Ministry Profiling

I’ve been thinking alot lately about the process that we use to help people "find their ministry in life".  I know there are lots of books written on the subject and loads of processes that are designed to take someone’s likes/dislikes to show them what God intends for their life, but I’m not totally convinced that we’re actually directing them where they are supposed to go.

Here’s what I’m talking about.  Let’s say you have a person that comes into your church and you run them through whatever process your ministry uses to integrate them into the congregation.  (Don’t ask me about NETChurch’s process.  We don’t actually use one.  Long story…)  It could be the Purpose Driven class system with the S.H.A.P.E profile or you have them fill out a questionnaire designed to find the church ministry that fits them best.  There are lots of different methods.  What USUALLY (and I say usually because this is not 100% in every church) happens is that we evaluate people’s personalities with this specific criteria and then plug them into a ministry that already exists.  Yes, there is a need to fill positions within ministries that we already have, but are we really looking for the ministry that God intends this person to have?  What I’m saying is this:  Are we screening people to be able to fill our spots so that the ministries WE created will move forward instead of really honing in on what God has designed a person for?

This is me asking the question, not giving the answers.  I don’t have concrete evidence of anything on this subject.  I only know how I’ve seen this process done in my own leadership experiences.  Many times the churches that I’ve been a part of started "profiling" people because we had so many unfilled positions and needed to plug bodies in, otherwise these programs were going to die.  The only problem was that there were many cases where the people became a part of a ministry mainly because they were excited that the pastor asked them to do something.  In that case they were relying on the fact that the pastor is communicating closely with God and knows exactly what the intentions of the Almighty One are.  The only problem comes in when the pastor is sitting at his desk, looking at a form that this new recruit has filled out, and is saying "I don’t know.  Let’s just slip them into this spot until something better comes along."  All of a sudden we went from truly seeking God’s design to doing something so that we retain people.

What if God really has the individual in mind?  Would we allow everyone to involve themselves in different ministry opportunities, creating multiple projects at one time, even if it meant spreading people out beyond what WE as leaders think it should be?  It could be tough!  All of a sudden we would be in the scariest situation that any leader could be in.  We wouldn’t be in control!  We would have to rely on someone bigger than us to really take care of the little details.  It’s the reason that we want to pigeonhole people so much.  It keeps the flock in a controllable state.

Could there also be a possibility that our concept of what a ministry is might be flawed?  Are we stretching, or allowing our churches to stretch, the boundaries of the traditional concepts of church far enough so that God can really be effective or are we so comfortable with the types of ministries that we have and have seen in the past that we question anything that doesn’t have that particular design?  Do our ministries have to be men’s, women’s, youth, children, singles, college?  Are we limited to simple, result oriented concepts like alcohol recovery or bible studies where we can track the expected results?

I see a type of church that opens these doors and starts people on a quest for a truly God-gleaned ministry to others.  Things that can only be conceived in the minds of those who have the biggest burn and see the challenges not as obstacles but as wonderful opportunities to be in tune with God’s will.  These ministries won’t look like what we see today.  They will start in coffee shops with casual discussions, on golf courses with people enjoying life, and in nightclubs and bars where people desperately need someone to pick them up.  These ministries should be things that the people involved find not only intriguing, but they fall into them naturally.  They become a way of life because they are already living these things before the church ever comes along.

I don’t have an answer as to how this happens.  I only know my own personal desires.  Would I like to put everyone into the slots that I see need to be filled? Yes, I would.  But I’m not sure I’d see any real growth, then.  Yes, people will grow, but am I going to stifle what they could become?  It’s possible.

My dream is to find a way that all people can become effective by God’s direction, not mine.

directions: 2years in

2 years ago this week 9 people met together in our living room and started a Sunday night bible study with one thing on our hearts:  Do something new and meaningful.  All of us had been a part of churches for quite some time.  Actually, most of us were raised in church.  We knew that what we saw at the time wasn’t working for us and for alot of other people.  We launched out with a vision of changing the world we lived in and reaching people who wouldn’t go to church.

We were very idealistic.  Everyone is when they start something new.  We were going to do something amazing!  This church would go where people were.  We were going to meet in a movie theater and have really great music.  We were going to cater to all of the people and communicate with them in their own language.  It was culturally relevant and totally cool.

2 years.  24 months.  104 weeks.  730 days.  The numbers get bigger the smaller your point of view gets, yet it’s such a minuscule amount of time.  2 years for a church is nothing.  It’s a blip on the radar screen.  In our minds we were going to be launching into something even bigger right now.  The demographics had been studied and everything pointed towards being a great contemporary church with cutting edge ideas for presentation.  But that’s not us today.  Not even close.  I’m not saying that we’re not cutting edge.  Those words don’t describe what we are.  We’re a totally different being altogether. 

What happened?  What changed us or the way that we think?  Why is a group of people who were planning such a big, contemporary, conventional type of church now meeting in an internet coffee shop that’s open for business while we sit and discuss what God means to our lives?

Only one answer I can come up with:  God.

Last night around 40 people squeezed into our house to have fun, discuss, and dream about what God wants of each of us and of NETChurch.  I have to say that I have never been a part of a meeting with any group that was as sweet, compassionate, open, and embracing as the time we spent there.  Thoughts were expressed and everyone joined together in thoughts that God is doing something amazing in the middle of Portland, Texas.  It’s not where we expected to be or what we expected to be doing.  I guess our expectations just aren’t that important.  It is exactly WHAT we are supposed to be, though.

In the past 2 years I’ve watched people come and go.  I’ve seen our ideas of what a church actually is go from an institution to an organic, living, breathing body.  I’ve watched people change and adjust to things that seemed so unusual as a church, but have become the backbone of an amazing ministry that will rearrange your life if you allow it to.  I’ve seen individuals grow beyond anything that I could imagine by simply discussing with each other what God needs of them instead of what they need of God.

I’m excited!  This family has rekindled the long, lost desire that calls me to pursue God with everything that I have.  I want to take this journey and live everyday as something amazing in God’s eyes.  It’s ok to follow Christ.  It’s ok to live it in a real way.  It IS possible to live as a Christ follower and connect with people who aren’t.  My life is a testament to the greatness of God.  It’s not that I have to change everything about me to fit some preconceived mold.  It’s that I need to be the person that God intended me to be in the first place.

Life. Love. God.  That’s what it’s all about.

What the heck is going to happen tomorrow?  No body here knows, but I know this:  I will breathe deep the beauty of what we experience.

A Moment of True Randomness!!

I saw this in the morning news and thought it was hilarious!  It’s an alarm clock called "Clocky" that runs off after you hit the snooze alarm.  The idea is that if you hit snooze the clock will then jump off of the bedside table and go somewhere else in the room and hide until the alarm goes off again.  Then you HAVE to get out of bed to find it and turn it off!  This would be great for, like, one morning.  The next day that thing will be flying across the room for a brief meeting with the nearest wall!!!

The mental image I have is pretty comical, though.  I’m relatively foggy brained in the morning as it is.  I can’t imagine having to crawl under the bed to turn off the alarm.  Not a pretty sight.

I guess I could make some philosophical analogy and say that this clock is like our relationship with God, but then that would give us this image of God trying to wake us up and then running away to hide (giggling the whole way) until He randomly tries to get our attention again from an undisclosed location.  It would be like God going "Tag!  You’re it" and then running away.

That’s just stupid.  But the clock is pretty funny, anyway.

Pay It Forward, Backward, Sideward, Everyward

Last night we watched the movie "Pay It Forward" with the youth that meet on Wednesday nights.  You know the movie.  Boy lives in broken home with recovering alcoholic mom and starts a school project to do something good for 3 people and then get them to do the same and see how far it goes.  It’s a really good movie!  It’s sad, but it’s really good.  The idea is great and the work by Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt, and Kevin Spacey is a wonderful combination of actors.  (Watching is does raise some long lost questions for me though.  Things like "Why was I so infatuated with girls that had curled hair bangs back in Oklahoma when I think Helen Hunt looks a bit cheap with hers?" and "Why does Jon Bon Jovi keep trying to act?".  These are important questions, you know?)

The message of "paying forward" goodness instead of doing things with a return expected is very valuable.  It’s definitely something that is needed today.  After the movie as we were talking about what we would do with this idea in our little portion of the world I went into one of my "lost in thought" moments.  I kept thinking about how the people in the movie were trying to do something big for someone else.  They wanted it to matter.  They didn’t just want to give someone a ride or offer someone some fries from their value meal.  The things they wanted to do for others were things that made them get completely out of their comfort zones.  They were things that most of us would probably walk away from, usually because it would inconvenience us or make us feel foolish.

I can think back to alot of instances in my life where I felt that something needed to be done for someone else, but I made a decision not to do it.  I’ve run through different variations of an event many times and talked myself out of being generous or helpful because I was more afraid of the unknowns than I was motivated to help.  It’s easier to be complacent.  It’s easier to be sarcastic and judgemental.  It’s easier to look at a person and say to myself "I hope they get through this" than to do something that could get them closer to a solution.

Thinking about me is so much easier.

Well, then I’ve got the times that I do reach out.  Sometimes everything goes well.  The person that you try to help responds and sees it as a helping hand.  They grow from the experience and are grateful.  Other times you get the opposite, though.  You reach out to someone and it gets turned back around on you.  I think that’s why compassion is such a rare commodity.  We’ve all been bitten at one time or another.  We find a scapegoat for our problems and we lash out at the ones that offer us a lifeline.  It takes the responsibility off of our shoulders for our own screw ups.  You can sit at lunch any day of the week and will have someone eating with you trash someone else or make fun of them, even the people that they love. We’re more comfortable with sarcastic, pessimistic views of the world than we are with peace, love, and happiness.

I don’t know.  Somehow I imagine that if we could only start to forget ourselves and our insecurities that the world could actually change.  Maybe I’m an idealistic optimist.  It’s just that I keep reading the words of Christ and seeing this flowing thread of compassion and love that goes not only forward, but backwards, sidewards, and everywards. (I know those aren’t words.  I just like them:)  I’ve spent too much of my life looking for the Laws of Christ so that I know how to live a perfect life and along the way I forgot how to live!  Jesus wasn’t calling his followers to obey a perfect law or rule book.  We could do that by just reading and staying out of everyone’s way.  No, he wanted action.  Life.  A living, breathing example of compassion with passion.

It would be easy to say that going out and meeting needs is more "works than Christ", but isn’t sitting on our tails waiting for God even worse?  I say that because He is here, now, right in the midst of our lives!  There’s not alot to wait for.  I could wait forever and watch the world around me die in the process.

At the end of the book of Matthew the writer says "Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Sounds to me like we already know what to do.  Guess that means it’s time to pay it everywhere.

It’s Official!!!!

The general board of information services met in an emergency meeting today to decide that I AM NOW OFFICIALLY THE WORST BLOGGER EVER!!!!!  It has now been 2 months and 1 day since my last post.  In some countries that would be considered desertion and I would have been flogged! (Don’t anyone get any wild ideas…….)

Oh, but I am back.  I now have a desire to blog as I never have before!!!  Where can my imagination take me?  How will this small and temporary, yet overwhelming desire to share my thoughts with the world change the landscape of life as we know it?

It probably won’t, but I love to dream big.  I’m back to blogging.  Hope you haven’t missed me too much!!!  I’m working on getting ready for the "Directions" gathering this weekend at NETChurch.  I’m sure that it’s going to be an amazing time that will bring some wonderful change to this great ministry.  I’ll try to keep up the blogging life in the middle of it all.

Geez, where have you guys been?  I’ve been waiting for someone to read this so I can write some more……….:)

Love you all,

Andy