What We Won’t
It’s important to decide what you aren’t. If you don’t decide what you aren’t, you’ll cave into ease, peer pressure, or popularity. Your integrity is one thing that you can’t buy, and is easy to lose. I was watching a marketing talk about this, and I think it’s so important for you as an individual, and for your church or ministry to decide what you’re not.
What We Won’t
We won’t sacrifice the truth for relevance.
The truth of the Gospel trumps being relevant to listeners everytime. All people come to hear you with sin in their hearts, and they will be repulsed by the truth of scripture. (Romans 8:7-8) A pastor may look cool, or have a ton of followers, and unknowingly lead a parade straight to hell.
We won’t sacrifice relevance for tradition.
Religion is based on tradition, and the Bible almost never speaks of religion in a positive way (except James 1:27). There is nothing wrong with tradition, but if we care more about tradition than people hearing about Jesus in a way they can understand, we’ve made our traditions an idol—and you know what God does to idols.
We won’t sacrifice tradition for laziness.
Traditions can be a great thing. A way of realizing that the saints before us preached the Gospel of Jesus so that we could hear. They put great thought into making the worship of God meaningful. We aren’t going to write that off out of conviniance, but only if it hinders the spreading of the Gospel.
Download “Are You Asleep?”
People want to be challenged in their faith, and not treated like children (1 Corinthians 3:1-3). A pastor whose been dead for a hundred years has challenged me to pursuit God, his name is J.C. Ryle. His preaching connected with the rough and tumble working class in 18th century England because he spoke with conviction and called people to something much higher than themselves. To follow God with everything!
I hope this blog fulfills the same purpose, I want to call the readers to follow God with everything they’ve got, and more. So I took and designed one of his sermons into a short eBook. You can download it and read it as a PDF , or print it out and read it. I challenge you to sit down and read this. If you find it useful pass it on to a friend or pastor, and let me know what you think.
Download the free eBook now, and let me know if it’s helpful. If I get enough feedback, I’ll consider making a whole series of these that can be used for small group or individual study.
Filed under other | Comment (0)Is this where we are heading?
My Mom sent me this video awhile back and I just saw it again on the YouWorkForThem blog. This video has got to be one of the funniest things I have seen in a while. Any time you mix Thriller and any indian pop song you know you are in for something special. But while I watched it for the 5th time last week it got me thinking, is this what the church is starting to look like?
It seems to me that the church is trying very hard, too hard at times, to add “pop culture” into every aspected of Sunday worship. Look around, message series are typically TV shows or movies. Most “special” worship is a secular song, and the more controversial the better. TV or movies clips are being used at almost every service, even if they add no value to a sermon. It seems like the church has become a bad version of todays culture. Just like this video we are missing the point. Thriller is great, but in it’s own place, not forced on indian pop. Pop culture is great in the church, but in it’s right place, not forced. I love when Paul preaches in Athens, he brings up the poets of the time (pop culture), but does not use that as a hook. He uses the “pop culture” to point to God, then proclaims the gospel. Lets look at how we can use the Truth as our main draw, and then let our “pop culture” support that.
Filed under other | Comments (12)Beware of Marketing.
Faithful church marketing is a razors edge. The tactics of marketing generally appeal to the most base emotions we have—lust (I must have that), envy (I want to be that), pride (I deserve that), idolatry (it’s the best), etc.
This morning I realized this more than ever. Seth Godin, the super hero of marketers, wrote a recent post here. He explains three ‘marketing levers’—fear, hope, and love. And how they are used to win an audience. He has a great point. He almost always has a great point. However, using emotions that are to be used for God to sell Coca Cola, or even the entertainment components your church service is risky business.
We want to tell the whole world about the Gospel, and marketing experts have some great insight on how to do that well, but we must be discerning.
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13. Could he possibly be getting this thought from Paul? Or is this just a universal truth that even a good marketer can see without the Bible?
Three reasons why Christians have a much larger view of faith, hope, and fear.
1. This cheapens hope for the church. We hope in a great God who is gathering his people to Himself, and will one day rid the world of all sin. Not in a president, or a great laundry detergent.
2. This notion of love is self serving. It is a love by convenience for self-serving purposes. Advertising love isn’t love at all, it is the same thing as a guy buying drinks for many ladies at a bar—he has a goal.
3. Fear, the Bible says that we are to fear God. But this doesn’t mean that we are to buy God insurance, or go to war with God. The motivation of this is to have a right understanding of who you are before him. So that you will come to him in faith. Just like a son fears the power of his dad, and must have faith that his father will use his strength for good.
Filed under other | Comment (0)Magazine-mania
The church is reaching a point in which it’s losing the ability to communicate at the speed of the day. We have a lot of work to do… Magazines are a great way to both teach and learn. Relevant is the most known example, but it’s still a long way away from being a great platform to teach and proclaim the gospel. A while back I built a Squidoo page pointing to many quality magazines that are published by Churches and Christian organizations. Many of them can be downloaded in PDF form or viewed in your browser. Check them out here.
If you know of any other great magazines, let me know in a comment and I’ll look them up.
Corey and I actually met by working on Graphe magazine over two years ago. I’m planning on sharing some of that with you in the near future.
Here are some links to great magazines:
- The Cutting Edge
- Vineyard Church planting magazine
- Graphe
- This magazine was published by our small church—Oikos Fellowship in Bellingham, Washington. It is looking to reach out to the community through art, beauty, and story.
- Collide Magazine
- Collide is a new magazine that I just purchased a subscription for. I’ve been following their blog for a while now, I hope it’s as good as it looks.
- Mars Hill Church: Vox Pop
- This is a magazine intended for the community of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. It focuses mainly on the body, but is beginning to look at the city around it as well.
- Tabletalk Magazine
- A beautifully thoughtful magazine who’s goal is to proclaim the holiness of God.
- The Movement
- Redeemer Presbyterian Church in downtown New York City is laser focused on urban church planting. Tim Keller’s church plating philosophy is a must read for any Christian.
- Outreach Magazine
- If you like top 100 lists, then this is the magazine for you.
- Relevant Magazine
- Sweet graphics, radical rockers, and a bit of spirituality. Relevant seeks to span the gap of religion and culture. An interesting method of reaching people for Christ. Relevant has some great strengths to be learned from.
- Specific & Practical
- This is a magazine about ministry from Granger church.
- Soul Purpose
- The New Zealand version of Relevant.
- Travelogue
- Sojourn Church in St. Louis, Missouri publishes this community focused magazine.
- (note: This was one of the first posts on this blog. Almost no one was reading at that time, and I think it’s valuable)
What the Heck is RSS?
You may have heard people talking about feed readers or RSS lately. It’s the wave of the future… and we’re about to take you surfing.
Watch this video for an amazing explanation of RSS.
THREE TIPS TO GET STARTED
- Use a feed reader such a Google Reader or Blog Lines to allow you to read hundreds of blogs in a very short period of time. You always stay up to date on the things you care about.
- Download the latest version of Firefox. It’s a web browser that works for Mac and PC, and is much better than anything else out there.
- Subscribe.
You can click the above graphic or the upper right ‘subscribe‘ button on our page to subscribe.
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Other Blogs Explanation of RSS:
Relevant Magazine- What is RSS?
Mars Hill Church- Feeds Page
Seth Godin- What is RSS?
Google- What is RSS?
Filed under other | Comments (2)
