Author: esschurch

Episode 022: The Purpose of Sunday

Sundays come around with an alarming regularity. As we plan for our weekly worship services, the constancy of the calendar can inhibit us from stopping to focus on the lens through which we plan or what our end-goal should be. In this conversation, we talk about the factors we consider as we plan worship services that allow people to meet Jesus, to be formed into disciples, and to encounter God.

 

Mission, formation, and encounter are the three broad approaches to worship… I’m of the opinion that we are meant to hold all three of these together in tension…

 

Each service should have elements of all three but there are different elements for each service… for instance, I know that on Easter and Christmas Eve we will be filled with guests… so I need to have a service that day that emphasizes that…

 

At the end of 52 weeks, we should be able to look at our worship and see all three in healthy tension and balance throughout the church year…

 

If you want to make your team a bit uncomfortable, take a look at the songs you’ve sung over the last year and ask this question, “If people’s view of God was formed solely by these songs, what kind of God is that…have we said anything about who he is or just how we feel about him?”

 

By doing weekly communion, it’s made us as preachers preach towards the Table… the end of the sermon is turning to God and asking for his grace again… the gospel proclamation moment reaches the lost, forms the faithful, and creates encounter—somehow, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus meets us when we come to the Table…

 

Singing, sermon, sacraments, and prayers should mirror all three of these things… to ignore any of them is to do so at your peril… embracing them helps the church come to maturity…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • What do you think about the “mission, formation, encounter” grid? Would you add any?
  • Which of the three does your church do best? Worst? Why?
  • What can you do to grow in a balanced approach to worship?

 

 

RESOURCES

Andy Stanley – Deep and Wide

James K. A. Smith – Desiring the Kingdom

Glenn Packiam – Discover the Mystery of Faith

Episode 021: Healthy Transitions

Transition is something that every church staff will experience. What matters is how those transitions take place. In this conversation, we discuss how to facilitate and enact healthy transitions.

 

Transitions can be beautiful if we’ll embrace them… when I arrived at New Life, I arrived in a healthy condition [because of how I was sent]…

 

A lot of times, transitions get messy when people arrive with a predetermined future… but when you come openhanded, you give people a chance to send you into the next place…

 

No one should be punished for exploring other opportunities… if you’re a senior pastor, you have to lead the way in this way…

 

I have found that the greatest joy I have as a leader is finding out what’s going on in the hearts of the people on my team… I want to call that out so that it manifests for the greater good…

 

If you bring up the fact that you’re thinking about a transition [to your leadership], you’ll be able to transition in a healthy way, or you’ll see that your desire for transition was actually a little bit of boredom and you’ll grow more fond of the ministry you’re doing…

 

It’s important not to stay around too long; once your heart has left an organization, you’re not going to give your best… so agree on a timeline that’s good for you and for the team…

 

The onus is on the leader to create a safe environment for people to share their hearts; the onus is on the young leaders to respect and honor…

 

The church is known more for its divorces than its marriages… in the case of Gateway and New Life, it was more like a wedding… Gateway felt it wasn’t losing a staff member but gaining a family of people in Colorado… 10 and a half years later, I still go back there to speak…

 

When I am willing to send out good leaders, I am sent good leaders… the same way we teach about generosity with resources and time, we need to be generous with leaders…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Is your culture one in which an emerging leader would feel empowered to share about their desire for transition? Why or why not?
  • Are you regularly checking in with members of your team to see whether they are thriving in their current roles? Why or why not?
  • What can you do to create an environment where the emergence of leadership gifts and callings is not threatening but celebrated?

Episode 020: Hiring and Firing

In this conversation, we talk about what we’ve learned about hiring well and how to navigate firing people well, too. Maybe you’re leading a church staff and facing a big decision regarding staffing, or perhaps you’re curious about how a church staff might handle a staffing issue at your church. We hope that this conversation leads to greater health and trust among the staff at your church.

You hire people for where you’re going not where you are… many pastors hire out of a panicked need or a felt burden right in front of them… most of the time, when I’ve hired people from that place, I’ve regretted it…

 

You’re looking for people who can train others… if you want to use the Jesus model, the people that Jesus called close to him were able to multiply others…

 

I have found that character, chemistry, and competency are a good litmus test for the people you are looking to hire… Chemistry is the tricky one… I want to work with friends, with people that I like… when you are shoulder to shoulder doing the hard work of ministry, it is almost impossible to do it with people that you don’t like…

 

We’re not promoting tribalism here… we want diversity… but at the end of the day, we have to enjoy being with one another, even if you look and think differently from one another… the relationship has to be good for both parties…

 

The hardest person to fire in the local church is the guy with high character, who everyone loves, who is just terrible at his job…

 

Don’t keep people in a place where they are not going to flourish… I owe it to them and to the congregation to steward the relationship well…

 

If we remember that people belong to the Lord, then “endings” can be “sendings” where people transition to new opportunities in godly ways…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Do you tend to hire for where you are going, or where you are? Why? How can you adapt your philosophy of hiring?
  • What criteria do you use in your hiring process? What from this podcast challenged you in that regard?
  • Are you stewarding people’s lives and the culture of your team and church well? How can you improve this through your hiring and firing practices?

 

 

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

“Necessary Endings” by Dr. Henry Cloud.

Episode 019: Finding Your Voice In Preaching

In this conversation, Pastors Brady Boyd, Andrew Arndt, Daniel Grothe, and Glenn Packiam (who are all members of the New Life Church teaching team, talk about finding that unique voice that each preacher (or leader) must discover.

The tension is, on the one hand we have to be learners, and yet one the other hand we have to be comfortable with our own personalities…

 

Often when we begin, we find ourselves practicing on templates that have been given to us… the early years are about finding good mentors and people to follow… and at some point down the road you begin to settle into your voice… now, after I’ve done all my study, I always shut the door and say “God, who am I and how does this text live in me…?”

 

The key is finding that place in yourself that needs to be “amplified”… the issue isn’t whether or not you’re learning from others, but whether you’re letting it get deep enough in you is that it comes out of you naturally…

 

You can only really impart who you are, what you’ve lived and embodied in private… public communication has to be birthed from private impartation…

 

There has to be a great amount of humility when we stand up to preach… if we’re not aware of the moment we’re in and the opportunity we’ve been given, we don’t need to be on the stage…

 

All public figures have an idealized self, which can feed our temptation to ignore the darker sides of who we are… Jesus allows us to integrate both sides of who we are and we need to let people see how the grace of God holds all that together… appropriate transparency helps people to see that you are not just an idealized version of yourself…

 

[When it comes to transparency and vulnerability], if you find yourself oversharing from the pulpit, it might mean that you don’t have enough appropriate community around you…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

 

  • On the spectrum of “learning from others” to “settling into your own voice,” where are you right now? Where do you need to grow?
  • What do you find most challenging about this podcast? Why?
  • Are you living deeply enough in God that you have a surplus out of which to share? How can you improve here?
  • On a scale of 1-10, how well are you and your team doing at modeling appropriate vulnerability from the pulpit? Explain why you gave the rating you did.

Episode 018: Developing a Culture of Generosity, Pt 2

How should pastors and churches help people position themselves to embrace generosity? In this conversation, a continuation from the previous episode, Pastors Brady Boyd and Andrew Arndt are joined by Chris Brown (Nationally Syndicated Radio Host of “Life Money Hope”) to answer this question and more.

The biggest revelation I’ve had in dealing with churches is that people are confused about stewardship… when people think about stewardship, they think the church is just trying to get their money…

 

Fundraising and stewardship are not the same thing… stewardship is about managing God’s blessings in God’s way for God’s glory… not just 10% but 100%…

 

We need to teach people to be faithful with the 100%…

 

At the core, this is about financial discipleship… we need to be teaching people not just what to do, but how to do it…

 

It saddens me that the church is an authority in the eyes of the world when it comes to marriage and parenting, but we’re not when it comes to finances… those churches that are taking stewardship seriously are seeing a lot of results…

 

The reason we teach on financial management and stewardship is not so that we can get their money but so that the Lord can get their hearts… we’re trying to teach people to worship the right thing…

 

People don’t give because they’re broke… so if you want to really do this well, people have got to pick up on the fact that this is something for them, not something that you want from them… it’s about trust…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • How good of a job do you think you and your team are doing at helping people think biblically about managing “the 100%” as opposed to just “the 10%” of their resources?
  • What are some improvements you could make to this area of your ministry?
  • Take some time to list 5-6 practical things you could do this year to help bolster the quality of financial discipleship your church. Talk about them with your team.

 

 

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Chris’s Podcast: Life, Money, Hope

stewardshipcentral.org

Episode 017: Developing a Culture of Generosity, Pt 1

Many pastors find it difficult to talk about giving and generosity in their churches, but developing a culture of generosity is essential to Christian living. In this episode, we have a conversation about how pastors can help our churches to embrace generosity.

SHOW NOTES – DEVELOPING A CULTURE OF GENEROSITY PT 1 – 017

 

Talking about money makes me evaluate my motives more than any other topic… I want to make sure that I am asking people to give for the right reasons…

 

At the heart of discipleship is inviting people to transfer allegiance to King Jesus… when you name money, sex, and power, we’re talking about the age-old temptations that have to do with how we orient and order our lives… it gets personal…

 

When worship becomes charitable giving rather than laying our lives on the altar as a living sacrifice, we have lost…

 

Every time I talk about money, I am having to live down the poor behavior of people I have never met… We have to be aware that we are staring in the face of a bad reputation, and the only way to reverse that is by doing the right thing for the right reason for a very long amount of time…

 

When you remember what the church is—the family of God, the household of faith—you can start to compare that to what a family ought to be like… when you are in the family, everyone chips in and contributes their strength…

 

Part of our role is also to help people see giving differently… God is the most generous giver we’ve ever known… the creation is full of excessive gifts that God didn’t need to give… when you understand that the heart of the New Testament is grace, “gift”, then it turns you into someone who becomes like God… you become a giver…

 

I’ve learned not to be ashamed or embarrassed to talk to people with finances about opportunities to give… but the relationship has to be based on shared trust and mutual love and respect, and if you just see them as a pocketbook, you will never gave their love or trust…

 

 

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

– Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability: http://www.ecfa.org/

– Henri Nouwen: A Spirituality of Fundraising

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • What challenges have you experienced in talking about stewardship to your church?
  • Where do you need to develop a larger “frame” for talking about stewardship?
  • On a scale of 1-10, how well have you talked about stewardship in terms of biblical, kingdom mission? Why did you give yourself that rating?

Episode 016: Mental Health and the Local Church

As we launch the second season of the Essential Church Podcast, we sat down with Kay Warren and Tommy Hilliker to talk about the Church’s role in serving those facing mental illness.

 

One study showed that 71% percent of clergy do not feel prepared or equipped to handle a mental health crisis… it’s not really talked about in Bible college or seminary…

 

Reducing the stigma starts with the value: What are we going to be known for in our community as a church? At Saddleback, we want to be known as a church that cares…

 

Half of all mental illness shows signs by the age of 14 and 75% by age 24… so when parents are looking at their kids and they notice behavior changes, they need to pay attention to that…

 

In the church we’ve been too quick to call those behavior problems or blame the parents, and all that does is perpetuate the shame…

 

When it comes to suicide prevention, parents are terrified that if they bring it up with their kids for fear that they will plant the idea in their child’s mine… that has actually proven not to be the case… when you actually ask the question, kids are usually relieved…

 

We’re not usually very good at helping our kids articulate their feelings… make a list of “feeling words” and give them to your kids…

 

It’s almost like mining for gold with your kids… we have to work hard to help them talk about their emotions and feelings…

 

We don’t wait until people are in stage 4 cancer to help people… the earlier we address mental illness, the better…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

1 – Do you and your team feel prepared to help people struggling with mental illness? Why or why not?

2 – To what extent is the culture of your team, church, or family safe for people to admit their mental health struggles?

3 – What can you do to better equip yourself, your team, and your church to identify mental illness when it manifests and lend a helping hand?

 

RESOURCES

National Alliance on Mental Illness – https://www.nami.org/

Mental Health First Aid – https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/

http://kaywarren.com/

Episode 015: Building Bridges

In this week’s podcast, we take a listen to a recent radio story that tells the story of our recent merger with Iglesia Nueva Vida, a local Spanish-speaking congregation in our city, and now the newest part of the New Life Church family.

 

EPISODE 015 – BUILDING BRIDGES – SHOW NOTES

 

On a macro-level, New Life Church was making a prophetic pronouncement that the Church was going to show the world how to live together…

 

The body of Christ has the ability to show a very divided world how to live together…

 

The Scriptures describe the Spirit as the great unifier of the human race… the church was birthed in a diversified world… and it was the Holy Spirit who was the great unifier…

 

The reason we are so divided is because of a noticeable lack of the Holy Spirit in our lives…

 

When you welcome the Holy Spirit into your church, do not be surprised if he asks you to live alongside people who are different from you… the Holy Spirit is a bridge-builder…

 

When people take a step toward one another and begin to love other human beings, skin color and racial differences begin to melt away and you begin to see the humanity in each other…

 

If the embodiment of the gospel is an earth-to-heaven experience, we should start seeing signposts, we should start seeing heaven being fleshed out among us, so we have to figure out a way for brothers and sisters to worship together…

 

If we’re in the city for the sake of the city, then we need to pastor the entire city… My question for pastors is: are you concerned with every neighborhood in your city?

 

Find out what the poor churches in your city are doing well, and lend them your strength… we weren’t out looking for merger opportunities, but for partners…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Do you see the Holy Spirit as the great unifier? What evidence is there in your church culture of that conviction?
  • How have you sensed the Spirit nudging you out of your comfort zone into relationship with others who are different from you? What steps can you take?
  • What can you do to grow in your concern for the whole city, and not just your neighborhood?

 

Episode 014: Avoiding Cynicism in Ministry

As leaders in the local church, we inevitably encounter criticism from within our congregations and from the outside world. In this week’s conversation, we talk about some ways of addressing this criticism in a Godly way, as well as some ways to protect ourselves from encountering criticism unnecessarily.

 

Episode 014 – Avoiding Cynicism in Ministry – SHOW NOTES

 

There is an ounce of truth in every pound of criticism…I’ve learned over the years that if I keep hearing consistent criticism…there’s probably some truth in it…

 

The vocation we have chosen opens us up to a lot of criticism…pastors need to find a group of trusted friends [to help them discern the truth]…

 

Social media is a modern calamity for pastors…it gives people the ability to immediately criticize and vocalize their discontent…

 

One of the things I’ve learned is that there are certain times in my week when I need to shut down social media…pastors need to be disciplined to stay away from the vitriol of social media…

 

There’s a time to be a shepherd of the sheep…I do not respond to personal attacks out of the pulpit, but I will get up and defend the church…

 

Find the truth in every part of criticism, don’t immediately dismiss it; surround yourself with life-giving people; and honor the Sabbath, make sure you are completely filled up with the presence of Jesus when you get up to preach…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • How are you doing with responding to criticism?
  • Who are your trusted friends who can help you discern the truth in criticism?
  • When are you most vulnerable to criticism? What can you do to become more disciplined?

Episode 013: Developing Ministry with the Hurting

EPISODE 013 – SHOW NOTES – DEVELOPING MINISTRY WITH THE HURTING

For this week’s podcast, we were joined by Matthew Ayers, CEO of Dream Centers of Colorado Springs to talk about how the local church can lead the way in serving the most vulnerable people in their cities.

 

Churches are notoriously bad listeners… the Christian community in America needs to do a better job of asking better questions and listening to the city’s response, and then stepping to the front of the line to meet those needs…

 

It was amazing to me how much good work was happening in our city that we didn’t know about… when we began to explore the areas of pain in our city, we began to unearth some amazing ministries…

 

The early church had a commitment to care for the poor… they took it more seriously than we take it…

 

Most of the people in our church were not aware of the brokenness that was happening in our city… what the Dream Centers brought to New Life was an awareness of the poor… now that they know, I don’t have any trouble motivating them to get involved…

 

The senior pastor of the church has to carry this in a deep way or it will become just a little project on the side…

 

I’ve discovered that this has become a discipleship mechanism for us… people are discovering that they can use what they have to be a blessing to others…

 

The poor are not a problem to be solved but a people to be joined… if you’re not regularly looking into the eyes of the poor, you are probably not seeing Jesus…

 

God’s Spirit is already incredibly active… if we will do the hard work of slowing down, paying attention, talking and listening to others that are already engaged in this way, we have a lot to learn…

 

Any time we get serious about taking care of the poor of our city, you will never lack for resources to do it…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

1 – On a scale of 1-10, how important is caring for the poor to you and your ministry? Why did you give it the number you did?

2 – What can you begin to do to raise this value in your own heart and in the heart of your congregation?

3 – What would it look like for you to begin genuinely listening to the needs of your city?

4 – How can you begin?

 

RESOURCES

Ray Bakke – Theology as Big as a City

Dream Centers of Colorado Springs

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