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We are 3 Sundays away from our 2nd sneak preview service and I can’t wait. In all that needs to be done in a church launch I have been distracted from some important tasks. Some of these has been cultivating and expanding our vision, planning the series for the rest of the year, and overall leadership development. Now I am distracted no more.

Handing over the technical aspects of the church to Kevin was one of the best decisions I could have made, for him as well as me. It is expanding his leadership skills as well as freeing me up to fulfill my responsibilities. I had a plan to get us to launch and a little beyond but now God has given me a greater and more far reaching plan. In a future post I will share some of the things God has had me working on.

Have you ever been speaking and realized something just didn’t sound right? The more you think about it you realize what didn’t sound right was you? We all make mistakes or slip at some point in our speaking. Many times we leave our church services feeling defeated and ashamed. Well, this morning my favorite raido station reminded me of one of those such instances in Wolf Blitzer’s career. I haven’t figured out how to embed with WordPress yet so here is the clip.

So the next time you have a case of “foot-in-mouth” syndrome don’t feel so bad. It just gives you something to work on. And extra preperation doesn’t hurt either.

Irrelevance is one of the major claims made against the church today. Worse yet is that when the church is determined to be irrelevant, then God and His Word are perceived to be the same. “How does that apply to me? How can something that happened thousands of years ago help my marriage?” are just a couple of questions asked by those in a typical church service. Conclusions have been drawn about God’s Word without a true consideration of its value. What a terrible injustice. What a despicable crime. Shame on…US. You heard me right. Its our fault they can’t find natural significance in spiritual things, its mine and its yours. When we fail to communicate in a relevant way, we force the conclusion that what we are talking about doesn’t apply to them. And frankly, that is just plain irreverent.

Irreverence, when speaking of communication, is just a fancy way of saying that we didn’t consider our listener. We created a stunning lesson, a series of Greek and Hebrew words and some history that would make your eyes cross. The only problem…your audience doesn’t care. Why should they? This is interesting stuff to you but most likely they have real problems that need real answers and the measurements of the Ark of the Covenant don’t seem to fit the bill.In my limited training for public speaking I was taught something very obvious and yet very profound. So much so most people miss it until its pointed out to them. In every speaking situation there are three elements: the speaker, the message and the audience. Where we place the priority is where things get messed up. If I were to ask you which element is the most important, what would you say? If you said the message you would be…wrong. We know as Christians that we have the most important message of all, but if there is no one to speak it what good does it do? Most of you perhaps fell for my trap and have immediately changed your answer to the speaker. If you did you would be wrong again. In fact, the speaker is the least important. God will use anyone no matter how talented or untalented they may be. The most important element in any speaking situation is the audience.

Here is probably the most well known verse in the Bible: “For God so loved the world (the audience), He gave His only begotten Son (the message), that whoever (the audience) believes in Him (the message) should not perish but have everlasting life.” You might say after reading this that it appears that the message is just as important as the audience. I can see why you would say that, but consider this: God loved the audience so much that He gave up His message for them. Most of us need to learn to give up the message for our audience. We may have the coolest presentation and the best facts, but if we are not considering the listener, then we are not communicating the gospel.

On my way to home from work today a friend posed a very interesting question. Although I didn’t get a chance to discuss where the question came from it did get me thinking. I would love to hear you thoughts on the topic so please leave comments. If you are ready, here we go.

We all know that society is constantly changing. Things that were at one time completely unacceptable are now the norm. Even in the church, things that were not tolerated among leaders are now overlooked. One of these issues is made more prevalent with the recent marriage amendment that many States have been voting on. So with these thoughts in mind I would like to share a scenario with you and see what some of you think about it. Church leaders are going to have to face this soon enough so why not start the dialog now.

Let’s put ourselves several years into the future. Perhaps most States, if not all, have voted against the marriage amendment thus making same-sex marriages a regular occurrence. Now we turn to the church. One of these couples have been attending for sometime in their search for God. They have been married for several years and have a couple of kids that they have been raising as well. They soon enter into a relationship with Christ. Here is where things get messy. What is the stance of the church? We know what the bible says about the issue of homosexuality but things have become a little more complicated. This particular couple has kids who are dependent upon them. So again I ask, what is the stance of the church?

I really don’t believe there are any easy answers to this topic but I would like see what others are thinking.

Updated 1/25/07: I realized this morning that many may not want to discuss this is a public forum so if you would like to discuss it in a more protected enviroment please let me know.

I just finished reading and article from the Barna Group. It was the 12 Most  Significant Religious Findings from 2006 Surveys. I have to say, I already new the finding but reading them was quite disturbing. Especially the part about how church attendance is on the increase and yet the actual importance of people’s faith to their lives is decreasing; as well as the concept of holiness.

There is hope though. The 4th finding that Barna makes is concerning Faith Revolutionaries. These are the ones who are integrating God and faith into every area of their lives. What is the climate of your church? Are you ready for a revolution? I know I am.

There are many different philosophies and models for starting a church but I can’t speak experientially on all of them. Instead I would love to give you some insight on the one that I am using. I would also like to go on the record saying that there is no one right way to start a church. It takes all different kinds of churches to reach the many different people that exist. It would stand to reason those different churches would have different ways of starting as well. Here is the approach I have taken.

I started with the mentality that I wanted to launch large. It wasn’t about numbers; at least not in the way that most people think of numbers and church. I realized that there were advantages to having a large crowd. One is that most people like to get lost in a crowd in a new environment. They don’t want to be under the microscope. Another reason for launching large is that it creates momentum. People want to come back to a place where something is happening, even is they don’t know what it is. With these and many other things in mind I decided that this was our direction; but what comes next?

There are a lot of things that go into a Sunday morning service. There’s music, children’s church, nursery, greeters, ushers and on and on. How do you provide all these things? In some cases you don’t. You have to decide who your target is and structure you Sunday morning to reach that target. Think of each element as a way of getting people to get one step closer to God. Once you have your list you will then see that it is still way to much to do for a pastor and his family. That’s when you build a launch team.

What is a launch team? It’s a group of people who have signed onto your vision for the church, if only for a short while. These people are the champions of Sunday morning and beyond. They will help you work all the areas you have determined to be important to your target. Some will become permanent fixtures of the vision while many will just be contractors of the faith. Either way these people are crucial to launching large. Since this post has already run way to long I will be following it up with some posts on how to build a launch team and what to do with the once they are there.

Most people who know me know that I absolutely love the show House. While everyone else is captivated by shows like 24 and Lost I am intrigued by the sarcastic styling of a bitter atheistic doctor. I think it’s because I see myself in him. Mostly just the sarcasm part, which I have done well in hiding from this blog so far. Marisa, one of the members of our launch team, bought me the second season as a Christmas present this year. Thanks again by the way. I thought I would give you a bit of wisdom according to the show, House.

House, “If you really want to do something, you do it. You don’t save it for a sound bite.â€?

How many churches claim they want to reach the unchurched but never do anything to accomplish it? How many church slogans are just that, slogans? How many of our core values never make it off the page or website into actual practice? Just something to think about.

A post from Harmony Blog listed the top 20 must read blogs. I actualy just found out about Harmony Blog through Gary Lamb’s post about this list. I only started blogging about a month ago but in that time I have already made most of the ones mentioned regular reads. Leaders must be learners and many of these blogs are a great place to turn so check them out.

A key element to starting a church is getting a clear picture of where you are going and making a plan of how you are going to get there. You may be very passionate. You may have a huge vision. You may even have am amazing strategy but if you can not communicate those things it means nothing.

When I began this journey to start LifePoint Community Church I had all those things; passion, vision and strategy. What I didn’t have was all of it straightened out in my head so that I could communicate it clearly. I heard someone say once that thoughts untangle themselves through the lips and the fingertips. That’s when I made the decision to put it in writing. If I could get it out of my head and onto paper then I could also verbalize it. If I could communicate all that God was giving me then I could plant it into the hearts of others and build a team that got it from the beginning.

What I came up with was a church launch proposal that gives the foundations of what, where, why and when. Whether it helped anyone else is unclear but what it did for me is invaluable. My encouragement to you is take the time to put it in writing. You’ll be glad you did. If you need a head start here is a copy of my church launch proposal. The structure was borrowed from someone else but it should give you something to start with. Happy writing.

Do you remember when we used to all argue which denomination was right? We used our denominations as bragging rights. I’m a Baptist, I’m a Methodist or the slam against all, I’m non-denominational. Of course most the time all we were really doing was pointing out our difference in styles of ministry and claiming ours was better than the others. Our actual doctrines were not all that different, at least not concerning the things that really mattered. And what did it accomplish? It accomplished huge divisions among us Christians. Instead of learning from what each denomination did right we focused on what we felt they were doing wrong. At least those days are gone…right?

We live in a day where most don’t want to be associated with a denomination or at least not advertise it. All you have to do is look at the growing trend in church names to see what I mean. Less and less will you find any reference to a churches denominational affiliation in their name. But that doesn’t mean we are done creating divisions. Our differences are still about style but we have created new labels to point out those differences. What label are you; modern, post-modern, emergent or maybe seeker sensitive? Maybe you prefer “Purpose Driven”? There are many other labels but I think you get my point. We attach ourselves to the label that best represents our preferences and close ourselves off to the great innovations that believers with different labels are discovering. Can’t we all just get along and grow together.

I’m not saying that labels are not useful for descriptive purposes. In fact I like to consider myself an emerging purpose driven modernized post-modern individual who is sensitive to seekers in a post-Christian world…with a cherry on top.