As we wrap up the Orange Conference today, you’ll head home with your lots of intriguing, inspiring and innovative ideas. In fact, every time you mine a website, dig through a blog, read a book, connect with other leaders or attend a conference, that’s what happens.

And the challenge on coming home is this:  you will be tempted to try to implement a few good ideas.  And that’s the problem.

The activity in most churches is often a conglomeration of good ideas.  But in the sea of good ideas, nothing is truly great.  And good isn’t good enough.  One great idea…one great ministry…one great initiative will always beat out a hundred good ones.  The tablet computer market has been around a longer than the iPad.  But it was a handful of reasonable ideas, experiments and good (and not so good) products.  Then came one great product: the iPad.  And it changed everything.  According to most pros, all the competition that has since ensued is just good.

And that’s the problem with good.

What if going home the best thing you could do was to spend six months reconsidering everything you did?  Some of that will be easy.  It doesn’t take a leader to identify what is bad, dead or not working.  That might be easy to get rid of.  But chances are you have more than a few good things at your church.  Why not look at eliminating the merely good so you can do what is great?

At Connexus, where I serve, here are a few ways that plays out:

• We are committed to reaching your families, and we program everything in our weekend service around that – the music, the message and our entire service.  Lots of others attend, but we never apologize for a style of service that is targeted and specific in its objective.
• We don’t do a lot of ‘adult’ programmes (other than community groups) so we can focus on getting people into community groups and focus on building a first rate family ministry.  If you do less, you can accomplish more.
• We say no to almost every initiative that gets proposed for ministry because we don’t want to go off mission or off strategy.  It’s not that the way we do ministry is not the only way to do ministry, it’s just that it’s the way we’re committed to doing ministry.

So as you head home, don’t settle for good.  Do the hard work and get to great.  You won’t be sorry.

I love conference.  The Orange Conference starts today.  It’s simply phenomenal.  5000 leaders from around the world in one place to figure out how churches can help parents and the next generation win.  Last month our team was at Drive.  These are world class opportunities to learn and connect.  They are also, quite frankly, fun.

But they can be challenging too.  Here’s why.  Conferences are almost always run by people who started churches.  They are almost always run by leaders who have met with some considerable ‘success’ in ministry, often with stories of churches that start with 1000 people in attendance in the first year, first month, first minute…you know the story.

The tension is that conferences are attended mostly by people who are trying to transition an existing church or by leaders who are in a start up that attracted hundreds or dozens in it’s first year.   And the reality is the churches most of us go home to have some confusion about ministry approach, future direction, and may have teams that are not all on the same page.

You go to a conference and get completely fired up. You’re excited, inspired.  You dream.  You actually see what could be.

And then you go home.

And a month later you are discouraged, frustrated, angry and a bit heartbroken.  Because what could be is not yet.  And now it looks like it might never be.  It’s not that you don’t want it to be, it’s that you don’t know how.

Three qualities can help us tremendously as we think about what happens when we point the car home or hand the boarding pass to the gate agent:

Courage – What I’m perhaps being called to do is going to take time, resolve and strength that in all likelihood God himself is going to have to give me.

Humility – I came alone or only with a few team members.  I need to go home and humbly work with other people who weren’t in the room to create a shared vision, shared action plan and shared implementation plan.

Perseverance – The work I’m doing is hard.  I need to take a long view and realize I will over estimate what can happen in the course of a week or months, but I will likely underestimate what can happen over the course of a few years.

What helps you turn a vision into reality when you head home?  What’s your biggest struggle in implementing great ideas and new directions when you get home?

By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to the Orange Conference with my wife and some awesome crew from Connexus Church where I serve.

If you’ve ever been to Orange, you know you’re in for a treat. Orange is 5000 of the best leaders in the church today trying to help church leaders and families combine their influences to make a powerful impact on the lives of our sons and daughters.

While Orange is always a crazy busy week, I’ll be posting insights and learnings from the conference.  If you’re not going to be at Orange, you can still watch the main sessions live here.

I’ll be speaking at different times at the conference and would love to connect with you.  Make sure you say hi if you’re in the house.  You can leave questions here in the comments section of my blog or we can continue the conversation on twitter. Either way, I’m looking forward to learning, connecting and being inspired.

How about you?  You going to be there? Will you be watching online?  What do you love most about Orange?  What questions do you have?

I don’t know who said this (I’ve misplaced the source), but I thought it was brilliant:

I don’t mind meetings about the future.  I just don’t like meetings about the past.

I’d never thought about it that way.  Who would really plan their life intentionally around meetings that are about the past?  The more I thought about it…the more I realized the answer is ‘lots of us.”

You meet about the past every time you:

Evaluate without clear changes for the future

Audit a problem simply to assign blame

Focus on what could have been

Discuss lingering issues without moving toward resolution

Dream, but don’t plan to implement (today’s unexecuted dreams become tomorrow’s regrets)

If you were to be completely honest with yourself, how much of your time is spent meeting about the past, not the future?  I’m afraid in many organizations, the percentage is measurable.  In dying organizations, it’s almost every meeting.

I don’t want to meet about the past anymore.  We can discuss it, but only insofar as it leads to a new future.

What have you learned about this?

As we wrap our week on the declining church and what it would take to transform the church, here’s some math to consider.

Anyone who is going to defy the odds and help lead a church that grows and makes a difference is going to need courage.  The math that has helped me involves thinking through the percentages around change.

Whenever you want change, people will oppose it.  Doesn’t matter what it is, people get upset.  The math of opposition looks roughly like this:

10% are deeply opposed

20% are opposed

40% are neutral

20% are open

10% are eager

As a leader, it’s critical you choose which groups you listen to most.  If you have 30% in favour and 30% opposed, doesn’t it make sense to run with the 30% who are in favour?  Additionally, who you run with will help determine who the neutral people side with.  If you side with the early adopters you could have 70% of your church on board. In fact, when the 70% begin to speak up, the 20% who are simply ‘opposed’ and not ‘deeply opposed’ often change their mind – even if it is belatedly.  By choosing who you focus on you can ultimately find 90% buy in.

This will take dedication and leadership because

The people deeply opposed are louder than those who are open and eager for change

The people deeply opposed are angry

The people deeply opposed are demanding

But seriously, are you really going build the future on people with that mindset?  Didn’t think so.  What’s worse, if you continually let the opposition have the floor, those eager for change and open to change will lose hope and likely leave.  They’ll find another leader ready to embrace change.

Now…one last point.  And this is so critical for change.  The math above covers the people inside your organization.  Not those outside.  Let’s say your church has 1,000 people in it, and the community has 100,000 people you are trying to reach.

Those deeply opposed to change represent 10% of your church, but only .001% of your community.

Are you seriously going to let .001% of your community hold the future hostage?  Are you going to sacrifice the 99.99% of people who will eventually embrace good change for the sake of the .001% who won’t?  Didn’t think so.

And there’s your courage.  Now go change.

So if you want your church to be around a decade or two from now, what do you need to do?

My suggestion would be to focus on strategy.  Focusing on strategy will provide the greatest disagreement point among your congregation and the great breakthrough potential.  It might also be the fight of your life.

Let me explain.  Churches for sure need a mission and vision.  And apart from churches undergoing a real theological drift (which we talked about yesterday), most people agree on mission and vision.  We rally around Jesus, God and reaching people.  Very few people inside the church disagree on those points.

What we disagree on is the strategy that will get us there.  Here are some ways strategy plays out in your church:

Choir versus band

Lame bands versus bands outsiders want to hear (sorry, it’s just true)

Insider focus versus outsider focus

Prioritizing ourselves rather than prioritizing others (like children, students and families)

Programs versus steps

Congregational control versus leader empowerment

Preservation versus innovation

Preaching information versus application

I hope you’ll add to this list, but you get the point.  These are among the flash points – the places where you will get serious disagreement.  Which is exactly why you need to go there.  Which is exactly why you need to have the conversation.

It might be the fight of your life, but it might also be the fight that brings life.

I know in my time in leadership, it has been tackling issues like these that have brought progress and helped us reach outsiders at a higher rate than ever before (last year 68% of the growth at Connexus came from people who didn’t regularly attend church).  We’re not there yet and we certainly don’t have it all figured out, but I think tackling these issues have helped us advance the mission significantly.

Tomorrow we’ll wrap up with a post on how to stay motivated through all this transformation. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you!  How about you?  What would you put on the list?

To continue probing the question about the extinction of the church on the blog this week, I wanted to share one sure way to kill your church.

Again, I don’t believe the church itself will die, but I do think yours might (and ours could, if we’re not careful).  Here’s one sure way to kill it:

Change the message, not the method.

When things start to slide in the church, I have seen more than a few churches and even entire denominations decide that the problem is the message.  So they start suggesting that maybe there is more than one way to God other than Jesus.  They doubt the authority of scripture.  They stray from the historic message of Christianity.

I can’t say this strongly enough – that’s a huge mistake.  The problem is not the message of Christianity.  The problem is the method.

Many of these churches change the message but keep the methods of past generations.  They question Jesus while keeping the choir.  They change the message while doing kids’ ministry in a creaky basement with mould in the corners.  They change the message while offering purposeless pot luck dinners that have little to do with the message of Jesus.

The problem isn’t the message – it’s the method.

The message is eternal.  The method is temporal.

The message shouldn’t change.  The method should.

Every growing church that is reaching unchurched people that I am personally aware of holds the message sacred but is incredibly innovative in the methods they use. Their services, student ministry, kids’ ministry, programming and even facilities look little like church twenty years ago.  The way the message is delivered has changed too.   But the message itself?  Pretty much bang on orthodox Christianity.

Here’s what I believe: churches that change the message don’t grow because they have nothing to say.

Sometimes I think that for some in this generation, the method has become more sacred than the message.

The best way  to kill your church is to change the message and hang on to an outdated method.  If you want to grow it, start by trying the opposite:

Change the method, not the message.

If Christianity is declining in influence, which it arguably is in Canada, the larger question is – will it become extinct?

It’s been engaging to watch the response to Monday’s blog post (lots of off line dialogue and some great stuff on my Facebook page – love to hear more!).   But here’s the bottom line.  The church won’t die.  And here’s why.  It’s Christ’s church, not ours.  Jesus has far more invested in it than we do and we have been promised in scripture that even the gates of hell won’t prevail against it.

But here’s what’s equally true.

While the church itself won’t die, yours might.

While the church will always exist, God might simply choose not to use you to lead it.

This has happened more than a few times before.  Witness the 19th century church buildings that used to house thousands of worshippers that are now museums or community theaters.  The church itself didn’t die – but their church did.  And that will happen again.

I’m with 2500 church leaders at the Drive Conference today.  This weekend I’ll be with hundreds of church leaders in Canada and a month from now with 5000 leaders at Orange.  And every weekend I’m home at Connexus where we are seeing 68% of our growth come from people who didn’t previously attend church. The church is not dead.  You can actually see the church that will be taking shape in front of our eyes today.

Here are some marks of the kind of churches I believe will survive in Canada and the US well into the 22nd century:

They will be Christ-centered.

The truth of scripture will be evident in the lives its members live daily not just in the notes they take on Sunday.

They will use the culture to reach the culture – their music, style of communication and approach will make it easy for a completely unchurched person to access everything and begin following Christ.

They will lead people into authentic community.

They will exist not for themselves, but for the people who aren’t there yet.

They will think more about outsiders than insiders.

They will drop a posture of arrogance and think of others as better than themselves.

They will be relentlessly committed to sharing the unchanging truth of God with an ever-changing culture.

They will be far more selfless than the last generation of Christians

When you have people living this way, the church won’t die.  I believe it will flourish.

Those of some of my thoughts about the church that will be here decades from now.  What would you add?  What do you see?

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?