I was at Elephant Room this week, a forum hosted by Harvest Bible Chapel for pastors and church leaders.

The best part for me was the honesty, candour and wisdom shared by the panel:  James MacDonald, Mark Driscoll, Steven Furtick, Jack Graham, T.D. Jakes,  Wayne Cordeiro and Crawford Lorritz.

Here are a few insights that really impacted me (in no particular order):

“It’s easier to be a critic than to be a pastor.”  Mark Driscoll

“The devil can’t steal my ministry.  He has no authority.  So he’ll just steal the joy of my ministry.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“Write the cheque.  Go back to sleep.”  James MacDonald on the limits of cheque-book evangelism.

“None of our books will be on sale in heaven.”  T.D. Jakes, on the limits of human theology.

“You can’t integrate the church until you integrate your life.”  T.D. Jakes on racial integration.

“You are ready for restoration in ministry when you are known more for your repentance than for your sin.” Spurgeon (via T.D. Jakes)

“You can teach what you know but you reproduce what you are.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“We use anger as a substitute for the anointing of God.” T.D. Jakes on how some preachers over-rely on anger in preaching.

“Just because someone doesn’t want you in their circle anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t be in yours.”  James Macdonald quoting Craig Groeschel

“There is a difference between leadership development and developing leaders.” (missed the source)

And finally, this raw confession:

“I always knew God loved me, but I thought it was because he had to. Now I realize he wants to.”  Steven Furtick

Loved the Elephant Room.

What other insights have you gleaned lately, at the ER or elsewhere that have helped you?

So you’ve heard the buzz and the jokes.  Harold Camping has predicted that the world will end on Saturday May 21, 2011.  We even have billboards proclaiming that here in Central Ontario.

So will it?  Well, probably not.  In fact, I’ve got Harold Camping’s book 1994 in my library somewhere. That thick manual is his earlier prediction that the world will end in 1994.  Ironically, you can still buy it on Amazon.

I agree with Jesus that no one will know the hour when Christ comes back.  It’s actually a good idea to agree with Jesus on things, especially when it comes to the world ending and all that.

Jesus said while he was on earth he didn’t even know the day or time.  So I figure if Jesus and the angels didn’t know, and I got 27% in grade 12 chemistry, then how would I ever be able to figure it out?

As bizzarre as tomorrow’s prediction is, it leaves me uneasy. Here’s why.  One day Christ will come back.

And that will be an awesome day and a terrible day.  When we finally realize it’s actually happening, we won’t be able to change anything.  I might in fact be late for many people you and I know and love.

Today is not that day.  At least not yet. Which makes what you and I do today so important.

And one day – when we least expect – it really will happen.  And in all likelihood, it will surprise even the people who buy billboards and write books.

So we get ready to celebrate the greatest moment in human history (Easter), and I’m worked up about it. It’s not that I dislike Good Friday, Easter and Christmas themselves.  I love what they’re about.  But as a lead pastor, I find them to be the most difficult services of the year to plan for. That’s what’s got me worked up.

Here’s why:  Most people know the story.  And most don’t care.

It’s like this:  I live an hour north of Toronto but listen to Toronto radio.  I hear all the traffic reports, but I live far enough north of the city that they really don’t bother me.  So instead of hearing the traffic report I hear ‘blah blah blah blah’.  The weather? I tune in like a laser.  Because we pretty much have the same weather patterns as Toronto.  I’ve developed a relevance filter.  I care about what impacts me…not just what happens.  Not saying that’s good…I’m just saying that’s true.

I think every person who walks in our doors this weekend has a filter like that.  Most of us will think we’ve done our job when we tell people what happened (Jesus died…Jesus is alive) and mourn or celebrate appropriately.  Over the years I’ve watched thousands of unchurched people walk out of those services unchanged.  It’s like there saying “Yep, I know.  So what?”  They wanted the weather report.  The way we presented Easter feels to them like a traffic report for another city.

That’s why I get all worked up before Christmas and Easter.  To simply tell them isn’t enough for most unchurched people.  And you can go all spiritual on me and tell me that the word will not return empty (I get that and actually believe it), but the truth is 98% of them won’t be back…at least until the next major holiday or the next tragedy in their life or until someone invites them and helps explain why it’s relevant.

Here’s what I’m trying to focus on more and more as we head into major holidays. I think our job is tell them not only what happened, but why it matters.  I think our goal is to tell them why they can’t just leave and not respond.  When you answer why, you establish relevance. You help people bridge the gap between what they know about and what they care about.

We shot Easter Sunday’s message this year for Connexus in a graveyard and talked about how you can dismiss an idea, a fact or a concept, but it’s pretty hard to dismiss a dead man walking.  When a dead man is walking and making claims about life and God and you, you can’t just sit there.  You have the respond.  You have to react.   And we’re going to give people a chance to respond…we’re going to try to help people get to a decision point.  Everything from the opener in the service, the worship leader’s bridges, to song choice to the message itself and the way we pray can help people understand why what we’re celebrating is relevant.

I don’t think we’ve cracked the code by any stretch of the imagination.  But I think the church has to do better on major holidays.

What do you think?  What’s helped you?

This study profiled by CNN last week suggests religion might be extinct in Canada within 100 years.

More and more people are affiliating themselves with the category called “unaffiliated”, which I think is the technical term for ‘no thanks’ when it comes to Christianity and religion.

The study doesn’t surprise me, but it does distress me.  I thought we’d unpack this on the blog a bit – the implications are huge.

When tough things occur,  I’ve seen church leaders approach the issue from four principal positions.

Blame

Justification

Resignation

Repentance

The blamers deride minor hockey games on Sunday, Sunday shopping, the kids who left who just weren’t loyal, the government, the education system, the growth of the ‘mega-church’ (which is a bit of a misnomer in Canada anyway) – essentially anything and anyone that moves who isn’t them.  The future is rarely built by people who blame.

The justifiers explain why our demise is inevitable.  They sound a lot like the blamers, but they’re not as angry.  It’s not their fault that the church is dying – clearly it’s someone else’s issue.  And there’s a thousand reasons for it (none of which are their fault in case you didn’t catch that).  They’ll tell you all about it.

The resigners are the least passionate of the bunch.  The demise of the church, while regrettable, is almost logical.  In a post-modern, post-Christian, pluralistic world, the church really can’t compete.  Perhaps it’s just best to plan a quiet, dignified funeral.

The repenters are the rarest group.  They see the problems and the cultural shift, but rather than point blame outward, they assign responsibility inward.  They confess the sins not of the culture, but of the church.  Or more specifically, they confess their own sins.  They realize the problem is that when we have a sacred truth that isn’t connecting, the problem isn’t with the sacred truth, but with those who bear it.  They pray, fast, weep and then they do something even more remarkable.  They change.  They reform.  Did you ever notice the Reformation started first with confessing the sins of the existing church? People repented and out of repentance came renewal.

When you adopt the mantra of repentance, anything and everything can change.  If you start with repentance, it never ends there.  Blaming, justifying and resigning yourself to things ends possibilities.  Repenting releases fresh possibilities.  I believe a church that confesses will be around 100 years from.  They might even reverse the trend completely.

What do you think the predominant response of the church has been to our pending demise?  What would it take to move more leaders to repentance?

I’d love to hear what some of your key insights for 2010 were.  Here’s a random sharing of some of the best learnings I’ve had in 2010:

• What people get involved in becomes the mission. My friend Fred Stewart shared this with me in the spring as we were reviewing a talk I was doing. It resonated so deeply. It’s why people leave your church when their favourite program shuts down.  They’ve lost their place.  They’ve misconstrued the mission.  It made my commitment to a simple model of church even stronger. If people only get involved in things that are core to the mission, then you end up with a much greater chance of seeing a missionally aligned community.

• You have less time than you think, but more influence that you realize. We sent my oldest son off to college in September.  To say it flew is an understatement.  Obviously our relationship is still influential – even critical in his life and ours.  And despite all my miscues as a parent, my 18 years of shaping him and influencing him at home is complete.  For better or worse, we’ve shaped him.  I had less time than I thought, and more influence than I realized.

• There is a world of difference in trusting God for something, and simply trusting God. I know that’s not new, but it really hit home this year.  In fact, I’m preaching a series around it in spring 2011 called “Three Letter Word”.  The three letter word?  ”For”.  If I could stop trusting God for things and simply trust God, where would my relationship with God be?  I’m anxious to find out.

I’ll share some more tomorrow.

What did you learn this year that stuck with you?  What are you learning about the things I’ve shared above?

I’ve been married in real life to the same amazing woman for twenty years.  We met in person, not online.  Only eight people were on the internet in 1990.   We weren’t two of them.

But this weekend I’m preaching on the difference between on-line and real life relationship as part of our Like Me series. You can watch parts one and two of the series here on on iTunes (search Connexus Community Church).   I have some thoughts based on my experience with social media, some resources I’ve read and of course, what the Bible teaches about relationships.  But I’ve never been in an online relationship.

Many of you have. I’d to hear from some of you who have fallen in love on line.  Those of you who met and stayed together or met and broke up.

Some questions:

• What got you into the relationship?
• What was enticing about the relationship?
• What was difficult?
• How hard was the transition from on-line to real life?
• What would you do differently?
• What do you regret?

You can answer all or just one of the questions.  All comments are moderated, but if you want to use an assumed name…I’ll allow that on this post.

Thanks!

- Carey

PS.  The promised blog post on reaching people who don’t go to church is still on its way.  Thanks for your patience!

So I feel like I emerged from a cave yesterday when I came out of a five day social media fast.  How do I feel?  Like the rest of the world gets around by sports car and I got handed a wagon with a broken wheel and no horse.

My rules were simple:  communicate with people voice to voice or face to face for five days.  I got rid of Facebook and Twitter, and only answered texts and emails with a return voice call, not by keyboard.

I thought it was going to be a great week – I’d be more spiritual.  More time for rich relationships.  Time to deeply reflect.  Mind you, I try to take time like that every week.  But I thought my social media fast would enhance that to the nth degree.

Uh.  No.  Not at all.   It just made everything more difficult and more complicated.  Sign of an addict?  I don’t think so.  Hope not.  Read on and make up your own mind.

Some random learnings:

• It wasn’t that hard not to tweet or update my Facebook status.  I had the urge, but it wasn’t like the response a caffeine addict might have to no coffee.  I could easily last a month or more.
• What I did miss is knowing what was going on in my friends’ lives.  Most of the benefit of social media for me is staying in touch and keeping up on what’s happening in other peoples lives and ministries.  It felt lonely actually, like a bunch of great people had exited my life.
• It was incredibly inconvenient.   I could not get to inbox zero because I couldn’t effectively follow up on everything that came across my inbox or desktop.  Not only was it inconvenient for me, it was very inconvenient for our staff and other colleagues.
• Phone communication isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  When you’re used to communicating with someone via text or direct messages, switching it up to voice mail makes is more complicated. Text based messaging gets sent at the convenience of the sender and read at the convenience of the recipient.  The phone is very intrusive compared to that.
• Good communication rule: communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with.  I decided I would read email but ask people to respond by phone.  I had an auto-responder set up on the gmail explaining my five day fast and asked people to call me instead.  Not many did.  I could be wildly unpopular or it might just be that people pick the channel of communication they want and stick to it.  I did call a few people and we had some fun conversations, but got more voicemails than actual conversations.  Online messaging is FAR more efficient and fun.
• I did have more time reflect and think last week…not much, but some.  But I felt my world got much smaller, and I missed the people who make it larger and richer for their presence.

Conclusions

• I thought the fast would be liberating, clarifying and spiritually uplifting.  Instead, it was mostly inconvenient.
• Social media can lead to narcissism for sure, but I found I wasn’t really missing updating my own status, I was missing every else.  And missing the chance to engage and interact.
• I thought I would be asking everyone to do a media fast in our Like Me series on social media (coming up in November at Connexus).  Maybe a better bottom line is this:  some of us (narcissistic folks etc) need to use social media less, but some of us need to use it more. If you’re not texting, on Facebook or online in any meaningful way, you’re missing a huge part of the conversation.  You’re being left behind.  And people younger than you might not be talking to you at all.  This is just actually the way millions of people communicate now.  You miss it at your own peril.

That’s what I learned.  Ever done a media fast? What was your experience? If you haven’t done one, what do you think you might discover if you did one?

This week I’ve decided to fast from social media (Facebook, Twitter, blog commenting, even email)….actually all forms of online communication.  It’s in preparation for a series we’ve been planning for a long time at Connexus called “Like Me”.  I want to drill down on the implications of what’s happening to human relationships as a result of social media.

The truth is, like so many, I love social media.  But as Shane Hipps and others have pointed out, it’s a double edged sword.  You can be much more selective in where you journey with a person online than you can in a face to face relationship.  We’re calling the final week of the Like Me series “Going All The Way”, because in a real human relationship, you are stuck with someone in their good moments and their bad moments.  Defriending is much more complicated in real life than it is on line.

So for the next five days, I’m not responding to any social media.  Instead, I’m going to have the conversations I would normally have online face-to-face or voice-to-voice.  No keyboards…just conversation.

The point?  I want to see what impact it has on me after five days.

How about you? What impact do you think social media is having on you, positively or negatively?  I’ll return next Saturday and would love to see what you think.  In the meantime, call me or drop by!

I love social media. I love life online.  But I’m worried about what it might be doing the souls of some leaders.

Does closely following the lives of other leaders threaten to erode the unique footprint of your leadership?

Let me explain.  Fifteen years ago, most of us couldn’t closely track other leaders.  If you wanted to know about a leader, you had to buy a book or attend a conference.  You might get to their website on a good day when the dial up connection was strong.

Now, through Facebook, Twitter, podcasts and blogs you can follow anyone you want to and everyone you want to and know pretty much anything you want to about them.  So many of us follow dozens, hundred or thousands of leaders: from Erwin McManus to Andy Stanley to Reggie Joiner to Donald Miller to Perry Noble and more.  We do it because we admire them and appreciate them. That in itself isn’t a problem.

The problem shows up here: It’s hard not to imitate the people we admire.  But how much energy do we squander as leaders trying to imitate someone we will never be?

How many leaders mismanage time and energy trying too hard to imitate the communication of Andy Stanley, the creativity of Erwin McManus, the innovation of Reggie Joiner or the poignancy of Donald Miller when they should be developing their own gifts, loving their own people and working hard at building the ministry God has given them?

In all likelihood, the people you admire most never set out in life trying to be someone else.  They made a mark by developing the gifting God gave them.

Don’t get me wrong: I love learning from the best of the best (and I track with lots of people).  But healthy learning encourages us to get better at what we’re doing.  Unhealthy imitation makes us wish we were doing what they’re doing.  It can also lead to a cascade of negative thoughts like “How come I can’t communicate like _________?  Why can’t I be as clever as _________?”   Just enough for the enemy to squander potential.

God will never ask me or you why we weren’t more like Andy Stanley.  He won’t ask us why we didn’t write more like Donald Miller or have as many brilliant ideas as my good friend Reggie Joiner.  Here’s the question God might ask us:  why didn’t you develop more of the unique gifting and talents I gave you? After all, God will never hold you accountable for something he never gave you.

Do your social media habit feed an unhealthy desire to be someone God never created us to be?  What would happen if you diverted half the attention you give to others into asking God what he would love for you to do? What are some other pitfalls you see of social media and instant access to people we admire?

Apologies are difficult.  Those of us who have been given even a tiny bit of authority are often reluctant to apologize to those we work with. Isn’t apologizing a sign of weakness?  Won’t people see through you?  Aren’t leaders supposed to have all the answers, to always be right?   Well no, but we feel that pressure anyway.

The problem is that those of us who are in charge have an advantage: we (usually correctly) suspect the person under our authority will be hesitant to correct us, challenge us or confront us.  We could fire them, hold it against them and, well, we’re the boss and they’re not.

Don’t be that way.  Just don’t.  All of us have worked for someone at some point who stole our ideas, took the credit, made poor calls and refused to accept the responsibility, and who – even when it was clearly due – would never apologize.  I don’t want to be that guy.  And I don’t want to work for that guy.  Nor does anyone.

Case in point:  today at our weekly staff meeting I apologized to someone who reports to me.  At Connexus we produce ‘title packages’ for our series.  The title package for the current series arrived a bit later than we’re used to, and quick final view left me unsatisfied.  At the time, I said I thought the video package lacked punch…it didn’t make the point we were hoping to make. I loved the basic design and concept…just wasn’t sure it told the story we wanted it to tell.  Our Service Progamming Director,  Justin, who is a year into his job, recently out of college and who designed the package, liked it the way it was.  I trusted my judgment on this one, not his.  But we didn’t have time to remake it and we ran it as is.

Turns out…I was dead wrong.  He was right on in his judgment.

We ran it ‘as is’ and I’m so glad we did.  In almost three years of weekend services, it is the only time I’ve ever heard people respond to a title package.  They loved it.  They laughed out loud, started conversations with friends next to them and buzzed about it after the service. It just worked.  (Check it out for yourself here.)  He called it.  I missed it. And I was wrong.

As a leader, I had a choice.  I could have pretended it was my idea all along, (nah, that’s not me).  But I could have ignored it…pretended it didn’t happen.  Or pulled him aside private and apologized.  But since I had said I didn’t like it when others were present, I felt I needed to apologize when those same people (and in this case, more) were present.  So I did…I told our staff how off my judgment was and what a great call he made on it.  I apologized for getting in the way of a great decision.  It’s pretty kindergarten if you think about it, but it actually doesn’t happen enough in leadership.

It should though.  The more freely we apologize as leaders when we’re wrong, the more we:

• Give permission to release the best ideas in the organization (they usually aren’t the bosses’ anyway)
• Create a culture where people can apologize and forgive freely
• Foster trust
• Prevent the need for the people under us to “vent” to others
• Remind ourselves that we are hardly the smartest, best or brightest people in our organization

Leaders:  what have you learned about apologizing?   And for all of us, what are some of your worst/best moments when it comes to apologies?