Peacemongers

I think people have heard me talk about this before. I read about 15 books at a time and finish about 100/year. Nothing to boast about. I am just that ADD. Recently I have been working through A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman.

Freidman was a Rabbi turned family psychologist. He began to be sought after for his application of family therapy to “bigger” families—organizations. If his assumptions are true, our understanding of leadership would be deeply impacted.

Here is a quote. Let me know what you think.

In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is tha the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger. By that I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a “middler,” someone who is so incapable of taking well-defined stands that his “disability” seems to be genetic, someone who functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats conflict or anxiety like mustard gas—one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask, and he flits. Such leaders are often “nice,” if not charming. (Failure of Nerve, 14)

What is the difference between a peacemonger and a peacemaker? I have some partially formed ideas . . . but what do you think?

Betty Louise Roberts

During the Christmas season our family and several families go Christmas caroling to shut-ins.  Each family brings homemade cookies, candy and cards to share.  We make baskets from the cookies and candy that everyone brings. These then are given  to people we carol to.  Afterwards we gather for chili at my home.  Try it sometime it's great.

Every year we have been visiting an old friend who has struggled through a hip surgery and the loneliness of not being able to get out much.  Her name was Betty Louise Roberts.  She died last week.  This Friday my wife and I attended her funeral.  When my five year-old son found out he asked, "Do you mean we won't get to sing to Betty this Christmas?"  I realized in that moment that sometimes we do ministry, only to find out that we are ministering to ourselves.

One of Betty's best known quotes was: "God looks out for us all week long; we can afford to give Him one hour a week."

Have you ever thought you were doing ministry only to find that you were ministered to more than ministering yourself?

5 Priorities

While our core team was in Georgia for n*Rich, we had an opportunity to list the top five priorities of each or our positions.

We have a unique staff structure at River Park Community Church. We are trying to pry off the lid for growth by separating the talker from the leader. Most churches expect the Senior Pastor to be an excellent weekly communicator and an excellent leader of people. We have all experienced senior pastors that are good talkers and poor leaders. We have experienced senior pastors who are great leaders but can't keep an audience awake for thirty minutes in a row.

I think not only is this gift mix rare, the reality is that even where both gifts exist in one person, one person simply doesn't have the time to do both. Something gets cheated--usually it isn't weekly communication. We are prying the lid off of the church in this area--more on this later.

We have five staff members: Lead Pastor, Lead Communicator, Executive Pastor (Admin/Groups), Service Programming Director and Kidstuf Director.

As a team we defined the five priorities of each position. Maybe I will spend some time fleshing out each of the priorities later. Here is the short list though:

Lead Pastor:
1. Vision Casting
2. Staff Development
3. Fundraising
4. Key Leader Recruitment/Development
5. Strategic Planning

Lead Communicator:
1. Series Planning, Sermon Prep. and Delivery
2. Managing alternate communication channels
3. Fundraising
4. Communicating Vision and Strategy
5. Married Life Live/Parent Matters

Executive Pastor:
1. Dashboard
2. Groups vision and leader training
3. Group tracking
4. Records and Legal documents
5. Cultivate a culture of giving

Service Programming Director:
1. Guest Services
2. Recruitment and management of SPD team
3. Oversee, design and maintain Worship Experience environment/context
4. Pre-production, creative planning and evaluation
5. Implementing vision of worship experience/big picture

Kidstuf Director:
1. KS Stage production
2. Recruitment and training of cast and crew
3. Oversee, design, maintain KS environment/context
4. Pre-production, Creative planning & evaluation
5. Graphic design

More on the details later . . . Our next step is to fill in these priorities. I plan to assign a one line "win" to each position. Then we create an organizational chart for a church of 750 and put our names in each of the slots.

Flannery O'Connor

O'Connor is one my favorite Catholic writers next to Walker Percy and more recently Mary Doria Russell.

She is best quoted as saying "for the near blind you have to draw really large pictures and for the hard of hearing you must shout really loud." She said this in response to the many people who were offended by her use of shocking characters and circumstances in her stories.

Edwin Friedman, author of Friedman's fables, had a similar philosophy. He wrote his fables to induce anxiety. Sometimes you have to shout really loud.

While on our way to Savannah, Georgia, we stopped in Milledgeville. There is not much in Milledgeville except the family residence of Flannery O'Connor. She spent the last decade of her life here battling the disease that consumed her at age 39. She wrote some her best stories. Sometimes I wonder what she would have written had she lived longer.

If you have never read O'Connor start with "The Misfit" or "Parker's Back." Out of all the literature I read at Wheaton College, I return most often to O'Connor and George Herbert.

Here is a question: Should we shock or induce anxiety in order to jumpstart life-transformation?

River Park went down to Georgia

Friday was our first official meeting since James and I returned from an internship at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. To celebrate we had a Southern potluck—does that make us Baptist? Maybe . . . Southern Baptist?

Our featured food was Marcona Almonds—guaranteed to keep your spleen lean. They are from the South of Spain . . . which is a sort of South.

If you didn’t make it, you missed some great food and lots of sweet tea. You also missed an update on what is happening at RPCC.

Some things we talked about:

The mission of River Park Community Church is to lead people in a growing relationship with Jesus Christ by creating irresistible environments that encourage intimacy with God, community with insiders and influence with outsiders.

In a past blog I talked about 5 catalysts of faith—five things that God uses to grow us spiritually. They are practical teaching, providential relationships, private disciplines, pivotal circumstances and personal ministry. We believe that the best thing a church can do is create environments where those five catalysts can be best leveraged. One of those environments is community groups. A community group is a small group of people--8-12 people committed to meeting together on a regular basis for fellowship and Bible study. It is where I believe that all five catalyst converge. It is where people do life on life.

Important Dates: Our goal is to launch two irresistible environments in the fall: Kidstuf on September 14th and our Worship Experience on October 5th. We will be alternating Kidstuf and the worship experience until January 4th.

Our next launch meeting is Sunday August 3rd at 6:30pm at the DeLillo’s.

Four Things: I often get asked about membership at RPCC. Membership is participation. Specifically, to be a part of RPCC we want people to be involved in four things. (One day we will have some great branding for this, cute logos and maybe a jingle—but right now it will be known as four things.) We want every person at RPCC to be involved in community groups and investing in outsiders and inviting them to our environments. We want people to be percentage givers and involved in personal ministry at RPCC. Those are the four things.

Hope to see you on Sunday August 3rd at 6:30pm. We are currently attending the 9am worship service at Camarillo Community Church.

Creative Boards

Creative boards changed my life.

We made our own--six of them actually for about $200.

Thanks Jayne, Dave and Allie for sewing 18 yards of fabric into River Park Community Church's creative boards.

We are a church plant that will be launching services in September 2008 . . . that takes a lot of creativity.

Our first project is to design what each of our environments is going to look like (worship experience, guest services, signs on the street, children's check in, kidstuf, bathrooms, resource tables etc . . . )

So yesterday I took 90 pictures of Rio Vista Middle School--our current facility.

I arranged the pictures of the school around the site map.  Our goal is to get a feel for the school--the layout of the facility, flow from street, to parking entrance, to gate to building, to children's ministry rooms.

I also took pictures of the color and textures used in the school facility.

These creative boards will be on display at tonight's launch team meeting.

When we have our creative meeting we will be cutting pictures out of magazines that represent what we want each area to look like.  We will make a collage of pictures around the photographs I took.

These collages will become the inspiration for what we will purchase to create our environments.

That's just one way of using a creative board.  Check out my friend Carlos at Buckhead Church for what they do with creative boards by clicking here.

What do you do to organize your creative processes?

What do pastor's do all day?

I have been trying to figure out how to justify the purchase of a new iphone 3g.  

My palm treo is barely working--four keys on the keypad require a blow to the bottom of the phone to get them to work.

So I figured it out . . . People often ask me what I do during the week.

What does a paster do during the week?

Usually because it seems most of what we do happens on Sunday.

And if you are not preaching on Sunday . . . like me.  It is sometimes even harder to explain. 

So . . . here is my plan.  If I get an iphone, I can twitter.

And since my life is so glamorous . . . you will all want to follow my twitter.

Ever wondered what a pastor does during the week?  How about a church planter?

Drywall Ringworm?

I just returned from a weekend trip.  

I returned to a house with little black circles on the wall.

They are all about three feet from the floor?

Any guesses?

Well . . . it is not some rare form of ringworm that only attacks sheet rock.

My almost 4-year-old son is a little over 3 feet tall.  We have a black toilet plunger.  Let's just say he is very creative.

I wonder what he was thinking while plunging the walls?

What do your kids do that can be both aggravating and laughable at the same time?