Everybody wants to change the world … so why can’t we?

Unless you’re a really hardened cynic, I think it’s fair to say that most everyone wants to do good, even if don’t always act on it or even if we don’t really know what that is

It’s obvious that social good is hot right now. Google’s All for Good, Twitter’s Twestival and all sorts of micro-sites are tapping to that desire for people to “contribute.” The web’s core values of collaboration and creativity; its smart, curious, and socially savvy users; and its astounding network effects have created fertile soil for social activism that dares to change the world.

So why don’t we do more as the church to embrace Jesus command to do good to others as an evangelism opportunity?

I’m convinced that when people stand shoulder to shoulder with sold-out believers “working out” their salvation, that the gospel will get preached in dramatic ways. In fact, I think the church should choose personal missions above financial mission work wherever possible for this very reason.

One of the most joyful moments of my life as a newspaper editor was my decision in 2005, under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, to send a curious, spiritually seeking reporter to Hurricane-Katrina ravaged Mississippi with two Christian congregations who were ministering there.

She returned with a deep, profound, life-transforming understanding of Christ that led her to become a member of her church, be baptized in Christ and eventually become a part-time children’s ministry worker.

I think there’s plenty of opportunities for us to engage with people who want to do good locally, since who knows local communities and there needs better than local churches? Why are we leaving this to the United Ways and the Rotary Clubs of the world?

Mission activity energizes local congregations, gets them focused on the point of living for Jesus and gives us an opportunity to talk about Jesus — and build the relationships with non-believers who may later be interested in finding out a little more about why we choose to live such other-focused and sacrificial lives.

We can start by registering what missions opportunities we do have on search engines like All For Good. And then we can start designing and executing high-contact, flexible and inspiring missions opportunities in our local communities.

What’s stopping us?

Filed under: community, evangelism, volunteers , community, evangelism, social action

Can churches deny human choice?

A lot of the critical and necessary debate on this blog comes around one way or the other to: How does the church handle the rising tide of consumerism in its expression?

It’s not an accident: The web has empowered the individual like no other time in history, and the act of accomplishing ministry in this context is bound to flirt, sometimes dangerously, with abetting the self-seeking, vain, prideful human heart without God, rather than calling it to repentence in light of the manifest glories of God.

It seems to me that man has always seen himself at the center of all things. This is not new. What is new is the extent to which man can now do it in almost all phases of life. And the remedy for this heart sickness is and always will be the cross of Jesus.

So here’s my question: When God calls you to salvation, do you really have a choice to “opt out” of the body of Christ? Is it not one of the most magnificent promises of scripture that it’s not possible?

Only “Christians” with unregenerate hearts go shopping for God “experiences,” rather than surrender to him.

Only “Christians” with no understanding of Lordship believe that God is a vending machine of blessings.

Only “Christians” who have never heard the truth will allow themselves to be swayed by every wind of doctrine.

Is it not the gospel, the good news, the freedom from captivity, that human agency, human choice, for the regenerated heart, is always for good?

Our hyper-consumerist society is still relatively young, probably 100 years old at best. And for the church, for thousands of years a local phenomenon, our history with it is even shorter. Perhaps 50, if that. And i think that, if anything, there is a reckoning coming for the church as it wrestles with this, which probably explains some of my passion for the Web Church: It accelerates the urgency of figuring this out.

I submit that the battle is not between consumerism and whatever some Christians think can control it — authority structures, whatever. The battle is to get anointed, gospel-saturated teaching that places the supremacy of Christ above all things into earshot of as many dead hearts as possible so they can be convicted and awakened to life in Christ.

We need to make sure that people choose the church rather than Oprah, Dr. Phil, Tom Cruise and every other self-help guru who is leading people dancing and singing straight to the gates of hell.

Only then will they know difference between a true and false gospel.

Only then will they know the difference between a life that glorifies self and a life that serves God

Only then will they know that Jesus’ call to total surrender can not be resisted except with tears.

And only then will the Holy Spirit magnificently insist that the appetite for seeing, savoring and treasuring the joy of Christ be fed insatiably.

I ask again: Where does the path lead for Christ-centered churches who work in this “crooked and twisted generation” without an understanding of choice?

Filed under: discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, web campus , culture, discipleship, evangelism, theology, web campus

Web church as “safe space” to explore Christian faith

This is my last post exploring the fascintating conclusions from Hartford Seminary’s groundbreaking study on megachurch attenders and what the web church can learn from it. You can read posts one, two and three and four if you missed them.

One of the more fascinating parts of the study showed that:

some people intentionally don’t want to establish friendships, even if they are highly committed to the church. Certain people come because they can be, and want to remain, anonymous. … almost a third of those at these churches over five years still report having very few close friends there. For some attenders even long-term participation in the megachurch is about something other than having a network of close friendships.

Let’s face it: “community” can be intimidating to some people, especially those who may only be just starting to live the Christian life.

That’s where the Web church’s perceived weakness — its so-called anonymity — might prove to be one of its greatest assets.

To begin with, it might provide a private, anonymous, low-commitment way to experience Christians and Christian teaching. But there’s also a clear path toward Christian community for those who want to explore it in a controlled environment, calibrated along a continuum of casual conversation, friending, commenting, messaging and physical meetups, to name just a few.

From a theological standpoint and a practical standpoint, discipleship occurs best in a community context, and the Web Church could provide that safe, community space in a believers’ formative years.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, discipleship, web campus , community, evangelism, social media

Web church success may be tied to customization

I’ve been looking at the Hartford Seminaryanalysis of megachurch attenders because I think it could be useful in understanding the Web Church’s potential mission field and how it can extend what we’ve learned from modern church methods. You can read past posts in this series here, here and here.

One of the study’s most dramatic conclusions was that:

involvement at these (and perhaps all) churches may be less about creating an idealized plan to move someone toward commitment and more about providing many ways by which people could craft their unique, customized spiritual experience to meet their needs.

It’s logical that the Web Church respond to this apparent desire for customizing church experience. Web culture, after all, is about empowering individual choice, and letting you set the terms of your engagement with content and people.

Many NewSpring Web Campus attenders are already actively engaged in designing their own path to spiritual growth and assembling the building blocks of an online church life, spurred on by the breathtaking amount and quality of podcasts, books, and blogs that fan the flames of someone’s spiritual fires on demand.

There’s no reason to think that wouldn’t extend to all aspects of church life as they migrate online. Someone could choose one church’s online worship experiences, another’s online small groups, yet another’s online discipleship program etc. and another’s online outreach and missions program.

I think the megachurch lesson here is that offering many paths for spiritual exploration and engagement and involvement could be the Web Church’s supreme value proposition.

That could include providing social guides or personal recommendations toward other trusted, high-quality content. Or it could be offering opportunities for spiritual growth in partnership with regional, national and international ministries. It could even be providing the support systems, resources and “open access” to the Web church’s people to build new ministries and recruit for them across the web.

A believer’s attachment, then, to a Web church might not be traditional “membership,” but in the personal relationships with individual believers as they come across them in different ministry area.

What do you think?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, icampus, web campus

The Web church could lower barriers of entry to Christian faith

The megachurch study by the folks over at Hartford Seminary has grabbed my attention, largely because I think it proves that “church different” has created a new “market” of believers.

The study’s authors marvel at the megachurch’s role as an “assimilation engine,” taking people from every demographic, religious and cultural background and helping them connect and integrate within the Christian faith.

They found that 25 percent of attenders were new to church. And 28 percent of all attenders had recently relocated — representing 40 percent of all those who had church background.

The lesson here is that traditional churches apparently carried a lot of cultural and even “theological” baggage that turned people off and created barriers to entry.

I think the web church, as the megachurch has done, can remove artificial, and largely cultural barriers to Christianity and allow for sampling of the experience on an attender’s own terms.

There are many hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but especially in the post-Christian west, who don’t have any real understanding whatsoever of the basics of Christianity and would simply not see the point of going to church at all.

The Web church could be ideally positioned to create a new type of experience that intentionally refuses to trade on old and outdated assumptions about faith and its centrality to one’s life, and instead chooses to address spiritual seekers and immature believers head-on. (The megacurch study found that only 6 percent of attenders were new converts, so there’s lots of progress to be made in that area.)

Web church worship environments tap into the spirit of our technological, experiential, explorational age. And the web church can dovetail nicely with personal and relational evangelism that can overcome hostility to institutional church and “organized religion.”

Given that personal invites were, by an overwhelming margin, the No. 1 method that megachurches attracted attenders, I think there’s reason to be optimistic that Web churches, properly positioned, can truly take advantage of the Web’s network effects.

Filed under: evangelism, web campus , evangelism, web campus

Megachurch study filled with positives

Mention the word “megachurch” and the chances are the response won’t be positive.

But a close reading of Hartford Seminary’s analysis of megachurch attenders — the most comprehensive to date — offers plenty of reasons to think that these large, Christ-centered, culturally-relevant congregations might have proved critics wrong.

The study found:

Megachurches widen the funnel for people to come into the Christian fold. More than a third of the congregation was young and/or single — a demographic that is more or less absent from traditional churches — and 25 percent were new to “church” as a whole. So much for megachurches just stealing attenders from other churches!

Megachurch attenders are active and engaged. More than 70 percent of attenders described themselves as “active participants,” and nearly half of attenders who have been at their church longer than 2 years report that their involvement increased.

About 20 percent of surveyed attenders said they weren’t active participants in church life outside services, and yet they exhibited strong signs of personal, spiritual development, with a fourth of this group praying and reading the Bible daily, 40 percent worshiping weekly, and three fourths having invited people to services. So much for unengaged, passive consumers!

Megachurch attenders are growing spiritually. Three-fourths of all attenders say they read the Bible and pray daily or often during the week. After 10 years, half or more of megachurch attenders are tithers, compared to only 34 percent at traditional churches. So much for megachurches being breeding grounds for a weaker, watered down Christian practice.

There’s other great stuff in there, too. You should read the whole thing.

I’m guessing that the same dynamics that led to criticism of the megachurch will be leveled at the web church once it, too, is firmly established as a new expression of church.

And the study might offer hope to the Web church that it is adding to the fullness of Christ’s kingdom positioned as a complement to other church expressions for those who Bobby Gruenewald <a href=”http://swerve.lifechurch.tv/2009/06/11/who-are-you-reaching/”>defined recently</a> as “distant, mobile, curious and digital.”

Thoughts?

Filed under: evangelism, web campus , evangelism, web campus

Is your web campus embracing your physical church attenders?

A church would be foolish not to see a Web Campus as a key to its growth at physical locations.

And a Web Campus would be foolish to ignore its church’s physical worshipers as a way to be successful.

One of the most biggest realizations we’ve made through the first few months of the Web Campus ministry is that our campus serves many different audiences.

Our Web Campus primarily targets the unchurched and the dechurched. People who have been relocated from your church who can’t find a good, Bible-believing church near them. Maybe people who are searching for God or for a church and seem to “connect” to NewSpring’s vision and theology.

Then there’s the sizable number of our attenders who are connected to our Anderson, Greenville and Florence campuses and are sick or out of town or just aren’t able to make it to church that week. It’s wise not to overlook the power of that second constituency to the Web Campus ministry.

No. 1In the mobile society that we all now live, physical attenders are bound to have many family and friends spread across the nation without access to a church like NewSpring, and who have been impressed by the ministry during visits or through casual conversations.

As we know, the power of personal ministry is greatest in relationships of deep love and intimate connection, and it’s in these family connections that a web campus or web ministry can best flourish.

Each family member or friend can have a shared experience — whether during the service in the chatroom or private IM or in conversations after the service. And the friend or family member can provide the instant and extended support and ministry needed by every believer to flourish in the Lord.

No. 2. Those physical attenders exposed to the Web Campus, have a natural opportunity to share a “preview” of the NewSpring experience with those that might be skeptical, reluctant or intimidated so that they can then be invited to a physical church location.

And to prove this isn’t just theory, here’s a story that providentially dropped into my email box Sunday:

I normally attend the Greenville Campus and serve on the care team. I was really bummed this morning because I had a terrible migraine and would not make it ! Thankfully I was able to attend today’s 11:15 service on the web. What an amazing experience! It was awesome to have a chance to interact with everyone in a chat room environment during Perry’s message.

After the service I came into contact with two people who have been wanting to attend the Greenville campus but didn’t want to go alone. I look forward to meeting both of them there this Sunday!

I also posted a link on my Face book profile at the start of the service . I received a reply from one of my contacts thanking me for the posting. She and her husband attended the Anderson campus last week and were looking forward to this Sundays service. She had fallen ill and couldn’t attend. Thanks to the web campus they were able to hear Perry’s powerful message today! I never ceases to amaze me to see how God move’s in our church. I can’t wait to see what’s next !

Got a take on this? Got a story or several of your own?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus

A Web campus: More than a podcast with bells and whistles

Web Campuses or Internet Campuses or whatever you want to call them are all the rage.

And as the Web Campus pastor for NewSpring Church, I’m blessed to have a small part in leading the Big C church to rightly embrace the web for church, broadly defined, as an environment for worship, a vehicle for community and discipleship, and a medium for evangelism.

I take what I do seriously enough that I’m always sharpening my theological understanding of what we’re trying to do through the web campus. So, inspired by this page on Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church Internet Campus, i thought I’d share here my internal vision statement for the web campus that has been in place since before we launched.

It’s aimed at getting my ministry team and volunteers on the same page. It’s a work in progress. It’s not proof-texted. It’s not officially endorsed by my church leadership. But it is I think a healthy approach that recognizes a web campus as something far more than a podcast with bells on.

Come on. You know you want to help critique it.

Our mission is to make Jesus famous one person at a time, helping people worship God, grow in faith and live in Christ-centered community online.

We believe the web campus can follow the model of a Biblical church. It provides a venue for worship of God, Biblical teaching, and opportunity for community, discipleship and evangelism.

For the lost, it can be a very powerful tool in welcoming spiritual seekers to hear the word of truth in a setting that may not be as intimidating as physically attending a church.

For those Christians who are not fully committed to a local church, it can be a more open and inviting path to involvement in a local body of serving, discipling, evangelizing believers who are passionate about Jesus and obedient to his word.

We believe that online attenders can and should participate fully in the life of NewSpring Church, which considers itself one church in many locations.

As with every NewSpring campus, our online attenders will be strongly encouraged to get baptized by immersion after a decision for Christ, give, serve each other and the church in online and offline venues and proclaim the good news as the Lord gifts them and leads them. Periodically, we also will celebrate communion together, rightly instructed by a pastor, with online attenders gathering and taking their own elements. (See our five purposes below)

Attendence of the Web Campus should never be viewed as a legitimate way to “go to church” while avoiding the challenges or the commitments involved in faithful participation of a local church body. We do, however, believe that full, consistent, surrendered worship among a body of believers on the web campus is to be preferred to infrequent attendance of a local church and membership of it in name only for whatever reason.

We believe that online social and communication tools can be used to ensure that we are “meeting together” in worship and in Christ-exalting relationship with believers as well as serving as a witness to God corporately. But as the body of Christ, each with a role in discipling, serving and evangelizing within “communities of grace,” our success can only come through deep investment in individual lives and communities that must include some element of offline, bodily interaction.

Although we donʼt believe that physical presence is the only way we can fulfill our role in the body of Christ, we do want to strongly encourage people to gather physically wherever possible, such as by viewing the web campus in physical groups.

Overall, the web campus is more than just a podcast with a chat room. In fact, we recognize that some podcasters may be using our media to create a personal church experience that risks isolating them and tends toward a false understanding of the Christian life as private and solitary, rather than public and communal. The web campus offers a chance to lead podcasters toward a more complete experience and participation in church.

Our theological conviction is to offer attenders a 360-degree church experience: communal worship experience realized through our chat room or in physical gatherings, pastoral guidance from me and other NewSpring pastors, and abundant opportunities to take “next steps” in their walk with Jesus. I think you’ll agree that taken as a whole, the web campus can serve as someone’s church home, should they need it.

We want out attenders to:

• Worship God through time, talent, treasure and prayer.
• Grow Biblical relationships that spur greater communion and connection with God, the church and each other.
• Grow spiritually through Bible reading and study and other resources to develop their spiritual understanding, gifts and leadership abilities.
• Serve their church and community by meeting needs in ministry and missions
• Share their faith with unchurched people by sharing testimony and inviting people to worship services online or offline.

Filed under: ruminations, web campus , community, community management, discipleship, evangelism, theology, web campus rollout

When Easter is all Greek to me. Part 1

This was my first Easter as a pastor, and what an Easter it was.

Record attendance of 15,400 at NewSpring’s four campuses — 803 on the Web Campus alone — and 322 people met Jesus, seven of them on the web.

It got me to thinking about the type of Greek Orthodox Easter that I celebrated with my family in North London when I was a kid.

Talk about traditional.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the eastern Orthodox churches make catholic churches look contemporary. Lots of icons, stained glass, incense, robes, an altar that isn’t visible to the congregation.

And everything in a foreign language.

Yes, it really was Greek to me.

The entire service, from the psalms, to the prayers to the homily, were spoken in Ancient Greek.

Easter along with Christmas, just as in the south, were big turnout days for North London’s huge Greek Community. We would wear our Sunday best along with a fixed expression of “solemnity” as we stood and sat (but mostly stood) through two and three hour services that I couldn’t understand a single word of.

Looking back on my path to God, I can’t deny that I felt the tug of the Holy Spirit year after year at those events. But I didn’t have a hope that I would ever hear the power of the gospel for salvation.

I have a great deal of respect for my orthodox cousins, and its theology is well, “orthodox,” but i just can’t understand how you would want to keep good news to yourself.

That has got to break the heart of Jesus.

And if it wasn’t for NewSpring, I’d still be on my Highway to Hell.

So forgive me if I just couldn’t care less about what people think about using a song like that inside a worship service.

God is undeniably moving at NewSpring, and I’m pretty sure that the energy behind the whole of the modern evangelical church movement comes down to two very simple things.

We talk to be understood.

We speak into people’s lives where they are.

That’s it.

Lights. Fancy video. Rock music. Social media. Whatever. In our noisy culture, that just earns us the right to attention and to be heard.

I came to Jesus at NewSpring while reporting a story that started out as an expose on whether NewSpring was really teaching the Bible and “right doctrine” or whether it wasn’t all just entertainment and a personality cult.

So you can see how that turned out for me.

Criticize all you like if you believe that Jesus needs to be harder to get to. You will be answerable to Jesus just as we are.

But you might want to remember Jesus very own words:

49 John answered, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” 50 But Jesus said to him, “Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you.”

Filed under: ruminations , culture, evangelism, social media

Is this the front door to the church in the 21st century?

I read this interesting post from social media/PR guru Brian Solis about the future of the news industry, and I couldn’t help thinking that he may also be describing the 21st century “front door” to our churches.

Solis’ imagines the new news industry as personality-focused, community-based, and distributed through the network.

An information producer, passionate about his “subject,” will cultivate a network of people who will help him create content and ultimately publish it through his network’s statusphere and its viral effects. Content serves as the supply of “social objects” around which conversations occur and networks build.

As a former media exec, turning the focus away from the industrial model of news organizations to individual “information evangelists” was almost exactly the blueprint for the future of news I was trying evangelize myself inside the E.W. Scripps Co. beginning in 2005.

Why wouldn’t the “good news” industry work the same? Isn’t this proved by the rise of the pastor personality who uses online social tools to proclaim the good news and gather and “care” for a flock? (And also the decline of the denomination and the church-as-institution?)

Rarely a day that goes by on the NewSpring Web Campus that someone doesn’t say they first heard about NewSpring through NewSpring Senior Pastor Perry Noble’s phenomenally successful blog or the NewSpring podcast.

I think there are a lot of opportunities for traditional church pastors, online pastors and thoughtful church members to serve as a new breed of online evangelist.

And if that’s true, we need to pay for more attention to and what information people receive, process and pass using social media, as well as why and how.

I fear that most churches’ current emphasis on promoting invites and interest in church in our ambient friendship networks online aren’t really all that effective, and worse, may actually be turning people off.

Maybe the news industry can teach the “good news” industry something. At its most successful (online or offline, professional or amateur), journalism delivers information that’s useful, easy to understand, and easy to apply. Some of it is practical, like how to save money, raise good kids etc. And some is just ambient knowledge, so you can be part of conversations and build friendships around what you know and like.

When it comes to evangelizing Jesus “in the network,” the new front door of the church, we need to start with first principles, not assuming that anyone who reads us knows anything about Christianity.

We need to embrace seeker-sensibility by making our message less about church, or even the Bible. We need filter everything we say so that it’s useful, easy to consume and more relevant to everyday people who don’t care about “religion” and are just trying to live life the best they can.

What if the “new evangelist” did what great teachers and preachers, just like Jesus, have always done: Take the stuff of life, the stories of our culture, the news of our world, and the practical challenges and felt needs we daily face, and offer spiritual insight, practical wisdom and life modeling to help people live better.

Maybe that way they’ll earn the equity to point people to Jesus as the true fulfillment of this crazy, beautiful life, and then be able to invite them to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Thoughts/

Filed under: evangelism , evangelism, social media, social networking