I am taking a break from blogging until February 1st.
Until then can I suggest an AMAZING new book on prayer that you MUST read?
It’s called The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson.
From the first page until the last its packed with profound insights and practical tips to take your prayer life to places its never gone before.
Buy a copy and share it with those you love.
It will change the way you pray.
I promise.
Here’s a picture of what REMAINS of my personal pastoral library…
A few months ago I gave away of 3/4 of the books in my personal library. Books are the lifeblood of any spiritual leader, so I was pretty surprised during a recent prayer time when I felt the spirit’s nudge to “clean this place out.” And yes, this is what was LEFT.
I believe the nudge to clean my library out was more than an effort on God’s part to simply create more shelf space. I’m pretty sure it was the spirit’s prompting to take stock of the ideas that had influenced me up to this point in my journey and, to begin, both literally and metaphorically, to make room for new ideas.
I approached each book in my library with one simple question: “Has this book so profoundly influenced me that I can see myself reading it 2-3 more times and sharing it with other people?” If the answer was no, it went into the “give away” pile.
Here were a few things that crossed my mind as I did this:
1. Besides biblical study and language resources, I quickly learned that I had purchased two kinds of books over the years: timeless books and quick-fix how-to books. Books I’d throw in the timeless category were books like Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald and Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis; both books that continue to speak into my life years after they were written. Quick-fix how-to books all focused on the latest church fad to come down the pike.
I think two of the most dangerous influences any church faces are: (1) Spiritual leaders who have lost their first love and (2) the onslaught of church hoppers.
Having wavered before in my faith and flirted with losing my first love with God, I know firsthand how dangerous the first one can be. But that’s something we spiritual leaders have control over. The second one…not so much.
I call church hoppers “connoisseurs of fine churches” because they’re continually on a quest to find the church that is spiritual enough for them, will endlessly engorge themselves on the “services” of the churches they attend, and always have a critical word to say afterwards whenever “church” doesn’t meet their standards.
Here are seven things we try to do to change their mindset (or keep their butts from staying in the seats of our church for very long):
1. Ask church hoppers to commit to tithing and serving
That usually takes care of it right there. Because church hoppers are consumers by nature, anything that strikes them as sacrificial will surely turn them off. As a ministry friend of mine used to tell me, “At the first sign of trouble, raise the bar.”
2. Tell your people to stop inviting their Christian friends to church
Right before Christmas I may have been one of the only pastors out there that stood up and said, “Please DO NOT invite your Christian friends to our Christmas services. We want other churches in the area to know we have their back. Also, we want to grow this church through conversion growth, not transfer growth. Let’s pack this place out with people who are keeping God up at night because they are living far from him.” I strategically do that 3-4 times a year.
3. Preach short sermons
Howard Hendricks used to say, “Keep them longing, not loathing.” I buy into that philosophy. I try to speak anywhere between 24 and 28 minutes max (my staff will read this and say PLEASE 
…okay, I TRY to preach 24-28 minutes!). Shorter sermons drive church hoppers nuts because they want to “be fed” (i.e. long expository sermons). I’m not interested in “feeding people” unless they are in the early stages of their spiritual journey. Church hoppers as well as Christians further along their spiritual journey need to be feeding themselves. Anything I provide on Sunday morning is in addition to their own self-directed spiritual nourishment. One point, one scripture, 24-28 minutes, that’s it.
4. Don’t sing 9,345 worship songs
Church hoppers, 9 times out of 10, came from a church background where they were taught to need 5-6 worship songs to really connect with God. That needs to be re-taught. Where did we get the idea that worship = singing anyway? That’s part of it, but only a small part of it. Every part of the service is worship. Every part of my life is worship. Limiting your worship songs except for occasions when you are led by God to expand the repertoire forces people to recognize this or leave.
5. Keep your services short
We keep our services to 55 minutes, period. That’s it. That’s because we believe “church” is more than the official service that happens on a Sunday morning. It’s what happens before, during and afterwards. It’s what happens during the week when 2-3 gather. Experiencing a well-conceived 55 minute service to the church hopper is like spending your whole life overeating and then sitting down for a healthy, well-proportioned meal that someone else serves you (“Hey, I’m used to eating 16 pieces of fried chicken! Why do I only get two?”).
If forced to make the decision, our church from day one has decided that we will offend the self-seeking Christian before the spiritually seeking non-Christian.
I personally believe you can only strategically choose to offend one of those groups.
Some churches are purposely designed to offend the spiritually seeking non-Christian, whether they describe it that way or not. The music they sing, the way they dress, the decorum of their buildings, the vibe they create on Sunday morning, and most important – what they define as a “win” missionally – all combine to create an atmosphere that repels the very people Jesus came to die for.
Other churches believe it’s absolutely critical to nurture the believers in the church into radically sold-out world-changing followers of Jesus, but also believe Christ-followers are called to serve. Jesus taught in Mark 10:43-44,
“Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”
Christians always define those verses as being willing to do crappy stuff for other Christians without getting any accolades. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I think what Jesus was driving at was that he wanted his followers to purposely choose to not get their own way, to put their own wishes and interests and needs aside in the desire to further his kingdom. Therein lays the motivation to offend the Christian before the non-Christian: Christians are supposed to be willing to be offended.
Show me someone who keeps whining about not singing enough worship songs, or “being fed,” or doesn’t want the church to focus on evangelism, or missions, or feeding the poor, or singing secular music on Sunday, and I’ll show you a freakishly immature Christian. The sad, and sometimes scary thing, is that 99 times out of 100 they simply don’t realize it.
It’s one thing for a Christian to say, “Hey, I’m giving my life away for the lost and poor, but I’ve got a lot of growing to do. Can you help me?”
A question that’s been bugging me lately is, “What precedes temperance?”
Our church just finished the second week of a series called, “Do This, Not That.” It’s a series on the seven deadly sins – a collection of sins that have proved to be the most troublesome for Christians to eradicate from their lives.
The solution, Galatians 5 and other scriptures exhort us, is to focus on cultivating a corresponding virtue that ultimately supplants the vice we struggle with.
This past Sunday we discussed the deadly sin of gluttony, and how focusing on temperance (i.e. “tempering our impulses to spend, eat, speak rashly, whatever) cultivates the spiritual strength to withstand all forms of gluttony.
But what precedes temperance? When you see someone who oozes self-control, what causes them to be so? What gives them the inner drive to control themselves?
The fantastic website Letters of Note recently shared the following post:
“In November of 1964, fearful of his connection to the Communist Party through Stanley Levison, the FBI anonymously sent Martin Luther King the following threatening letter, along with a cassette that contained the fruits of a 9 month surveillance project — allegedly incriminating audio recordings of King with women in various hotel rooms — headed by William C. Sullivan. A decade later, Sullivan told investigators that they had simply wanted King to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King, on the other hand, had seen the letter as an invitation to take his own life.”
Read the letter and let me know what you think.
Despite his foibles (like King David, Soloman, and the multitudes of women and men in the Bible that blew it sexually yet still made an incredible impact on the lives of those around them), MLK was a prophet, reformer, preacher, and devoted man of God worth honoring today.
Especially when you consider what he endured to help so many…
Image courtesy of Paul Wolf.
Transcript
KING,
In view of your low grade… I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII…
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God… Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.
I found this video while doing research for an upcoming mission trip to India. Our church is adopting an unreached people group through our partnership with Team Expansion, so I’ve been cruising the net trying to get a better feel for Indian culture.
Here are 5 reasons I’m adding this to my bucket list:
Enjoy!
(if you can’t view the video in your reader click HERE)
Every time we turn around there’s a new book/pastor/church/sermon/bible study/seminar or conference telling us that we are wholly inadequate in our commitment to Christ.
The formula is always the same:
Who wouldn’t feel fat, lazy, shallowly committed and innately self-centered after being bludgeoned by that?
The problem is American Christians eat this stuff up, and it has nothing to do with Jesus; it’s all about the formula.
Imagine you became a little league baseball coach and were tasked with taking over a team of fourth-graders and turning them into MLB superstars. What would you say to them to motivate them?
My hunch is you’d be tempted to…
And the fourth graders would eat it up.
But would they actually get any better because of it?
Of course not.
Why?
“Acedia is like morphine. You know the pain is there, yet can’t rouse yourself to give a damn.” – Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me
Throughout church history, those tasked with leading men and women in personal transformation quickly realized there were seven persistent sins that continually set traps for Christ followers.
Over time those sins became known as “the seven deadly sins.”
The key to overcoming each deadly sin is not by focusing on the sin itself, but by practicing a corresponding virtue which over time supplants the vice we each struggle with.
In short, spiritual growth comes by “doing this, not that.”
This past Sunday we kicked off DO THIS, NOT THAT by talking about spiritual apathy, or what the ancients called “Acedia,” which in Greek literally meant “not caring.”
Last night I had a dream that I was sitting in the back seat of a car driving around the streets of 1950ish Clearwater, Florida.
Everything I saw in my dream had a yellowish tint to it, like the way the Cohen brothers filmed the movie “No Country For Old Men.”
At some point in my dream the scene shot changed and I saw who was driving the car. It was Francis Chan (or it could have been Daniel Dae Kim from Hawaii Five-O…I don’t know…Francis is bald, right? Daniel has hair…well this guy had hair…but looked like Francis Chan).
Anyway, Francis Chan was driving the car, in my dream, with a wig on, trying to look like Daniel Dae Kim.
Whoever it was, we had that “wiser older Master Po Asian guy / young David Carradine grasshopper thing from Kung Fu” going on in the back of an old Studebaker cruising the streets pasts palm trees and shiny new houses.
At some point Francis looks in the rear-view mirror and says, “I don’t see it. Brian, I don’t see the obedience in your life.”
