Session Two: How to Discover And Use What Your Church Does Well

[Music] right we are back again and we're just gonna bear along through this I want to make the most of our limited time together we'll have a chance for conversation and at lunch in between sessions and we can stick around even after the last session if you got any questions or anything you just want to sit and chat about we can do that as I mentioned earlier I'm Assemblies of God And like most of you who are in a denomination we have our annual conference for Southern California and we go every year and participate with

it love love the group we're in and every year our district superintendent who was in charge of all of the churches over Southern Cal does what he's supposed to do which is give the annual kind of state of the district report here's how we're doing here the churches we planted here the churches that close here's the Average age of ministers all this stuff and a lot of it is statistical as appropriately so the numbers are a part of that process and every year he gives part of the statistics that he gives our church science statistics

and for every year that I've been around one of those statistics that he's given how did I go back to that there we go is this over 90 percent of our churches are under 200 and over 80 percent of our churches are under 100 a statistic that Is shockingly consistent denomination to denomination and region to region in the u.s. on average it's 90 percent under 200 and about 65 percent under 100 that has been a recent change in recent years because the phenomenon of mega church is disgu Ewing the numbers a little bit higher but

throughout the rest of the world and in most denominational situations within a couple percentage points that's just the way it is everywhere so he would get up and do That every year and I'm talking about a couple different news to supers over a couple of different you know eras and they would give that stat and the next sentence that would follow it would always be some version of we need to fix this it was always assumed that those numbers meant a problem always and I would sit there every year and I would listen to it

and I would think oh no I'm one of those problem sure she's I'm making the problem worse for a large Part of it we were one of the 80% and for the entire time except for that one little blip we were part of the 90% oh no I'm part of the problem I gotta fix this that was every message that I got was that's a problem oh no and then one year during the middle of this whole kind of meltdown season that I told you about he starts giving the thing and he gives the stats

and have you ever been in a room where somebody's talking you know preacher whatever teacher and in a College class whatever and they're talking and they say something that triggers your thought process to go way over here they keep talking but you are not paying attention anymore it may be happening to some of you right now come on back and that happened to me I I went off here and he went on his way and I went off I didn't hear the next twenty minutes because at that moment I shifted from oh no - so

what okay fine my church is small most of the churches are small So what I just don't care anymore I can't fix it so it doesn't matter so what and I went home sitting with so what and then I'm just the kind of guy that decides I'm not so good to say so what I'm gonna find out so what so I did some so what research okay 90% of the churches are under two hundred and eighty percent are under 100 what's the so what behind that where does that come from what does that actually mean

and here's what I discovered that stat says Nothing about the health of the denomination of the region in question that here's why if the church is in revival the denomination is in revival the region is in revival a big part of the way that they're growing is by the planting of churches and those churches are all going to be small churches when a denomination or a region is in revival there are more small churches because you're planting more churches so the percentage of small Church just stays very high if a church is in decline then

all the existing churches are becoming smaller or most at least of these this teachers are becoming smaller therefore there are going to be more small churches because the medium-sized churches are becoming small churches and so the percentage of small churches stays high so whether the church is in revival or decline the percentage of small churches is always very high it's Been that way for 2,000 years it's not likely to change because of the next Church growth book it's been that way forever so that says nothing about the health of that group of that denomination of

that region it says absolutely nothing now it's not an unimportant stat it's simply not the be-all end-all stat it should be taken in with all the other information but don't make assumptions based on that stat alone it's not enough so I sat with The so what and i sat with a little too long quite frankly and if you stay with so what for too long you become hard and you become cynical don't don't sit with so what for too long you you've got to go through so what but you've got to go through so what

you've got to get to the other side and on the other side of so what I came out at okay now what alright our church is small now what actually about a year after coming out of that counseling time and we'd you know the Church had gone well under a hundred so we were at 200 we've gone up to 400 in in in less than two years and less than a year we went down under under 100 which means we lost over half of the people we started the growth spurt with and there was no

scandal and there was no split it was just this whole unhealthy period of time and then we kind of righted the ship and we were getting back together we were getting healthy again And the numbers hadn't really gone up all that much and so I've started talking about we got to get the numbers up and I heard the words coming out of my mouth and I stopped myself in the middle of and said no I'm done we got to stop thinking like a big Church and I only believed it after I heard myself say it

have you ever done that you say or write something and you go oh I didn't know I believed that until I just wrote that down right it was only After I heard it fall out of my face that I went yeah we gotta stop thinking like a big church and everybody in the room - jaws hit the floor cuz that's the mantra the church growth moon if you want to be a big church you got to think like a big church and so we got to stop thinking like a big church for a simple reason

because we're not one what does a healthy small Church look like and nobody in the room including me knew the answer so I said okay we got to figure Out now what now couple of illustrations to get you to the now what spot Apollo 13 the movie has a great scene in a bunch of great scenes there's one scene in the movie Apollo 13 in which the astronauts have not been able to land on the moon they're there they're their spaceship is damaged and because they weren't on the moon so they weren't in that one

part of the spaceship all of the air filters in the part that they've had to stay and are now clogged they're All used up they can't use the air filters anymore and they're about to kill themselves on their own carbon dioxide emissions and on earth they're trying to figure out how to fix this and they realize oh there are filters in the other part that can just go in there and get them but the problem is the filters in that part don't fit the fill the filter in this part they made two different types of

filters right and the guy goes tell me this isn't a government Project like you're seriously really you couldn't have just had the same filter in both parts no we had to have different ones so they've literally got to figure out how they put a square round peg into a square hole or vice versa and they can't figure it out so the very next scene an engineer takes a couple a couple engineer's take a couple boxes and they dump them out on a big table and they essentially say this everything that is on this table is

Everything that is on Apollo 13 if it's not on the table it's not on Apollo 13 and the astronauts can't use it so using only what is on this table we have to figure out how to fit this into this or they die go that's your job I do not know of a better description for what it's like to be a small church pastor than that really god this is the mess you gave me none of what you gave me is designed to do the job that I'm called to do but the mission has not

Changed and lives are at stake get the job done that's our assignment right we're always cobbling stuff together and going but this isn't well the big church they get to design it from scratch they get to engineer it perfectly yeah that's what happens when you got tons of resources and tons of time we don't but the answer is still the same get the job done the mission is the same the mission has not changed we just got to figure out how to do it with An Apollo 13 table mess it's been said that the first

job of leadership is to define reality I don't know a better picture of defining reality than that little clip from that movie they that that right there this table is our reality defined you can't define it any clearer than that see it's not faith to pray that something appears on the table that is another table because even if it appears on your table it's not going to appear On the pole thirteen faith doesn't say oh we can't do it with this faith says this is what we've got and we're gonna get it done anyway faith

doesn't say oh no we're gonna pray something onto the table that doesn't exist that's not faith that's fantasy faith says this is my reality and God is still going to do his mission with my reality because Jesus didn't wake up this morning depressed by the size of your church you may have but he didn't So we gotta get the job done there's another saying that's real popular now and it's actually a really good one get the right people on the bus everybody saying that I've heard it get the right people on the bus it's a

leadership term and what it means is if you're putting a staff together you're putting your team together you gotta have the right people on your team because if you have one person on the bus that shouldn't be on it then the whole thing can fall to Pieces the team can fall apart over one badly matched so you've got to get the right people on the bus the challenge in a small church is your right people on the bus dude these are my people this is my bus I'd love to get some like that love to

get one right person on my bus all I got is this Apollo 13 table mess there's not a single thing on that table that's designed to do the job that I'm assigned to do but that's where the Really good engineers shine they figured it out now there's some engineering anybody can engineer an air filter when they've got all the time all the money all the resources in the world but if you can figure out how to do that with that mess now you've got yourself an engineer they know their stuff and that's what we're called

to do all the time I said I said Rick Warren can't do my job I can't do his so it's not a diss on him it's not a diss on me we Have different jobs I couldn't do his he can't do mine did he pastor Church of my size yeah for like two weeks you know he blasted right on through that if he'd been stuck under 200 for 20 years let's see what kind of mental state he'd be in today all right he's not built for that and that's I'm glad he's not built for that

I'm glad he's built to do what he's done and I'm glad he's done what he's done are you not built for what I do I'm not Built for what he does there's no jealousy there is just different that's okay you know and I've got a look at that and go I get I'm doing the Apollo 13 messed thing that's that's my assignment so don't fight it get it done pastoring a small church is not a penalty for doing something wrong it's a specialty and it's worth doing well and we've got to get internet drilled into

our heads and hearts I'm not being penalized this is a Specialty this is a specialty that God has called me to do and we're going to do it we're gonna get figured out now we're going to move into what I like to call the why is my church so weird part of the day yes I know your church is weird I'm gonna tell you why in a bit all right from here we're going to move into this back to these circles that I said we'd get into the difference between big and small churches predominantly comes

down To something called the law of large numbers the law of large numbers is a sociological phenomenon that says the bigger the crowd is the more predictably they behave this is how polling companies work they know that if you get a large enough sample size you can just add zeros and B right within a two to three point margin of error right so that if they survey 3,500 Americans they can tell you how all of America feels and every time you see when you go they Never asked me they don't have to if you ask

the right questions of the right demographic group and here's the third key and have a minimum sample size all you got to do is add zeros it scales up but you've got to have a minimum sample size so here's what typically happens if you go to a conference you got a pastor speak and who's pastoring a church of 20,000 people and if you pastor a church of 2,000 people you can take virtually everything that they say take it home And do it and just drop a zero because your Venn diagram circles almost completely overlap because

at 2000 you've got multiple staff you've got multiple venues probably you've got all you've got you know parking issues you've got age-appropriate classrooms for everybody you've got all of the different programs from recovery to benevolence to everything else in place it's just one-tenth the size of the church twenty thousand that's slightly Oversimplified but not much right because you've got to have all those things by the 22 2020 thousand it's just more of okay again oversimplified but not much so 20,000 down to 2,000 drop is zero you're good to go 22,000 down to 200 it's no

longer an issue dropping a zero anymore you're not on the left circle anymore you're in the right circle it's a different animal it's not a matter of scaling anymore because it 200 you may not have multiple Staff you don't have all of the subdivisions for age-appropriate for everything so it's not just a matter of scale there are some things you simply don't do anymore or you do very very differently and 200 down to 50 difference again and in fact when you get to those numbers you can have two churches of 50 of the same denomination

in the 10th same town on the same street and you might as well be on two separate planets why because this Church of 50 they lose one family say goodbye to the entire children's ministries Department and in this church of 50 when that one person that everybody loves doesn't show up one Sunday we all breathe a little bit easier because we brought somebody new this week and now I don't have to worry about that awkward confrontation in the lobby with weird miss or mr. so-and-so that we all love but we all just kind of know

how to navigate around but the new Person might not right and every one of you just had a name pop into your head all right you know you know how I know that because every church has one and if your church doesn't have one some other poor church has two I'm convinced there's three churches around us that don't have one took your moment but you got there with me now the big church has one too but that just means the pastor gets a weird email once a week no big deal in a big church but

That one person can ruin your Sunday and maybe has occasionally certainly has ruined your mood right before you're about to preach the church pastor doesn't have to worry about that just the number of people kind of levels those personality issues out but the smaller the group the reason that a bigger group behaves more predictably is because the size of the group kind of levels out the personality distinctions okay the flip side however of this goes To these Wonder Bread circles now in addition to big church essentials on the left small church essentials on the right

so on the right in the right big circle it's all the things we share in common as small church pastors we get together and go oh you one of those people - oh yeah me too you've got that problem yeah all yeah me too so there's a whole bunch of me - going on in that circle on the right in Addition to that however there are things in your church that are completely different than any other Church on the face of the earth so you've got a little circle and you'll notice those circles have three

things about them one they're all different sizes - they're all different colors and three here's the big issue they don't touch because every one of those circles represents what is completely different about your church than any other Church On the face of the earth and here's the inverse correlation the smaller your church is the bigger your unique circle is because the smaller the churches the more individual personalities come into play so 20 people behave less predictably than 50 people behave and 50 people behave less predictably than a hundred people behave because the bigger the group

the more the individual personalities kind of flattened out and have a lesser effect on the whole make Sense right we here we go oh yeah of course so that's why your church is so weird because the smaller the group the more the individual quirks and personalities come into play and we can fight against it or we can look at it and go well God gave me this maybe he gave it to me for a reason and we can lean into it and figure out how to actually leverage that for the sake of the kingdom of

God so the flipside of the law of large numbers is this if the If the bigger the crowd is the more predictably it behaved then the smaller the crowd the more impact each person has for good and for bad for bad we already talked about that folk don't we just we got to work around him we got to figure out a way I went through so many years on our in our church every time we want to do something new we had to figure out how are we gonna work around Jack on this one there's

that one guy he was always gonna resist Any new thing he was always gonna have a problem with it and it was always okay how do we get this one past Jack how do we work around Jack everybody's got a jack right last few years we've been blessed not to have one and everybody's on board but there's going to be a season there's Jack's gonna come back not that Jack but a different Jack Jack will be back all right well f1 so there's the negative but there's also the positive one of the primary reasons People

say they go to a small Church and pick a small Church when they have a big church option and there that happens I mean in Orange County there's thousands of that we know of the big churches but there are far far far more small churches a lot of people choose to go to small churches even when there's a picture it's available why did they go one of the primary reasons they mentioned is because I can have a greater impact in a smaller church now Some of that's negative some of that is control-freak issues and here

just to give you again a difference between big and small in big churches let me put and put it this way if you want to go to church be a passive observer and not get involved at all and not be made to feel guilty that you're not getting involved what size of a church is gonna go too big you can disappear in a vet Church big church pastors know that so healthy big churches are always pushing small Groups and ministry teams because they recognize one of their challenges they have to fight that they have to

fight passivity so they're always pushing people towards connection and activity and then they come to us and they say well you gotta have a small group too and you go okay and we try it it doesn't work why because you already are a small group we're not fighting passive we're fighting passive aggressive right because if you're a control freak what Size of a church you're gonna go too small you're gonna have more control at a small church control freaks don't show up at big churches because they got no control there so we always have to

fight the control freak and sometimes guys the control freak is behind the pulpit right we've got to recognize that and we so they're fighting against passivity we're fighting against the control freak because each one attracts a different type of person and it's just a Difference between us that we have to recognize and we have to adapt to so that again that's part of the bad but the good part of that is if you play some guitar and you walk into Saddleback Church on a Sunday morning you're gonna hear that band and you're gonna go I

am never getting on St but if you walk into the average small church and you play some guitar dude you can be running that entire worship team in a month they might have you played That morning right and that's the reason a lot of people go to a smaller Church because they'll go and they'll go my gift is not appropriate for this size of the room if you play some guitar it's not good for the church or for the guitar player to put them on stage at Saddleback that's not right it doesn't make sense in

that context then a whole bunch of small churches would love somebody who's willing who plays some guitar please we're desperate for it and All of a sudden that person has a gift that they can use in that context in a way they can't use it in a different context or they can teach or they can help to - with design or they can out the setup or teardown there's a whole bunch of gifts that are available in the body of Christ that are far more appropriate for use in a small church then for a big

church because then a big church has a level of professionalism and arrows on the floor Precision that has to be followed or the thing falls apart but in a smaller church we can use the person who's still trying to figure it out we would love to be able to use somebody who's not good at it yet but willing I'll take that any day of the year of the week and in a small church that can be used so it's it's not less than it's simply different then so people have impact it's one of the reasons

they want to go to a smaller Church so this is also why metrics are harder in a small church by people ask okay if if a small church can be healthy what's the metric that measures health and my answer is there really aren't any that I know of what's your metric for measuring a healthy family I got metrics for measuring healthy companies I don't have measured metrics for measuring healthy families because once you drop below the minimum sample size numbers matter less and less and less and they Get they are an accurate measure far less

and less here for instance here's a typical month at a typical church small Church if you average 50 people for Sunday you got 50 people next Sunday 25 what happened church split no it's hunting season or lake season or any one of sluicey the Sun came out or or in Southern California it's drizzling they're not gonna go out in that yeah we know how you make fun of us we just lean into it Right that's just the way it is the next Sunday 75 revival now you're dedicating a baby that morning and the entire extended

family showed up but that's the morning that the worship leader if you have one called the said pastor I still got the flu I can't show up and so you get up and you lead acapella badly and as you're doing it you look out at the biggest crowd of your year and go not one of these news people is ever coming back the next week 50 now if you took a church of 500 and they had 500 than 250 than 750 than 500 in a given month you got some serious schizophrenia going on because at

larger numbers you have smaller changes that's why they talk metrics so much because if you're pastoring a thousand two thousand twenty thousand people a 10 percent shift if you're pastoring a church a twenty thousand a 10 percent shift means 2,000 people that's something worth paying attention to right so numbers Matter at that size because at that size every number is a person but numbers aren't people in smaller churches people are people in smaller churches the axiom just doesn't work in a smaller environment we have these massive spikes and drops in numbers and we can't live

and die by them every week it'll kill us but in a big church if they have a 15 percent shift they had better pay attention because something's going on either up positive or down negative it Can change their budget it can change their missions program and that's why if you're in a denomination send your numbers in every year somebody's our God every year we gotta set the massive sheet 150 questions all of them about numbers Wednesday night and conversions and baptisms and all this stuff and there were several years I'd look at it and go

is there somewhere I can just write down it stinks right now leave me alone and send it in but every year Ascended in faithfully why because I wanted a nomination of they're not dealing with fifty or hundred people on a denominational level they're dealing with thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands nationally or internationally millions of people so they need accurate numbers because small shifts a 10% when you're dealing with millions of people a 10% shift up or down changes a ton of stuff you're budgeting in and the way you Approach things and whether or

not you're moving forward or backward so we need to report so they're not obsessed with numbers because for no good reason they're obsessed with numbers because when you get to that size the numbers have a bigger bigger bigger indication of health and of the decisions you make but we just can't live and die by the numbers in a smaller group they don't mean as much to us because of the size so let me walk you through a couple Other principles before we do break for lunch here one of the primary differences between big and small

churches is that big church principles center on process systems in curriculum so you go to a conference and lately all they seem to be talking about is this new system this new process this new method and then you break from the big thing you go into this massive room where they're all trying to sell you the latest curriculum I remember talking to A pastor a couple years ago and he actually said to me have they just forgotten about Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit are we just gonna save the world through methods now

now I thought about it and thought no I don't think that's the case I think what it is is when you're IKEA sized and your methods aren't perfect the thing Falls to pieces so you have to have good methods when your IKEA sized so they're not denying the power of the Holy Spirit but methods and systems and processes just matter more when there are bigger numbers because you have to otherwise it falls to pieces there's too many people not to have precise systems and places so they just need it more but in small church a

small churches principle Center on relationships culture and history so let me walk you through the difference between those first of all relationships how many of you pastored in the 1990s most of you Are younger here but got a couple okay so you know that in the 1990s we were all legally required to write a mission statement it was mission statement decade man they discovered that every big growing church had a mission statement so that was going to be the answer we're all going to become big great churches if we all have a good mission statement

and we all got together and we all wrote it and then nobody's heard about it since then Because in a big in a big church you have to have a precise mission statement because the pastor isn't going to be at 90% of the meetings and so the mission statement keeps everybody on task but in a small church everybody's at everything so in a small church a mission statement doesn't keep us on task it feels manipulative I've had pastors and more than pastors church members why can't we just do the Great Commandment of the Great Commission

and you know my Answer is now you can they've done well for 2,000 years they'll do fine and so Jesus returns now in a bigger Church you have to refine Great Commandment and Great Commission is something specific again because there won't be a physical presence of a pastor or a staff member in in these meetings and so they have to know what they're how to stay on task any any a memorable mission statement helps do that but so the bigger the church the more important a mission Statement is the smaller a church is less important

it is the Venn diagram going in and out okay so because it's about relationships in a smaller Church secondly culture now when I say culture I don't mean a contemporary traditional casual formal cult that that's style that's surface I'm talking culture which is the stuff beneath the surface when I say the culture of a church what I mean is the unwritten rules that everybody goes by even if they're not aware of it In fact the most the strongest culture enforcers in your church may have no idea they're enforcing a culture we've always done it this

way is a statement of culture and the people who are insisting on it have no idea they're doing it culture is the unwritten rules by which every church operates and we got to go back to the beginning word of the session discovering in a big church the pastor and pastoral staff establish create and promote the culture because When you walk into a church of a thousand or more you don't expect to influence the culture you expect to be told what the culture is and what the mission is and I'll agree with it or not agree

with it and stay or don't stay based on whether I agree with it or not agree with it I don't expect to change it I just want to know what it is but in a small church culture is huge and a small church is established by the people who've been there by the Relationships by their history by their background by the good and bad things that have happened and as a pastor we have some influence on affecting it that's what leadership is about anyway but we don't create it we have to discover it now what

do I think about culture the best illustration I know of it is Jesus parable of the sower and he tells the story of the sower going out to sow seed and the seed is good seed doesn't change so the seed in this as Will use it say is the mission or the vision or the new idea that you've got for the church and it's a good idea it's a good seed and in some churches we toss out that seed and some churches the reaction every time is not going to do that in my church if

that's the reaction you get and you've got a church that is the first type of ground it's the hard ground the seed lands it doesn't penetrate the birds come up and pick it and there's no harvest because it's too Hard so what do we have to do we have to soften the culture of our church it's a hard culture you cannot sew a good seed into a bad culture if you've been frustrated trying to put a good seed you got great ideas good mission I know this is where God wants us to go and they

keep resisting keep resisting keep resisting the problem is not the mission the problem is the culture there's a saying in business right now and it's a really good one culture eats strategy For breakfast what that means is you can have a great strategy and a great mission and if you're trying to put it into bad soil it will not work so we before we spend all of this energy on the next new mission or the next new vision or the next new event or the next new idea you've got to figure out is my culture

sick and if so I have to make it healthy so I have a good place to plant the seed otherwise I'm gonna waste the seed so the first one is the stubborn Culture or maybe you've got a culture in which you present an idea and they go that's a great idea pastor let's do that and then nobody shows up for the planning meeting why second soil Jesus says it goes in and it penetrates and a little bit of a bug comes up but that it dies in the heat of the day when it's called upon

to do some work why because it's shallow it can't go deep enough so if you've got a church culture that says Yes to great ideas but nobody follows through you have a shallow church culture and you've got to help deepen it you got to help go deep you may have to spend some time in real serious scripture study of what the church is supposed to be about and what the mission really is and reestablish reestablishing mission back into the church if you've got a shallow culture or you've got another culture that says grant idea pastor

let's do that we'll Add it to the 17 other things we're doing this week and that's the third type where it grows up but there's so many weeds and thistles and thorns that it chokes out the good stuff it's a busy church culture there's just so much going on that nothing new can't get traction there's a lot of our churches that are just doing too much stuff it's like the mayor restaurant makeover show that says you can't do 179 things out of that tiny little kitchen I'm gonna give you one page of five items all

on a theme and you're going to be the best restaurant in town that does just that food and every time the restaurateur resists it and goes oh no no we can't just do that what about this so we got regular who loves such and such yeah but you got like three regulars dude all right nobody in town is doing gourmet burgers or nobody in town is doing gastropub or nobody in town is doing such and such you can do It in your kitchen you can have five items that you can be all practically world-renowned certainly

regionally renowned for but you can't have 50 items that you're renowned for you'll do 50 items badly or you go into five items really really well and in small churches those are the kinds of choices we need to make but the busy culture says we're gonna try to do it all and it all gets choked out and nothing gets done so we got to get rid of the weeds gotta get Rid of the extras we'll talk about how to do that in the next session and then the fourth culture it goes in it goes deep

it takes root it and it produces a harvest why because it's not hard and it is deep and it's not overwhelmed with other things that's a healthy Church culture and so we have to figure out what culture is now how do you figure that out in your church the best resource I know for that is a book that a friend of mine wrote called Culture wins no I'm sorry culture wins just came out by Van der bloomin and he's got some good stuff on it but better for small churches is a book called dirt matters

by Jim Powell and if you go to the URL on the right there the new small church comm / Arlington there's a link to his book on those notes so dirt matters by Jim Powell he's actually raised on a farm he pastors a church in Peoria Illinois loves small churches wrote this from a Small church perspective and he goes through everything I just talked about and then he says here's how to discover what the culture of your church is and here's how to change it over to a healthy culture best in a very short book

very simple very practical it will help you better than any church I know if you feel like the issue in your church may not be a mission problem but maybe a culture problem dirt matters is the best place I know to go to get that So check that out so that's culture and then the third one is history small towns have long memories and so do small churches there are history enforcers in your church if you've been around for any or if the church has been around for any length of time and especially if you

haven't so if you are new to an old church this is particularly important for you today do not ignore the history of your church here's the challenge we get we're trying To pull our church towards a preferred future and it feels like the history of the church is like an anchor pulling us back anybody ever had that experience pretty much everybody right then what we want to do is want to push even further into the future and the more we pushed the more the history keeps pulling us back what's why won't they do this why

is it always happening and the answer to it isn't to try to push them even further away from their history it is to Let some slack come in and actually go and dig into that history as here's what you'll find churches were not planted by sticks in the mud and old fuddy-duddies churches are planted by pioneers and visionaries and if you go back and rediscover why the church was started in the first place whether it's your denomination or your individual congregation you will find very inspiring very forward-looking ideas and quotes and thoughts and then you

can go To the history and forces in your church and you can go look what I just found from the founding pastor well look what John Wimber said about moving the church forward into the future or look what Chuck Smith said about what he wanted calvary chapel to be i know you love the history of this church here's part of the history of this church give you an example of how it happened in ours a few years ago we were about to celebrate our 50th anniversary as a church so we got Out all the stuff

from the archives we put pictures out and documents and everything else and i'm going through it all on the lobby and I see this one picture and it's I see this one a newspaper article and it's this this is the picture I took of it the church can work with delinquents I love that title so in the early 60s just a year or two after our church started and you'll see in the first paragraph it was written by someone who calls themselves an Institutional caseworker and probation officer and he's been looking for can the church

actually help now if you're under 40 delinquent doesn't mean they're late on their bills the linked ones are what we used to call kids that we now call at-risk youth we used to call them juvenile delinquents so we're talking about at-risk youth here my church was started with the mission of reaching the kids that other churches couldn't reach stated by the founding pastor in a Document that I had now on my phone that I can pull out any time and I read that and I took the picture because I'm looking out my window at in

our parking lot which has limited parking to begin with we have the only skatepark in town because 15 years ago when we resurfaced our parking lot all of a sudden there's noise outside and all the kid shown up on their skateboards because we now have the smoothest surface in town and so our youth pastor and I said okay We've got a choice we can either find and put up a whole bunch of no skateboarding signs or we can put up some ramps and we decided churches on defense put up signs and churches on offense put

up ramps and we're always going to stay on offense and we went around and we begged for every piece of scrap we could find and cobbled together this ridiculous ugly looking skateboard park and the kids showed up from everywhere because we had the only one In town more kids have come to Christ more families have come to Christ through that skateboard park than probably anything else we've done in the last 15 years and we didn't do it because we said oh the cool new Church down the street is doing a skateboard park we did it

because they were in our parking lot there on site already take advantage of it what's in your neighborhood what's happening immediately outside your doors And how do you do how do you go out to them and minister to them be on offense not defense and so we discovered that and then I saw that and thought I'm gonna take that picture because if anybody ever comes to me and goes I can't believe you've got a skateboard park in the parking lot the founders of this church would be appalled oh really the church can work with juvenile

delinquents that's what our founding pastor said I you can use your past to Propel you into your future if you look through your founding documents you will find gold like that from the founders who had visionary ideas because people don't start new churches because they want to do things the way they've always done them data stayed in their old church if they wanted to do it the way had always been done so we can honor the past well or the way I like to put it is this we need to do what our founders don't

do what your founders did think Like your founders thought we think we're honoring honoring the founders of our church by duplicating their methods they weren't method duplicators that's why they started something new we have to think the way they thought how do we do a new thing for a new generation using the same gospel that hasn't changed in 2,000 years we got to think like they thought so what do we do from that point on we got got we got half a minute I'm gonna give you this Quick story the old story about a guy

who's walking around a fireman he walks around the side of a barn and he sees that the archer has been shooting arrows against the side of a barn and there are five painted targets on the side of the barn and in the center of each target there's an arrow dead center and he looks at the archer and back at the target and he goes wow you must be practicing a law in time to hit five targets dead center how did you get so Good the archer doesn't say anything pulls the five arrows from their targets

puts them in his quiver walks around the other side of the barn there's nothing on that side of the barn except the barn door he aims for the barn door lets an arrow go and it goes 20 feet off to the left well that's weird shoots another one at the barn door 20 feet off to the right what's going on here five arrows five complete misses but the arch is not upset the archer Goes and grabs a paintbrush and paints a target around where each arrow hit the barn and now each target is dead center

that to me is a great illustration of how we start figuring out what our church is supposed to do well because what happens is if that archer had shot a hundred arrows instead of five you discover that arrows tend to clump a hundred arrows maybe 50 of them hit randomly with no order whatsoever but 25 of them are kind of in this area and 25 Are kind of in that area which means this archer in this spot with these weather conditions with that Sun in their eyes with those types of arrows whatever all the entire

thing of this all coming together tends to mean I'm gonna hit those two spots more often so what do you do get it a paint brush paint a big old target around those two spots and now aim there on purpose because if you've been hitting those two targets by mistake imagine how often You'll hit them if you try to do it on purpose so what it wit does that mean for the church here's what it means want to figure out what your vision is what your mission statement should be and what you should do as

a church don't sit and think about it don't even sit and just pray about it pray about it yes but don't just pray about it and think about it yes but don't just think about it start doing stuff start shooting arrows what arrows I don't know Great Commandment Great Commission arrows do the Jesus stuff do the stuff that every church is supposed to do but now start paying attention to what works watch where your arrows hit and what you'll discover is a theme to the things that work now it may be a different theme than

you're looking for you and your head might now right now because it's how most pastors think may have an age-appropriate theme we want to reach kids or we want to reach youth or we Want to use young adults or we want to reach seniors but when we try this for seniors it works and that one doesn't work and we try this for youth it works but that one doesn't work when we try for this kids it that works we're never successful on any age group maybe we don't have a mission oh no take a look

at what did work for seniors for youth for young marrieds for kids and what is the theme of the thing that did work and what you may discover is oh every time We did benevolence everybody showed up or every time we did evangelism everybody showed up or every time we did it with a missions orientation everybody showed up so it's not about age appropriate it's about oh we're a recovery church we discovered that a few years ago what I discovered was we don't have a lot of first-time conversions in our church and it frustrated me

to no end is still frustrated it's true to a certain degree because the Great Commission you know kind of matters but what we were doing was we were researching D churched people so it wasn't first-time conversions but it was coming back to Jesus and what we discovered was their fall away from the late they leave for college they fall away from the Lord they get married and have kids or they have kids and then get married and the seven-year old comes to them one day and goes daddy who's Jesus and daddy goes oh I need

to get my kid In a church but I don't want to go back to the church I left that's why we left it and they hear from their neighbor check out cornerstone it's kind of different you and your kids might like it and they show and they go oh yeah this feels right to me not everybody some walk out and go what a bunch of weirdos but the ones are weirdos like it all right and they come back okay not a lot of first-time Conversions and we discovered that we want oh that's we do that

well let's do that on purpose now we also discovered that we send people often to mission really really well we're always losing our a team constantly losing our a team we've invested in them we've put money into them time resources they're just great they're just beginning to really be good on the worship team or they're just beginning to lead Sunday school really Really well and then some other pastor calls them and offers to pay them to do that and they're so unholy they want a roof over their head and clothes on their back so they

take the paying gig it happens constantly and we discovered we're doing that we didn't choose to I wouldn't have chosen to do something that loses good people I would not have been my choice right but several years ago we discovered how we keep saying goodbye to these great People and it's not because they're mad at us it's because they're going off on a full-time ministry so I go to the board and I go I think that's part of our mission but are we okay with investing time energy resources and money into people who as soon

as they get good enough to pay us back we'll leave because some of us you're just gonna pay them and to a person our entire leadership says says it's at it sounds like kingdom growth to us let's Do it so now we do it on purpose we lose good people on purpose a kid who was raised in our church was my youth pastors is my youth pastor son was yeah it still is my youth pastors son we actually helped to pay for him to go to Hillsong he was you know he played some guitar so

we put him on stage he got better and played really good then wanted to go to Hillsong we helped raise some money to send him the family paid most of it where we helped a little bit He comes back to Orange County and what's he doing now he's the worship leader at the new Hillsong in Orange County six miles away we paid for that in many many many ways and you know how good you gotta be to be leading and worship on a Hillsong campus and he's over there doing it for them like they need

another worship leader and I'm joking about it because it's true but there's no jealousy every time I see a picture him on Instagram in Front of a big crowd of people leading at Hillsong go and I'll go I'll even sit there and take some credit for it we're contributing to the kingdom and we would we have pic that know somebody strategizes that that's a dumb strategy but when you're doing it already and you choose to go I'm gonna lean into that for the cane sake of the kingdom that's where our arrows hit and then once

you discover it then you so you discover we shirts as well then do it on purpose and Then what you got to do is front-load the value by front-loading the value I mean once you figure out what you do well don't let people wade through all kinds of stuff you do badly in order to get the stuff you do well once you figure out what you do well then write something and if you want to call it a mission statement fine you know why most of our mission statements didn't work because they were based on

something we wanted to be and not something we were But if you look at it and go okay we do this already fairly well by mistake let's do it on purpose and become really good at it and then after you become really good at it then write out a statement that says we're the church that does this two quick examples then we'll go for lunch one from a mega church one from a small church mega church Hillsong remember when they first started coming out with all these songs right probably shout to the Lord was the

First one that I'll kind of registered with all of us I'm thing a man all these songs come out of this church that just happens to be named Hillsong there's no just happens to it it used to be called Sydney Hill Community Church and then they started being known for their songs so Brian Houston goes we're known for our songs let's change our name and put song in the name now as a pastor imagine what that took because you heard Darlene Checks name before you ever heard Brian Houston's name and the ego that he had

to put down to go I'm gonna promote what my worship pastors doing she's known worldwide for her songs I'm gonna song and the title of the church to push her out even more front even it pushes me in the back that's some pretty good leadership right there now I'm not telling you to change your church name but that's how they did it you can't Touch that church without knowing their about songs because it's in the stinkin name talk about putting it out front they don't they don't hide their value they put it right in the

name small Church example little Church in Ione in California io NE you can google it the state prison that's just outside the border of town has more people in it than the town has in it they call it their neighbors in the gated community and it's what the pastor calls at the Gated community next door it's the state prison men's prison because the men's prison is next door you got a whole bunch of women in town who are married to or girlfriends of the men in the prison and including their kids and so a few

years ago the streets of IO and started getting overrun by these kids who don't have good father figures cuz dads in the gated community next door and mom showed up without a job so mom's probably doing things on the street that She shouldn't be doing to put my food in their belly and this tiny little church the assembly got in Ione California looked around and said somebody's got to help these kids and then they realized well we're the one with the heart for it so we're the one with the job and they they partnered with

other groups like rural compassion and every year before before the school comes they have a big backpack drive and they give a backpack to every kid who needs it for school Three or four times a year they do other programs from food to distributing school supplies to other stuff they take care of the kids on the street in their town and you cannot touch that church without seeing Ione Assembly of God the church that cares for kids if you go to their Facebook page today well I can't say today it was there yesterday I haven't

checked today they better keep it up I put it in the book on their Facebook page is a picture of their Church building hidden behind a bounce house and the fret saying the church that cares for kids you can't touch that church without knowing what they're about they didn't choose that mission the mission chose them but they bought it and they put it out front and they say this is who we are so what do we do start shooting arrows do the Jesus stuff pay attention to what works see if you can find a common

theme to the things That work then do it on purpose and then tell everybody this is who we are and what we do and you notice what I'm bringing you to is not saying hey here's a cool idea that church did do it this way don't borrow another template from another church figure out the DNA of your church figure out what God has called your church to do and be by noticing what you do well and then just do it better be the church God has designed you to be and we as pastors get To

do the process of discovery and then promoting that we'll get into some more details this next session [Music]