Effective?

Yesterday we worshiped with the congregation of the Ondas de Paz UMC in Cabudare, Venezuela. This congregation was started by our good friends, and now family members, Efrain and Bethsaida Morales.  For several years it met in their modest home in Cabudare.  When they moved to the US to be with their children Pastor Efrain appointed Alexander and Amaryllis to be the new pastors.  This young couple had very little experience and almost no seminary or theological training.

However, Pastor Morales knew they were people of great faith and good character and would grow into the office.  And how they have grown!  That has been a sheer joy to observe. As they have grown the church has also grown.  First they knocked out the interior walls of the Morales' old house.  They added Sunday School rooms in the back.  But the last time I worshiped there, in March of this year, the sanctuary was full and people were standing outside the doors and windows sharing as best they could in the dynamic service.

Yesterday we gathered in a large "Party Room" as a great crowd gathered for worship. The rented facility is on a main street, has off-street parking (rare in this area) and is sheltered by several very large trees, making it extremely pleasant in the tropical heat. This was great to see after being used to the overwhelmingly cramped facilities of the last 10 years.

Is the description above what is necessary before a church can be called an effective congregation: new people, new/expanded facilities, more money, more attendance?  Well, maybe.  These are not typical of ineffective churches.

However one factor I did not mention in my description of the church is the issue of transformed lives.  Lives are being changed in this congregation.  Just yesterday several adults were converted and made a profession of faith. Homes are being restored.  Lives are being changed.

This is the measurement of effectiveness:  Transformed lives.  Not attendance, not buildings, not new members, not apportionments paid, not number in the choir or Sunday School Attendance, not cell groups or home groups, not mission teams and mission budgets, or any of the other ways we typically measure effectiveness.

My denomination has been content to have no or few professions of faith, little growth, or actually slow decline, aging congregations and dwindling constituencies and impact as long as the one vital sign was healthy: 100% apportionments paid.Other denominations have majored on other single focus issues such as theological integrity or Sunday School attendance or Baptisms, etc. The result:  all mainline denominations in the US are in decline.

Effectiveness is measured by transformed lives, lives transformed, changed, redeemed by the power of the Gospel of Christ.  When a church is effective it will impact its worship attendance and mission offering, its percentage of apportionments paid, its Sunday School attendance, its numbers of baptisms, etc.  However those alone are not the signs of effectiveness.  Our church will be judged by the Great Judge on whether we were engaged with Him in redeeming lost humanity.

Ondas de Paz is doing just that.  Most churches in the US are not.  There is so much we could learn from the church in Latin America! However, that would require at least the following:

1. The honest recognition that what the church in America is doing is failing miserably.
2. The burning desire to reach people with the Gospel of Christ and see lives transformed, the lost found.
3. A teachable spirit - a loss of the arrogance of the American church.
4. Humility. The Latin American church has so little of what the American Church values, but so much of what we need.  Could the church in America change its core values enough to esteem what God is doing in Latin America?

Do you want to be effective?

Church Work or Ministry?

When I started in ministry in the early 70's leadership recruitment in the UMC was basically the task of finding anyone who had some talents and putting them in a job in the church where they could serve.  The "Nominating Committee (usually primarily the pastor)" had the unwelcome task of filling elected offices that neither functioned in the local church or had any use in the Kingdom. But our Charge Conference forms had a space for a name beside every job and we had to fill that space. If you were breathing you were a likely candidate for just about any job in the church.  We just had to talk you into it either by saying, "I am asking you to take an office that really has no function/purpose, but it does put you on the Administrative Council." Or, conversely, "This is a big job, but I am sure you can do it. It will not require much time." 

Either produced unsatisfactory results.  The first left people, often gifted people, feeling guilty about not doing what the Job Description from the UMC said they ought to be doing and putting them in the decision-making/permission giving loop wothout sufficient "skin in the game." The other outcome was burned out church workers who disappeared every year around Charge Conference time. "I have already served my time. Get someone else to do it.  I'm tired.  I just can't take on anything else."  This often resulted on recruiting second tier leadership instead of having the best players on the field.

Thankfully someone taught me about gifts based ministry - spiritual gifts. What I discovered was if I could help a leader discover his or her spiritual gifts, discern their passion and calling and then help them find a way to serve in the Kingdom which fully exercised those gifts, passion and calling, they soared! Avoidance and burnout ceased to be a problem.  They served joyfully and sacrificially.  The complaint department almost closed (although in the church it is ALWAYS open).

This discovery and experience led me to coin this phrase to capture this great truth:

Church Work Kills


Ministry Thrills

What does that mean?  How many good enthusiastic church members have been beaten to death by work in the church that does not fit their spiritual gifts nor passion nor calling? Just because one is a Certified Public Accountant does not mean that she should be on the Finance Committee.  She may work in that field all week but her primary spiritual gift is the gift of teaching. Therefore if she can be helped to discover that gift and employ it in the Kingdom, she will serve in effective and sacrificial and joyful ways that would never be possible on Finance.  Sure, she can do the work of the Finance Committee, but it is just that for her:  work.  It (Church Work) saps one's energy and diminishes one's joy.

Larry was a computer programmer and typical of the sterotype.  But Larry discoverd he had the Spiritual Gift of Teaching.  He began to teach Disciple Bible Study (a brutally long year-long process requiring a great amount of work and perserverance by the participants). Frankly, I was not optimistic. He was a computer programmer and more comfortable with bits and bytes than Scripture and people.  Now over 15 years later he is still teaching and talks about it with excitement and joy in his face.

Glenn came to me one day to tell me she felt her spiritual gifts, passion and call were leading her into prison ministry.  Being the sensitive and perceptive person I am, I thought, "This is crazy.  They will eat you alive in the prisons of Georgia."  Fortunately I did not say exactly that, but I am not sure how encouraging I was.  However, she did not need my permission and just immersed herself in that ministry.  She became a part of a team that developed a model program for the families of prisoners in Georgia and it has been duplicated in other states at the request of state governments.

Church Work Kills - Ministry Thrills. These are two examples of the thrill of serving in one's area of gifts, verses filling a job in the church. Unfortunately, in my work as a District Superintendent and a church consultant, I more often saw the old way I did leadership recruitment.  And resentment, fatigue, "it will never work here." and "I'm not going to do it" attitudes are the result.  Joyless duty and meaningless work is the description of most leaders in most ineffective churches.

Thankfully years ago my friend John Ed Mathison taught me that just because someone said we needed a job filled in the church did not mean God wanted that job filled.  If no one with the right spiritual gift came forward to serve, the church was better off not doing the task and waiting until or if God did call someone.  That was a freeing realization. Of course, being a pastor meant putting names on the charge conference forms (before the Discipline was changed), but we all knew in the local church that was just a show for the DS.  We found ministry occurring when lay leaders discovered their spiritual gifts, passion and calling and were given permission to pursue that. Some things did not get done. But that made no difference to the Kingdom, just like forcing people into church work makes no difference to the Kingdom - except to take away from its power and resources.

An effective process for helping both lay and clergy leaders discover their spiritual gifts, passion and calling is time consuming, but well worth the effort. Death or joy is the the difference. Kingdom work is the difference.  Transformed lives is the difference.

Inward or Outward Focus?

I just finished teaching for a day in a State-wide pastor's conference in Venezuela.  I was asked to teach on the Mission Church.  The invitation came from a pastor who was the Valedictorian of the first graduating class of the Seminario Wesleyano de Venezuela (www.venezuelaforchrist.blogspot.com). Pastor Wilmer Perez had taken my course on the Mission of the Church and wanted to introduce his fellow pastors to both the concept and the seminary. He stated to them that going to the Seminary had changed his life and ministry, particularly the course on the Mission of the Church.

One of the primary differences between effective and ineffective churches is the primary direction of their focus.  Ineffective churches are inwardly focused - almost exclusively. Effective churches are primarily outwardly focused.  Ineffective churches consume all given to them (leadership resources, finances, location, facilities, etc.) with centripetal power.  Effective churches multiply resources given through the release of centrifugal energy into the world. Effective churches are about "them," those outside the church.  Ineffective churches are about "us." those inside the church.

This simple comparison and contrast is worth much more examination and something I do in the Seminary course.  However, it is enough of a thumbnail sketch for one to begin to understand the basic difference between the Mission Church and the Traditional or "Chapel" Church.

The pastors in the conference in Venezuela demonstrated this simple, but profound truth in an exercise depicted in the following pictures.  I asked for volunteers and 10-12 people quickly stepped to the front. Then I asked them to form a circle and join hands.  They did what I have seen in every case where I have scores of times asked this to be done.

Then I asked them if they could still hold hands and form a different kind of circle. After some discomfort and confusion they eventually moved to the form of a circle pictured here in which they were facing outward. These contrasting ways to be in community (holding hands) are powerfully demonstrative of the difference between the inward focus or outward focus of ineffective and effective churches.

There are many ways illustrate this and/or examine objectively which one best describes our church.  However, simply asking this question is a great beginning:  "Are we primarily an inwardly or outwardly focused church?"  The answers may help us change the focus and move from ineffective, irrelevant church life to transformational ministry in a lost and broken world.