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Church

the Mission Church Trustees don’t want you to think about

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mission of church to revitalize buildingsI find myself driving around my neighborhoods and the nashville area eyeing properties that are vacant or left dilapidated and wonder, “Wonder what that could be for the church?” Warehouse spaces could be food pantries, shopping areas could be start up businesses for job training centers, some areas could be reclaimed for the land for community parks/playgrounds/gardens, maybe some building/neighborhood could be renovated for some intentional living communities are just some of my thoughts on re-claiming space. Those are just dreaming ideas for me at this time.

However, with this dreaming I am super intrigued by Hope Church’s efforts to re-claim their neighborhood areas and create safe livable housing for people who might, for whatever reason, get stuck in squaller conditions.

For more than a decade, the 700-member church off John Young Parkway has been buying and rehabilitating Washington Shores buildings to revitalize the area.

“We’re not a church that solely exists within these four walls,” Wiggins said one recent morning in his office. “We are a church that is taking our faith to the community.”

Surely this isn’t without a headache or some troubled moments, but when is something meaningful completely stress free? What would it take for the church, general, seek out ways similar to this as a way to meat the needs of the people and be some vision of Kingdom? I would love to be a part of a church that does that.

Maybe in stead of taking hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to make our sanctuaries cooler (in figurative sense, or the HVAC sense if you want) but take some portion of that to invest in community improvements or making sure those who are struggling can live safely and with dignity. That’d be a cool break of some cycles of poverty and self-service that I couldn’t imagine Jesus seeing any other way than a good thing.

It would take time, but home runs have be earned after some batting practice and a few foul balls, but you never get there unless you imagine you can do it and then actually go out and do it.

Missional Drive Church?

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I was pretty impressed with this pastor who has started a ‘Drive In’ church. Wasn’t so much impressed that he’s doing a drive in church, that seems rather silly to me. I was impressed that he is choosing to do sermons outside in the Texas heat wave this summer. That is just insane.

Vans and trucks drove into the parking lot of Lovejoy High School to be part of “Sanctuary Under the Sky,” Rev. David Ray’s new drive-in church.

“The sound is transmitted over the car radio so they just tune into the frequency that it’s set to. They can hear, they’re encouraged to participate. Everything that the congregation is asked to do is printed in the bulletin,” said Ray.

Ray, pastor of Presbyterian Church of the Master, stands in the parking lot conducting the service as churchgoers watch through their dashboard windows.

What caught me by surprise with this story is that he was a Presbyterian pastor. Not the normal kind the norm of worship for a mainline minister. So as with any bored moment I went and looked up ‘drive in church‘ and come to realize, he doesn’t actually know how to look for others doing the same thing (claimed in article that he’s only one doing this that he’s aware of), because it seems other churches have driveinchurch.net websites. Turns out a Disciples of Christ church has been at this for almost 50 years. In their history this is their reasoning for a drive in church.

The purpose of these services was to reach a large number of people with the good news including tourists, the physically challenged and provide an opportunity for the whole family to worship together. The Drive-In Church is new and different, yet it is deeply spiritual and reverently worshipful. As our Pastor was quoted in The Washington Post in a recent article on our church. “We worship outdoors, by the sea as did Jesus.”

So has me wondering, is this like the first emergent / missional / emerging / post-modern church?

Or maybe, is the car such a comfort buffer that we prevent ourselves from ever actually being community because we never get in proximal distance to one another?

Come on, Take the Money and Run Church!

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“Come on, Take the Money and Run. Woo, Woo!” (couldn’t resist a little Steve Miller Band in this posting)

In my methodist church they have stated that a lottery is in congruent with Christian practice.. or more exactly.

Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life, and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice.

Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual’s energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends.

The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unnecessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling—including public lotteries—as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government.

From The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church – 2004. Copyright 2004 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Used by permission.

When I lived in Alabama the churches were in a uproar over a lottery trying to be pushed through the government. A governor was elected with the implementation of a lottery as a big platform. However, it got shot down pretty quickly (and I don’t think he won a second term). In Tennessee we had the same uprising, but a lottery passed through regardless. In both cases there was always this hypothetical. What if someone in your congregation won the lottery and gave the money to the church, do you take it?

Well, not so much a hypothetical question anymore..

As it turns out this church had an instant win card worth $80,000 dropped off in the offering plate. It was anonymous so the church folks say and they are not to bashful about accepting it.

“The money is going towards the church and we have to supply the food for the neighborhood, the clothing, everything costs and we give this stuff away free,” says Alfonzo Riggins.

Riggins has been attending cathedral of prayer church for the past 15 years, He also handles security for the pastor and first lady of the church.

He says he has already received criticisms from people in the community about the church accepting the money.

“God said a blessing is a blessing you know, no one at the church played the lottery so it had to be an outsider that came in and did this,” Riggins said.

News Leader 9 caught up with church members after Bible study.  They had no idea about the huge donation their church had gotten but agreed that it was in fact a gift from above.

“Everything comes from God, everything is a blessing however we received it, and it’s a blessing I’m not telling anybody to go out and gamble but however God gave it to you then receives it as that,” Riggins said.  “I haven’t found out yet and I’m not going to ask that question unless it’s given to me as a direct order to figure out where it came from.”

So what do you say? Anonymous gift to the church via gambling method a gift from God to be used or a deeper moral question that needs a more creative response?

If you were curious as to the church.

What is The Why of Ministry?

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I have been pondering this idea of “start with why” for my own ministries then it had me wondering. Does our church even know the ‘why’ of its existence? Sure there are some mission statements, but those are things that the church says it wants to be. Not really why it is there. Maybe I am thinking to hard on this, but companies who live to do their why have captured mass appeal. Maybe the church doesn’t need mass appeal.. The leaders of my faith expression sure seem to want ‘vital’ mass appeal.

P90X your Church Email!

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I happen to be subscribed to a number of church email newsletters. Some because I helped set them up and have not removed myself from the list, some because in a weak moment I wanted to know how they communicated. Many times I am feeling pretty bored with the emails. They are always doing the same things and in the same way. I know what is in there before I even open up the email.

P90X is a popular workout program that you would have to be under a rock not to have heard of it. If you own a tv you must not have it turned on ever to not have seen one of their commercials. One of their cool marketing tricks or actual solid training technique (you decide there) is their design of training called “muscle confusion.” The idea is simple, do different stuff so that your muscles never get used to the work out and will burn more calories because they are never conditioned to do a certain set of exercises.

Well, the brain is a muscle, although different than your buttocks it is a muscle and gets trained. So I had this idea. What if churches did their email communications with the p90x model of muscle confusion in mind. If you send an email each week have a different type of presenting a message, different layout, and different writers. Once you set up a few layouts and themes you can repeat using them in some random pattern. So far, it has been a concept that apparently is foreign to the people I have suggested it to because it does not compute or seems like too much work.

Funny enough, the MarketingProfs folks just put out an article with a similar thought process in mind “Variety is the Spice of Life.”

Lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for marketers. Businesses newer to email marketing or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list.

They go on to list 1. email newsletter 2. personal & holiday greetings 3. follow ups 4. educational entertainment as emails to spice things up instead of a constant barrage of promotional emails.

So what could mixing it up p90x style look like for a church email program?

  1. Email Newsletter: You want to push all your information at people in the hopes that they are now informed so go ahead, get that over with.
  2. Ministry Story: Find some good ministry stories to share. A paragraph or two, not more than 500 words though. If you can’t find 500 words to share some cool story about the ministry happening in your church then you have worse problems than an email communication issue. You can switch it up from choir, to youth ministry, to missions, then to worship. Again if your ministry leaders cannot come up with 500 words to share a story about their ministry then they have more problems to be dealt with than email. This practice though is helping the people of your church have stories to tell about the church family they are a part of. So when someone asks them, “what does your church do?” they will actually have some stories to answer with.
  3. Images Only Reflection: Put out an email that is just photos of the congregation. Sure you can link those images to something else. Please no cheesy clipart or stock photography. Really nice cameras are owned by at least a few people in your church. Charge them with photographing the work of their church as part of their mission. People love to see good photos. People love to see good photos of themselves and the intrigue that they might be featured in an email. Open rates will be huge!!
  4. Challenging Devotion or Message: Have a message, again less than 500 words that gives a glimpse of the Kingdom of God and gives some actionable response/challenge to people. A get out and do kind of thing.
  5. Other email types to throw out there. Community Prayer email: Not your prayer chain, but a prayer you want everyone to pray for the month. Poetry devotion: plug in a single email a poem written by a congregation member. What is Out There: so often church emails just share the church things, share blog posts, news articles, that give glimpse to what others are doing

There you go. Gavin’s p90x Email marketing method. Give it a go and see what happens. Tell me I’m full of crap. Tell me it has revolutionized the culture of your church. Let me know it is a whole lot more fun than just blasting out the newsletter or bulletin in another form. If it doesn’t work in 90 days I’ll give you a full refund of the money you spent on this advice.

Oh, and if you want to use an enhanced email program, I suggest you do, then go with MailChimp for your free option. There are other pay options such as Aweber or Emma I’d suggest, Emma if you want someone to hold your hand & help design.