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Kindle Notes & Highlights
10. Coaching and counseling:
Are the relationships around here healthy? No community should have better relationships than the local church.
2. Will serving help me grow spiritually? It’s ironic that in many churches and organizations, people equate serving with burning out, not being renewed. And yet Christian service should be a paradox of renewal: When we give our lives away, we find them. When we serve, we grow.
“Our research shows that it’s not doubt that is toxic to faith—it is unexpressed doubt that is toxic to young people’s faith.”
What’s needed now more than ever is church leaders willing to pioneer, to go deep into a culture that keeps changing to reach people who are increasingly resistant.
While most organizations naturally drift toward an insider focus, church leaders must resist this at all costs. Not only is it antithetical to the true mission of the church, but a self-obsessed community is a turnoff to a young generation that is well aware of the needs in the world the church often ignores. You lose your narcissism when you lose yourself in a bigger mission. And a bigger mission, by the way, is something millennials are longing to give their lives to. A church that is focused on a larger mission will never become self-obsessed.
If you’re over forty (and many church leaders are), the world into which you were born no longer exists.
Leaders who are willing to reconsider the methods to preserve the mission are usually the ones who succeed long term.
How do you embrace where they start but encourage them not to finish there?
Relationships and mission will be more powerful than singing and speaking.
Mission-centered, mission-focused churches will not be impacted by this. A church that has a white hot sense of mission will almost always have the resources it needs to do what the church is called to do. But churches who want to prop up what used to sort of work won’t. So focus on your mission. Focus on your purpose. Call people to something greater than themselves.
Typically, people change when the pain associated with the status quo becomes greater than the pain associated with change.
While that thought can be somewhat depressing, think of the flip side. History belongs to the innovators. It belongs to the leaders who dared to dream, to try things no one else was trying, to experiment, to push the boundaries of what everyone else believed was possible. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Or as Steve Jobs put it, “A lot of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Ron also changed the congregation’s language around outreach from “invite a friend” to “bring a friend”
Seek affirmation among the people God sent you to minister to, not the people who weren’t going to ‘get it’ anyway.”
It’s quite simple. Your patterns, habits, and level of effectiveness as a church got you to where you are now. If you want your current level of effectiveness, keep doing what you’re doing right now. If you don’t want your current level of effectiveness, change. It actually isn’t much more complicated than that.
focusing on the why, not on the how and what.
Because we imagine a church that our kids and grandkids want to come to. Because we want to be a church our friends love to attend. Because we want to be a place where people who don’t feel welcome today feel welcome tomorrow. Because we love Christ and the world for which he died. Because we have a passion for those who don’t yet know Christ. Because our current methods aren’t optimally helping us accomplish our mission.
