During the last couple of months (as you will have gathered from my last post) I've been thinking about how it is that people grow, what is that they need to be changed into the likeness of Christ? I've come to the conclusion that there are three things needed if a person is to come to maturity in the faith.
The first is EDUCATION. We all need to learn about what it means to follow God and to keep on learning all of our lives. God is too big and the adventure of following him too expansive for us to get to know all that we can in one lifetime. I've used the word education rather than teaching. 'Teaching' puts the emphasis on the teacher, education puts more of an emphasis on the learner. We each have the responsibility to discover for ourselves the riches of Christ's grace. This is not about getting to know the Bible better, although it is part of it. When Jesus gave the great commission he said "Go and make disciples of all nations....teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you". The whole point of learning more is about the transformation of our character and behaviour. If what we learn doesn't transform us in some way then it is a pointless exercise.
There are three things here that I have been thinking about. The first is how we encourage people to 'feed' themselves and to take responsibility for their own growth. In all the conversations I've had with people from church it is clear that few actually do that. They will ocassionally read the scriptures, but not in a regular systematic way, perhaps never read a christian book and very rarely attend any christian event, apart from sunday worship (and then not every week), where there may be life transforming teaching.
The other thing is about the responsibility of those who teach in church to teach well and to seek to accommodate those who learn in different ways. Not everyone learns well by simply sitting listen to a sermon, not matter how good it is. I'd like us to work harder at making sermons and other teaching events more interactive, visual and relevant. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do well, as anyone who has seen our different attempts up until now, will testify. However, we have to keep working on it more and more. James 3:1 says that those of us who teach will be judged more strictly than others. This is not just about being doctrinally or biblically correct in our teaching but also in the character of the teachers and the way in which the teaching is presented.
The last thing is what other ways can we provide for teaching on certain subjects and what should those subjects be. For a person to grow in their faith I have, after a lot of thought, concluded that there are certain things that we need to provide teaching on for basic discipleship. They are; how to learn, spiritual disciplines, overview of the Bible, who we are in Christ, discovering your gifts/strengths/purpose, how to develop a supernatural lifestyle and understanding evangelism/our mission. It's a bit of a list and I'm sure that other could suggest other subjects, but these are I believe the ones that we need to work on. How they will be delivered though is another question (and yes I have thoughts on that as well).
The next two blogs will cover the other aspects of what is needed to grow in discipleship.
Monday 29 October 2007
Wednesday 17 October 2007
Measuring Growth
Most Church leaders I know (and I include myself in this) have a major obsession and that is the number of bums on pews on a sunday morning. There is a very good reason for this, how else is a church leader going to know if they are being 'successful'. Things like bums on pews and also how much money is given every week are one of the few things we can measure as church leaders. We all know that numbers on a sunday are not necessarily the best way of measuring success (Jesus wasn't always very good with numbers!!), but they are one of the few things we can actually measure in Church. I use the word 'success' guardedly because it's not a word that sits easily in the context of Church life. Some people don't like it because it makes the church sound like a business. We could easily use biblical words like fruitful but for now I'll use 'success'.
There's some research come out of Willow Creek Church, and documented in the book 'Reveal', that looks at how we can measure the one thing that needs to be measured in order to gauge 'success' and that is our hearts. After all a truly successful church is one in which all its members are growing in their discipleship. Success is really defined by the christlikeness of our membership but how do you measure that. Wiilow Creek have tried to do that. Drawing on the skills of a top market researcher who specialises in assessing people's attitudes and behaviours to different products, they have tried to assess their church members on how they feel they are growing in the faith. It is a very interesting book that expresses the struggle they had in trying to develop a tool to assess whether people are growing or not. Through the research they make a number of interesting discoveries and were able to create predictive models of how people might feel as they grow in faith.
The interesting thing for me on this is that I have been thinking about how we could develop a questionnaire that helped us to consider whether people felt they were growing in their faith, what they found helped them most in growing and how the church could help them grow. Can it be done, can we really measure people's hearts. I think whatever could be done would only ever give an indication of what was happening in the hearts and lives of church members, but it is certainly better than what we have now in terms of that kind of information which is simply hearsay and intuition. So at the moment I'm slowly working on trying to develop this form. Maybe nothing will come of it but you never know in a few weeks time I might be asking you all to help me measure your heartsand let's see how 'succesful' we really are!
There's some research come out of Willow Creek Church, and documented in the book 'Reveal', that looks at how we can measure the one thing that needs to be measured in order to gauge 'success' and that is our hearts. After all a truly successful church is one in which all its members are growing in their discipleship. Success is really defined by the christlikeness of our membership but how do you measure that. Wiilow Creek have tried to do that. Drawing on the skills of a top market researcher who specialises in assessing people's attitudes and behaviours to different products, they have tried to assess their church members on how they feel they are growing in the faith. It is a very interesting book that expresses the struggle they had in trying to develop a tool to assess whether people are growing or not. Through the research they make a number of interesting discoveries and were able to create predictive models of how people might feel as they grow in faith.
The interesting thing for me on this is that I have been thinking about how we could develop a questionnaire that helped us to consider whether people felt they were growing in their faith, what they found helped them most in growing and how the church could help them grow. Can it be done, can we really measure people's hearts. I think whatever could be done would only ever give an indication of what was happening in the hearts and lives of church members, but it is certainly better than what we have now in terms of that kind of information which is simply hearsay and intuition. So at the moment I'm slowly working on trying to develop this form. Maybe nothing will come of it but you never know in a few weeks time I might be asking you all to help me measure your heartsand let's see how 'succesful' we really are!
Monday 8 October 2007
Developing Strengths
Over the weekend Andrea and I were at the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit. There were 8 sessions across two days and each session had something major to reflect on afterwards. However, the session that stood out for me was by a guy called Marcus Buckingham who advises companies and corporations on how to recognise, develop and use the individual strengths of their employees. He made the point that all to often we focus on building up a persons weaknesses rather than fulfilling the potential of their strengths.
This obviously has relevance to the church and to our discipleship. We recognise that we have God-given natural abilities and personalities and we also have supernatural gifts that all must be used in serving God in the world. A major part of our discipleship is recognising what they are and looking for the best way to use them. Most Christians I know would say that they haven't yet discovered what those gifts and abilities are, despite the fact that there are great tools for helping with this, Willow's network course and the S.H.A.P.E. course from Saddleback Church are great for helping people with this.
Part of the problem I think is they way we run church. Churches tend to focus on fitting people into their existing programs rather than fitting their programs around the gifts and strengths of the people in the church.
Listening to Marcus got me thinking about what would St Andrew's look like if we focussed on people's strengths and gifts. If we only developed our Church life around what people had been gifted to do rather than trying to shoehorn them into what we are already doing or think we should do. The strengths and gifts of the people in our church is our most valuable resource - maybe we are wasting that resource?
This obviously has relevance to the church and to our discipleship. We recognise that we have God-given natural abilities and personalities and we also have supernatural gifts that all must be used in serving God in the world. A major part of our discipleship is recognising what they are and looking for the best way to use them. Most Christians I know would say that they haven't yet discovered what those gifts and abilities are, despite the fact that there are great tools for helping with this, Willow's network course and the S.H.A.P.E. course from Saddleback Church are great for helping people with this.
Part of the problem I think is they way we run church. Churches tend to focus on fitting people into their existing programs rather than fitting their programs around the gifts and strengths of the people in the church.
Listening to Marcus got me thinking about what would St Andrew's look like if we focussed on people's strengths and gifts. If we only developed our Church life around what people had been gifted to do rather than trying to shoehorn them into what we are already doing or think we should do. The strengths and gifts of the people in our church is our most valuable resource - maybe we are wasting that resource?
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