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Things That Don’t Change!

October 23, 2013 by Mark Woodward

Birthday_candlesToday is my birthday. Not a big deal—I’ve had a lot of them—but still, a birthday is a good day for reflection.

As far as I know, there is only one reference to a birthday in Scripture and that is a mention of Pharaoh’s birthday in the story of Joseph found in Genesis 40:20. It must have been hard for people to even know the day of their birth before access to calendars was common.  Calendars have been around since the beginnings of history. God gave the Jews a calendar in order to celebrate feast days remembering their exodus from Egypt, but apparently the average person didn’t really know the exact day of their birth.

In medieval times, I’ve read that people celebrated the saint’s day for which they were named—which probably was the same as the day of their birth. So, for instance, St. Mark’s feast day is April 25, so that would be my day of celebration each year instead of October 23. If my parents had followed medieval traditions, I’d be named Hilarion after St. Hilarion (291-371), one of the earliest monastics. I think I like Mark better!

I was actually named after a very saintly man named Mark Armstrong, who was one of my dad’s best friends. I met him several times as a boy, but have always known that he was a good man and a devoted Christian.

One of the lists that people like to make on their birthdays is of all the things that have changed since they were born. The frequency of change in our times is almost more than we can keep up with, so one of my thoughts this morning has been to make a list of things that have not changed since I was born. Here are a few of my thoughts:

People are still frantically trying to find security. One of my earliest memories is of the people next door who had built a bomb shelter and stockpiled it with canned goods in case of atomic war. And, yes, I do remember the notorious school drills of hiding under our desks to protect us from bombs. I used to wonder if we had enough aluminum foil to cover all our windows. Today, we are more afraid of economic destruction, but I suspect our sheltering strategies are about as flimsy as those bomb shelters would have been.

People still need to be loved. Today the hot issue is same-sex marriage. As a child the big issue was divorce first, then the question of remarriage. Modern Family is quite different from The Partridge Family or Leave It To Beaver but then not so much in each family members need to belong to others and to love and be loved within that relationship.

Our lives are still framed by birth and death. I was the oldest of five children, so I remember the excitement of the day each of my siblings was born. I remember the birth of younger cousins, and, of course, you never forget the births of your own children—and then our nine grandchildren!!  As you get older, your calendar of special birthdays can really fill up!  But then, it starts to empty as well.

My first real experience with death was a boy in my class in elementary school named Guy who drowned in a municipal swimming pool.  Then my grandparents started dying while I was in high school and college. A very close college friend died in a light plane crash when I was in my twenties. Older aunts and uncles died during my 30’s. My dad died when I was 41. Sherrylee’s mother died eight years later. It was hard to lose them.

In just the last couple of years we have lost some close friends of our own age—that’s a real shock. Sherrylee’s sister Linda died of early-onset Altzeimer’s. I have watched my Mom who is now 90 lose almost all of her friends at church, so I start thinking, yes, that time of life has begun.  We may live a little longer now than centuries before—sometimes a blessings, sometimes I wonder—but our lives are still framed by birth and death.

God is still God. Jesus loves me, this I know! Security, love, and eternal life,  everything that we long for, that we work for, that we fight for—everything is found in Him.  I’m so thankful today for parents who taught me about God, for Sister Tew—the first Sunday school teacher I remember at the Riverside Church, for Beryl Hooten, who asked me one Sunday if I was ready to follow Jesus, for Alex Humphrey, my first Bible teacher at Fort Worth Christian,  for great teachers at Harding, for Owen Olbright who invited me to do mission work in the Northeast, for Joe Hacker who encouraged us to become missionaries, and for the many Christians who have continued to teach and encourage and walk with us right up to today.

And I’m unspeakably—deeply thankful for my wife Sherrylee, who has not only been my soulmate—the one I love more than my own life—but my teacher, my confessor, the one who has kept me honest before God. Her love is the most physical expression of God’s love in my life.

Great is Thy Faithfulness, O God My Father!

 

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Is Your Church Slipping Toward Unitarian Universalism?

October 15, 2013 by Mark Woodward

ImageSherrylee and I are again in New England, so allow me to repost these observations from 2010.  

While we were in Vermont and Massachusetts last week, I saw a large number of Unitarian Universalist congregations, mostly meeting in buildings that were at one time Congregationalist churches.  I did some work on the Puritans a few years back, so I began thinking about the history of these churches—and I started to get a bad feeling.  Here’s the super-zipped history, so you can see why.

Although historically tied to the Presbyterian church, this new movement eventually separated themselves from that denomination. As they pursued their independent study of the Bible, they became convinced that the only true path to reform was to return to the practices of the first century church, including adult conversion and the pattern of congregational autonomy.

This new movement flourished, but with time, because there was no higher authority than the local congregation, the movement splintered into Arminianism (legalism), Deism (social gospel), transcendentalism (spirit-filled), and Unitarianism (liberal)—parentheses are my translation into 21st century labels.

I thought this could have been a description of Restoration Movement history to this point in time. If you feel that way too, then read on to see where the future might lie!

Within two hundred years of its beginnings in America, many of the most influential Congregationalist ministers were Unitarians (a belief in the singleness of God and a rejection of a trinitarian understanding, including a rejection of the exclusive claims of Jesus because He is the Son of God).

During this same historical period, the doctrine of universal salvation was at its zenith in America. Universalism teaches that a loving God would not create humans, then send them to hell or eternal punishment.  It is no surprise that after rejecting the divinity of Jesus and opening the doctrinal door to acceptance of everything under God, Unitarians quite easily moved into universal salvation as well. It would be the natural step following their move to a more syncretic understanding of God.

Today, these beautiful old church buildings in New England are no longer Christian churches; rather, they are filled with the great grandchildren of those early Restorationists.  Unitarian Universalists profess the following in their own words (http://www.uua.org/visitors/6798.shtml ):

There are seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:

  • The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
  • Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
  • Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
  • A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
  • The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
  • The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
  • Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Unitarian Universalism (UU) draws from many sources:

  • Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
  • Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
  • Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
  • Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
  • Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
  • Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

I want to think that my church could never slide down this path, but I do recognize some of these footprints in the road we are traveling.  I do believe that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (G. Santayana).

And if this is not what I want for my grandchildren, what must I do today?

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The Crisis After Starting A Successful Ministry

October 10, 2013 by Mark Woodward

The pre-start and the start-up phases of any new ministry are hard, but exhilarating. Typically, you have the most passionate and the most committed people involved, so these Starters are willing to do whatever it takes.  Starters are heart, soul, and mind committed!

As the start-up continues, the Friends of the Starters observe the commitment and enthusiasm—as well as the results that follow the  do-whatever-it-takes efforts of the Starters, so they join up and become a part of the ministry—with equal enthusiasm, but not necessarily with equal commitment as the Starters.  But the ministry has grown because both Starters and First Volunteers are part of the ministry, and it appears to have a great future.

A small cloud looms on the horizon, however. First Volunteers do enjoy the work of the ministry; however, they did not come into the ministry to recruit, but to serve. The reluctance to recruit in this second phase means there are fewer Second Volunteers than First Volunteers.

The Second Volunteers are the friends typically of the First Volunteers. They really enjoy working together, so now the First and Second Volunteers merge into a pretty wonderful, but fairly self-contained group—so they recruit no one else and there are almost no Third Volunteers for the ministry.

This promising ministry is completely unaware that it is in a crisis it may not survive! With no new volunteers, no one takes the place of the Second and Third Volunteers that have to drop out for quite normal reasons.  Attrition is predictable.  Typically, Starters and First Volunteers just step into the gaps because they still are doing whatever it takes.

Then more Second Volunteers and some First Volunteers step out—and Starters start pushing everyone to recruit more Volunteers—but especially the Second and Third Volunteers did not commit to the ministry to be recruiters—so they talk to a friend or two, but that is it.

For many ministries, this is the almost predictable slide into an inevitable conclusion—a whimpering end of the ministry with many regrets. I’m sure you have observed some recognizable version of this story in your own church, if not your own attempts at ministries.

Here are a few suggestions for breaking this pattern and prolonging the effective life of your ministry!

1. You never have enough new people! If the ideal number of workers is 10, then seek 20 and plan on seeking replacements continually.  If the ministry does not have a recruiting strategy , purposefully and intentionally organized to bring in new people, it will not survive long.

2. Those involved in the ministry are the best recruiters. Every volunteer can be asked to be a recruiter. Some will be better than others, but every new person should feel some responsibility for recruiting others.

3. Keep recruiting personal. Pulpit announcements, videos, church bulletin announcements can create some general name recognition of the ministry, but one person tapping another on the shoulder saying, “Come go with me” will yield greater results.

4. Teach volunteers how to expand their circle of friends. Most workers invite their immediate friends—and then they stop because to talk to others is outside of their comfort zone. One way to expand their circles is to help them recognize other points of contact at church that exist, but that they do not necessarily think of right away. For instance:

  1. Parents of their children’s friends
  2. People who sit in seats near them at church services
  3.  Common demographic groups at church—parents of teens, retired, but still active, stay-at-home moms.
  4. New people at church who have yet to be plugged into a group or ministry.

5.  Utilize the best recruiters among your volunteers! Former cheerleaders (like Sherrylee) are much better recruiters than bookworms (me!).  Use people’s natural talents. It may be more important for someone to Sherrylee to recruit than any other task in your ministry!

How long the ministry will thrive and survive depends to some extent on the ability of the Starters to recognize the need for expanding its circle of friends.  The earlier in the ministry that friend-building becomes a part of the model, the greater chance of blessed longevity the ministry will have.

 

Reposted from September 2010

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For Those With Fire In Their Bones

October 7, 2013 by Mark Woodward

You are not the preacher. You are not the head of anything at church. But you have just started a great ministry  or you have a great ministry idea that you would like to see get traction and grow.  What do you do now? Here are a few tips from our experience of trying to get Let’s Start Talking established in lots of churches. This is what we have learned from watching people enthusiastic about short-term missions try to work with their home congregation.

  1. Don’t even start unless you are committed to doing whatever it takes to succeed yourself! Lots of people want to start things for other people to do. Just forget it! You should be able to accomplish the ministry yourself—at some level—or you will never get others to buy into it. For LST, this means that if you are not willing to go, you will not be successful in getting other people to go.
  2. Try to get the blessing of church leadership from the very beginning. If the preacher and/or church leaders are opposed to your ministry idea, it is not likely to survive. It might possibly survive if they are indifferent, but the chances are much better if you have their blessing.  Notice, I said blessing, not commitment. See below!
  3. Do not expect to get leadership commitment to your ministry until you have proven that it will be successful! LST actually made this mistake in our Centurion project which launched about three years ago. We asked churches to commit to a goal of sending 100 workers with LST over a five-year period—with no financial commitment whatsoever.  Although a few churches committed, we were absolutely shocked at how resistant most churches were to making any kind of a commitment at all.  We have since modified our approach, so that we only ask for permission to test run LST in their congregation to see if their members have a good experience with it.  Church leaders are much more open to us with this approach.
  4. Don’t reinvent the wheel! Join with established ministries who have proven track records and who can help jumpstart your ministry. So you think your teens should do mission trips to learn to share their faith! Rather than asking your youth minister or some parents to plan and organize such a trip, why not ask a ministry like LST YoungFriends to help you, since we have been planning short-term missions, including special ones for teen groups, for thirty years! If you want to start something for the poor, why not contact existing ministries and partner with them–or after-school programs, or abused women, or English As A Second Language outreach??
  5. Be spiritually prepared to be ignored. If I were a church leader and if I knew what kind of transformation happens to every person who spends two weeks on an LST project, I would do everything in my power to make it possible for every person in the church I was leading to participate—there, I said it as boldly and honestly as I can.  However, the fact is that a very small percentage of Christians really want to engage their faith as actively as most ministries require. If you, as the promoter of your ministry, let the massive indifference discourage you, then you are defeated! You must be willing to do your work without recognition, without popularity, and without any other reward than the smile of the Father!  If you need more than this, you will give up!
  6. God has His own schedule for growth! I love flowers—Sherrylee calls them annuals and perennials and I have a vague idea what that means. But I really love flowering trees. I love the blooms on our fruit trees, I love the beautiful white flowers of the Bradford pear trees, and I really love the Oklahoma redbuds!! The time from seed to bloom is very different for these plants. In reality, only God knows the proper time and season for your ministry to bloom. You can choose to acknowledge God’s sovereignty here—or you can try to set your own schedule. Occasionally, we may be able to hothouse something into rapid growth—but these efforts are rarely long-lived. I recommend you let God be in control.
  7. If you are called by God to a ministry, you will never be truly happy until you are answering the call—so get on with it!  I love the story of Jeremiah, called by God to be a prophet to the nations, who yells at God and says, “You deceived me! I did what you called me to do and I’m having a terrible time! In fact, I’ve tried to quit several times . . . but I couldn’t because your word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones–and I can’t keep it in.” (Jer. 20:7-9)

Reposted from September 2010.

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Who Built Your House?

September 27, 2013 by Mark Woodward

builder“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builder labors in vain” (Psalm 127:1) I love this verse because it expresses absolute dependence on the Almighty while acknowledging that we are not meant to be automatons.

There is, however, a tension there with which we must wrestle!

First, there are two builders in this verse: the Lord and “the builder.” So, who is building the house?  Sherrylee and I once built a house in Oklahoma—that’s the way we talk about it anyway, but the truth is that neither of us poured one cubic foot of concrete, neither of us hammered one nail or laid one shingle on the roof.  So did we really build the house?

Some unknown architect conceived the layout of our house and drew up very detailed plans.  I heard once of a group of church members who were building their own church. They got the walls up about half way when they realized that they had not built a door into the church.  Pretty good metaphor, isn’t it, for what happens when people try to build a church and don’t have a plan made by an architect.

Sherrylee and I hired a general contractor to build our house. Again, he never drove a nail himself, but he hired all the people who did.  He also organized the order of activity because it is totally backwards to have the painters come before the framers have built the walls.  Some people I know have attempted to be their own general contractor in order to save money. I would never do that because I wouldn’t begin to know where to get someone to raise the walls or whether the plumber or the electricians need to come first.

And when our house was finished, we were so proud!  We had chosen the brick, the colors of the rooms, the carpeting, the door knobs, the drawer pulls. We had even made the decision not to put in a half-wall that was in the original plans in order to open up the rooms a little bit more.  I suppose I could argue that the house could have been finished without our input, but we would not have liked it as much.

So who built “our” house?  The architect, the contractor, the carpenters, or did we?

We all played a part—but our roles were not all equal!

Within boundaries, we could change the architect’s plans to fit our taste; within boundaries we could ask the carpenters to adjust walls or doors; within boundaries we could express our own personalities with colors and carpet. But there were boundaries in every direction which we as the “builders” could not change once we had committed to build this house.

Back to our verse:  There is no doubt that God put us here to be builders—but if we think that we are the Builder, then we commit the sin of Babel. They wanted to build a city and a tower to the heavens to make a name for themselves (Genesis 11).

Motivation and purpose seem to be key here.  The men of Babel were building for themselves, building to the heavens to show that they were like God! Creators, Builders!!

Yes, we can—and should build, BUT what is our motivation and what is our purpose?

Those should be easy questions for Christians to answer because we have only a single purpose and motivation in life. Remember Solomon said, 13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.

Remembering this singleness of motivation and purpose, let’s rephrase David’s psalm to make it even more applicable:

  • Unless the Lord builds the church, those who build it labor in vain.
  • Unless the Lord builds the family, those who build it labor in vain.
  • Unless the Lord builds the business, those who build it labor in vain.
  • Unless the Lord builds the ministry, those who build it labor in vain.
  • Unless the Lord builds the nation, those who build it labor in vain.

I must build, but I must never forget that the Lord is the Builder!

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Strategic Planning Pt. 8 Throw the First Draft Into The Trash!

September 19, 2013 by Mark Woodward

Strategic-PlanningRevision is at once both the best of times and the worst of times.  If you are tasked with writing the strategic plan for your organization/ministry, then you will be dealing with all the challenges of writing a public document.  It may sound overly dramatic, but the quality of your work will finally be judged by your ability to revise!  So let me give you some tips that will ensure a more pleasurable experience as well as a premium product.

  • Accept the fact from the beginning that no word you write is holy, that everything may be discarded and/or replaced. Perhaps the most common mistake of inexperienced writers is to assume that their first efforts are their best.  Their virgin words feel more natural, more authentic, somehow more purely inspired.  The truth is that most first offerings should be trashed. An experienced writer knows this is true and assumes it will happen, whereas inexperienced writers are offended that their words were not taken seriously.  Please, get your head around the idea that much of what you write will be replaced with better writing—perhaps multiple times. 
  • Revision means “re-visioning” your writing.  You have to look at your writing again in order to do revisioning properly. That means reading your writing as if you had not written it, which is very difficult.  Often to gain this degree of objectivity, you have to let it sit for a day or two and then come back to it.  Having enough time to let writing sit often seems like a luxury, but you can help yourself if you will not procrastinate the writing/revisioning so that you do not increase the pressure on yourself. 
  • Let other people read it and ask them to mark any place they have to stop and re-read something.  You can use this tip as well when you are revising. Anytime you “stumble” in your reading or you have to go back and re-read a portion, mark that for certain revision.  If others will do this for you, it will also help with the needed objectivity.
  • Let others read your draft for content and clarity. Ask those people who are the best writers or best communicators AND those who are best informed in the content area about which you are writing.
  • Determine who will do the final proofreading.  If you are not a detail person, one well versed in grammar and punctuation, then you MUST find someone who is and have them make final corrections.  These are not likely the same people who read for content and clarity.
  • As the final author, you have the final say, BUT you are foolish if you don’t pay attention to every suggestion and every correction.  If you don’t have a marvelous reason for rejecting a suggestion, you should probably adapt it to your text.  The same is true for grammar and punctuation suggestions.
  • You are not really finished until . . . well, most experienced writers never quite know when they are finished. They just know when they need to stop. Of course, you are letting your leadership team and your board read as you write, so they will be coming with suggestions each time you let them read it.  When I feel like what is done should be done, then I tell my Readers that this is the final draft unless they find some glaring typo or major grammatical error. Such an ultimatum will usually stop those who continue wanting to add new objectives or new ideas to every draft they read.

If you follow these suggestions, your written products will not only be better, but your writing will improve.  The more you write, the better your writing becomes.  Experienced writers often incorporate some of these tips as they write, so they appear to write with much less time spent on revision.  I can assure you that earlier they have accumulated the same number of hours that you need. 

Learn to love revision, not dread it, and your writing will become prodigiously better!

Next:  Producing the final draft of the strategic plan

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Strategic Planning: Pt. 7 Starting the First Draft–Or Not Starting!

September 17, 2013 by Mark Woodward

Strategic-PlanningNothing about writing is harder than starting!  Everything is more important, the time of day is all wrong, the computer just keeps jumping over to Free Cell, and every interruption is welcomed!  And if you don’t write regularly for any reason, starting a writing project is even harder!

Here are some general writing tips to help you get started.

  • Set aside a time that works for you, when you will be uninterrupted for at least an hour.  Even here in my office with fifteen people who could walk in the door at any time, I just announce to them that when my door is closed, please do not disturb me except for something really, really important.  Other people go to Starbucks or another place they can be anonymous. At a time in my life when uninterrupted time was even more rare, I stayed up later than everyone else in the family on nights when I had to write.
  • Start with what you know best.  We were in the middle of work on our financial model at LST, so the very first piece of the outline that I attacked was the part I was working on every day anyway.  I could, for the most part, just write from the information already available to me.  That was Part 1, but Part 5B of the outline was something that we had been working on since February, so it was also easy to write. 5B was the second part of the outline that I finished.  Write what you know best, what you are already working on, or what you have the most information about.  That makes starting much easier.
  • Divide and conquer.  Break your task down into small parts.  Instead of thinking about writing a 30-page strategic plan, I sat down and wrote one-half page on a new website!  Instead of a tome, I just needed to write on six objectives—and most of those objectives were broken down into three or four sub-points, so I could just write on one sub-point at a time and feel like I had made great progress! It was not until I finished that I knew our plan would have thirty pages.  I just added all the small parts together one day–and there it was.
  • Just start.  Sit down, turn on the computer, put the Objective number at the top of the page . . . and start writing . . . doesn’t make much difference if it is good writing or if it is even on the subject. What you are doing is just getting into the groove.  After a few minutes of this, stop, see if you’ve said anything worthwhile—and if you have, cut that and paste it on to a new page and this time start writing on the topic, using the good of what you have already written.
  • Don’t edit yourself!  Very few writers can write creatively and edit themselves at the same time.  This means, don’t worry about spelling and grammar, about outlining, underlining, centering, fonts, or anything else at this point.  First, just write.  Editing will come later in the process. If you start worrying about receive or recieve you will never get past the first paragraph.

Your goal is to get a draft written!  A draft is just a first attempt. If you accept from the beginning that you will change what you’ve written when you do your revision, your editors will change it, your leadership team will change it, your board will change it—it’s going to be changed many times before its finished, so don’t think you’ve got to get it right the first time!  Just get it written.

Next:  Revision is a necessary part of the writing process, so we’ll talk next time about the hard work of revising your writing.

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Lead Us Not Into Temptation–What Does That Mean?

September 12, 2013 by Mark Woodward

gethsemaneBut God doesn’t tempt us to do evil. That’s the Devil who does that!  Isn’t that what the Bible says?

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. (James 1:13-14)

Why did Jesus teach his disciples to pray, “Lead us not into temptation?” 

The newer translations certainly try to mitigate the impact of Jesus’ teaching. The NLT says “And don’t let us yield to temptation,” while The Message loosely interprets the text as, “Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.”  The ERV says simply, “And don’t let us be tempted.”  Is such a smorgasbord helpful?

Here are a couple of bits of information that might help us sort it out.

First, the word temptation can certainly be translated trial or test, in the sense of some situation that challenges us to choose our will or God’s will.  An Old Testament example of this is in Genesis 22 where the KJV says that God tempted Abraham, the RSV says God tested Abraham, and the ASV says God proved Abraham by asking him to take the son of promise Isaac and sacrifice him.

The origin of the test is probably what is important here.  Jesus was also tempted or tested in the wilderness. We are quite comfortable with this event being described as temptation because it originated with the Devil and was designed for evil.

Second, the last half of the prayer sentence probably should not be separated from the first, i.e., “but deliver us from Evil (or the Evil One).  The contrasting clauses are supposed to suggest opposite ideas—or at least strongly opposing ideas. It seems easier to understand God delivering or rescuing us from Evil, so maybe that will illuminate the first part of the prayer

Putting these ideas together, it seems to me that Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray to be protected from the trials, tests, temptations that the Devil puts in front of us, just as he tempted Jesus.  We might paraphrase it something like this:

And, Lord, you know me, you know where I am weakest and where I am stronger. Don’t allow the Devil to tempt me in the areas where I am the weakest and might fail. And when I must face temptation, Father, deliver me from it.

If this is the meaning in the text, then what does it mean for me?  How do I pray this prayer in the middle of my world?

Here are a couple of my thoughts:

With these words,  Jesus teaches us to acknowledge the sovereignty of God in our lives.  God has released Satan into this world for a time, but Satan is not omnipotent or omniscient. Even though God allowed Job to be tempted or tested, God knew Job, so the outcome was certain!  Job may not have known the outcome, the Devil certainly did not know the outcome, but God knew what Job could bear and did not allow him to be tested (tempted) beyond what he would survive.

God has made us the same explicit promise. He is fully in control!

The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

I’ve wondered many times if Jesus prayed the essence of these very words in Gethsemane: 

“Father, must I really go through this test? Is there any other way to do this? You know it is not just the horrible physical pain that is coming towards me to test my flesh, but the mental temptation because I know even those who have been following me not only will abandon me, deny me, even betray me—but they are just clueless about what is really happening and why. They have hardly understood anything yet! Don’t let me doubt what I have done with them and left in their hands.

But the worst of all, Father—what I fear most—is the punishment for Sin—how can I stand to see you turn away from me?  Can I bear, Father, to be in the dark?

Oh, Abba, please deliver me from the Evil One. Do not let me waver, not in my flesh, nor in my mind, and especially not in my soul.

Not my will, but Your will be done, Father.”

And so we who are His disciples still pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil!”  And we know He will because He loved us enough to give His only Son!

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Strategic Planning Pt. 6 – Deciding On Your Objectives

September 10, 2013 by Mark Woodward

Strategic-PlanningYou have queried all of your important constituents, so you have mountains of information.  You have filtered your information a variety of ways to look at the collected data from every conceivable angle—or so you think!

Now it is time to actually decide what the information says—and that is perhaps the key task in the whole strategic planning process.

First, look for where the streams of information lead to lakes!  After we finished our surveys and collected our giant SWOT sticky notes hanging on our walls, our leadership team got together, committed the whole day to the process, shut the door and turned off our cell phones and said, OK, what does all this say?  Mostly we looked for streams of similar comments and collected them into little pools.  Then we tramped through the pools, looking for related ideas, testing them for compatibility, and eventually we saw a few big lakes emerging.

Second, name your lakes!  It was the poet W.H. Auden who is quoted as saying, “How can I know what I think until I see what I’ve said.”  Take the time and make the effort immediately if you can, to write one-sentence descriptions of the main collections of information.  Not one-word descriptions.  It’s too easy to put down Communication  or Leadership, but those are topics, not whole thoughts, so put down in one complete sentence (that means a subject and a verb) what you believe the larger collection of information is saying to your organization.  For LST, our list looked something like this:

  • LST needs a new financial model, including a fund raising strategy and more predictable operations.
  • LST needs a growth model with a good leadership model that will carry it through future transitions in leadership
  • LST has a big database issue that needs to be solved
  • There is great opportunity for LST in the U.S., including expanding FriendSpeak and expanding to other churches.
  • LST needs to improve how we communicate with and serve our host churches.
  • LST needs to develop closer partnerships with U.S. sending churches.
  • Marketing of LST   (By this time, we were so brain dead, that we didn’t do a whole sentence!!)

Third, take it to your board!  We took this list to our board but did NOT show it to them at the beginning.  Remember, they had received all of the raw data prior to this all-day meeting, so they came with their own picture of what the data said.  We went through the whole exercise again of following streams and looking for lakes until we got to the end of the day.  Only at that point did we bring out the synthesis that the Leadership Team had developed.  In our case, with just slight modification of wording, the Board of Directors came to the same conclusions as the Leadership Team.  It was almost an AHA! Moment when we put the two lists side by side—and very affirming.

If you come out with two very different lists, then you’ve got one more step, and that is to get your board and your leadership team on the same page.  It might take a joint meeting to discuss why one group’s lakes don’t seem as important to the other group. Don’t stop until there is consensus.

Finally, the Executive Director or the one leading this strategic planning process must sit down and begin writing what will become the final version of the objectives for the strategic plan. 

The objectives become the outline for the rest of the document, so again, be sure and write in complete sentences.  In addition, the final version of the objectives document should include not only the main objectives, but the essential tributaries that flow into them to give a complete picture.  For example, look at LST’s first objective in its final form:

1. To create an inclusive financial model that will achieve the following specific goal

     A.  Both income and expenses are more predictable

     B.   Annual cashflow variations do not require use of credit

     C.   New revenue streams are created

     D.   A fund raising strategy is developed, along with other strategies, resulting in a fully funded, sustainable, growing ministry.                      

And finally again, your board needs to have a look at what you may think is the final draft of the objectives until they are ready to sign off on it.  There is no reason to write one more word until this initial document is finished and approved.

Next:  When your “Objectives for the Strategic Plan” document is finished and approved, then the real work begins.  How are we as an organization going to meet these objectives?

Posted in Strategic Planning Series | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

20% of Non-Christians Do Not Know A Christian!

August 26, 2013 by Mark Woodward

SikhsIn an article that appeared in August web-only edition of Christianity Today, Abby Stocker wrote about “The Craziest Statistic You’ll Read About North American Missions.”  Her article opens with this paragraph:

One out of five non-Christians in North America doesn’t know any Christians. That’s not in the fake-Gandhi-quote “I would become a Christian, if I ever met one” sense. It’s new research in Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity’s Christianity in its Global Context, 1970-2020. Missiologist Todd M. Johnson and his team found that 20 percent of non-Christians in North America really do not “personally know” any Christians. That’s 13,447,000 people—about the population of metropolitan Los Angeles or Istanbul—most of them in the United States.

The study shows that it is not the atheists and agnostics clustered together in academia or Hollywood or the liberal unbelieving media whom evangelicals love to hate that make up the majority of those who do not know a Christian.

No, mostly it is the immigrants and those they live among.  Here is the chart that was published with the study:

stats

And although Christians make up one-third of the world’s population, eight out of 10 people in the world do not know a Christian.

Sherrylee and I just went to a wonderful Journey to Generosity retreat and in the opening session, we were confronted with the fact that Americans hoard much of the world’s wealth.

So is it worse to be poor because we hoard our wealth—or to be LOST because we hoard Jesus??  I’m not so sure it is not the same thing if looked at from our side of the equation.

So why do you think that 79% of the Sikhs in North America don’t know any Christians?  It’s not because of a scarcity of Christians; it’s not for lack of churches they could visit?

Well, how many Sikhs do you know?  How many Buddhists from Asia live in your community?  How many Chinese?

Just last week there was a Chinese couple in Wal-mart and I could tell they were searching for something that they couldn’t find, so I asked them if I could help.   They were looking for that kind of ice cream with many flavors in it, so I found the Neapolitan and they were quite pleased.  I wish I had been even friendlier and asked about them and . . . .who knows what might have come from a little conversation about ice cream.

They might already be Christians!!  But I don’t know because I didn’t take the time to even offer to get to know them.  And because of that they may still be one of the many Chinese in our country who don’t know any Christians.

I’ve quoted this verse before in describing the reason for the FriendSpeak program, that we offer churches through the Let’s Start Talking Ministry.  But surely the convicting results of this study should make us question whether we truly believe the verse to be inspired by God—or not!

26 God began by making one man, and from him he made all the different people who live everywhere in the world. He decided exactly when and where they would live.  Acts 17:26 (ERV)

Immigrants are in North America for the same reason you are—because God decided exactly when and where they would live.  And Paul says the reason that he put people in the same place was so that they could find Him!

It’s not just “foreigners”  who cluster in ghettos.  Christians do too!

What could you do to reduce the number of people who don’t know a Christian?

  • Make a point to speak to people of other origins in public places.
  • Find meaningful service projects to join or to launch in ethnic ghettos.
  • Adopt an international student from a local university!
  • Host a Thanksgiving meal at your church and invite the immigrant community nearest you, specifically!
  • Inquire about beginning a FriendSpeak ministry at your church (www.friendspeak.org)  and volunteer to be a part of it.

What can you add to this list?

Posted in Christian Culture, Christian Missions | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

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