes.

A Christmas Prayer

Fragile finger sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
Unto us is bornUnto us is born

So wrap our injured flesh around You
Breathe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy
Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world[2]

[2] “Welcome To Our World” – Chris Rice, Deep Enough to Dream, 1997.

Thoughts about John Wesley

I read this morning that John Wesley was "a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have made him eminent in literature, whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu, and who, whatever his errors may have been, devoted all his powers in defiance of obloquy and derision, to what he sincerely considered as the highest good of his species."(from Journal of John Wesley, PC Study Bible formatted electronic database Copyright © 2003, 2006 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)

As I read this thought I'm struck by the part that says, "in spite of his errors" and "in defiance of obloquy and derision" (obloquy-1 : a strongly condemnatory utterance : abusive language 2 : the condition of one that is discredited : bad repute ) devoted all his powers to what he considered the highest good of his species.

How many times are we deterred by our own knowledge of our weaknesses and errors and because of them a fear of people's condemnation and derision?

I have watched people struggle and quit when others derided them, criticized them, and condemned them. Most often the comments that hurt us the most have a grain of truth and a bushel of falsity, but our minds, most often most acutely aware of our own shortcomings and sin, magnify the grain until it becomes a huge bog of quick sand which drags us down.

The only way I know of dealing with this is to own our sinfulness and failures and errors(repentance), lay them before God (confession) and accept our forgiveness and renewed status in Jesus (the positive part of confession) and bodly move forward secure in the fact that Phil. 1:6 is being worked out in our lives.

New Statistics from Gary McIntosh

Did the name of your church influence your decision to attend
No 84% Yes 12% Uncertain 3%

Did the pastor’s preaching influence you decision to attend
Yes 90%, 6% no, 3% uncertain

George Hunter notes

Here are some interesting notes from George Hunter's lecture at the American Society for Church Growth.  The topic was evangelizing Pre-Christians.

George Hunter

 

Belonging comes before believing

 

Themes: Community, compassion,

 

If you don’t learn to communicate redemptively inside the body you won’t be effective in communicating effectively outside the body.

 

If you are orthodox

 

Lack of Communication

 

Conversations—Declining market for one way communication.

 

Feature the theme apostolic

 

It is one of the earliest and most perennial terms referring to the church.

 

The church is apostolic –sent out to pre-Christian people whom the Lord loves.

 

This is the main business of the church.

 

Proliferation of congregations within local churches.  Groups with similar homogenaeity within a body.  Who care for each other

 

The church features a strategic perspective of evangelization.

 

Strategy is the

 

Most churches are driven by the demands of the calendar rather than by a strategic vision of an overriding purpose.

 

The gospel is the only thing we have that the world doesn’t already have.

 

Cultural, emotional relevance in presenting the gospel.  Christianity is a religion of the heart .  To become a Christian is to be set free from an emotional world that was destroying you.  Guilt, doubt.

 

The secular world has an ecstasy deficit.  We need to help people discover grace through sublime worship experiences.

 

One of the supreme unspoken issues is “What is normal church like?”

 

Church should welcome people as though they have come into their true home for the first time in their life.

 

The domesticated relatively trivial church is not what Jesus or the apostles had in mind.

 

Another myth—The great commission is our purpose, but to fulfill it, all you need is correct theology.

Counter analogy—NPR interviewed a botanist. Phd in Botany and taught for 30 years.—He decided to take early retirement and build a great Victorian garden.  Five years later, his intended Victorian garden, was not a Victorian garden, but no one would have perceived it as a Victorian garden.  Why?  Birds, insects, droughts, pests sabotaged his dream.  After 5 years he went back to GB to visit the gardens, this time, he made a revolutionary discover, every great Victorian garden has a great Victorian gardener.   They knew more than enough botany, but they also knew soil science, meteorology, ornithology.  In our complex world, you can’t even build a Victorian garden without an interdisciplinary approach.

 

You must have an inter disciplinary approach to church.  Behavioral Sciences, anthropology, must be part of our understanding of our world.

 

Evangelism is not merely the enrolling of people into eternity, it is also the ministry of enlisting of people into working in the mission of Jesus in mission, justice and the other callings of Christ.

 

You can’t fulfill the mission of Jesus without building a critical mass.  The building of that critical mass is called evangelism.

 

Two Scientists

 

Arthur Edington—Cambridge—Astro physics—1930 “Why I believe in God”—“Relativity explained”

 

“The entire universe is more strange and complex than we imagine, indeed it is more strange and complex than we can imagine.”

 

Paul—No one can say Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit

 

Albert Einstein—“We must make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

 

In the academy we don’t make it simple enough--  The majority of academic people are virtually unintelligible.

 

In mission we often succumb to the temptation to make it simpler than it can be.

 

The biggest hurdle is the folk wisdom that assumes because we have slogans we can interpret reality.

 

 

One reason to use the apostolic is that every other term has a shelf life of less than half a generation.

 

Don’t enter your horse in non-main business races.

 

George Hunter reads Mere Christianity almost every year.

 

P 199—God became man in Christ that we might become little Christs.—CS Lewis.  If the church is not doing that, then everything we are doing is a waste of time.  God became man for no other purpose.  It is possible that the entire universe was created for this purpose.