Purpose Driven Church Ch8b - Applying your Purposes

And on we go. Hopefully the next few points won't be marathons like the first two. But let's see.

3) Educate your people on purpose.

This is thought provoking for me. Often I tend to see the teaching of the Bible as an end unto itself - that people should come out of the Sunday service with a better academic understanding of the part of scripture that was preached on.

This, however, is challenging - "You only believe the part of the Bible that you DO."

The key point here - the objective of Bible teaching (and other Spiritual education) is to influence peoples' behaviour, making them better at the five purposes of the church (which, in case you haven't read any other posts, are Evangelism, Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship and Ministry).

What Warren is saying is that there's a really important process at work here. He uses a baseball metaphor, unfortunately, but it is in a fairly simple diagram, which I reproduce here:

People are consciously moved from "1st base" to "3rd base", and then to "home", which is repeating the process and helping to reach others for Christ.

What this demonstrates is a really clear understanding of how training in Spiritual things actually works - and although I know my Bible backwards, I wonder if this just shows how little I really know. This really is about "turning an audience into an army".

4) Start small groups on purpose.
Since there are people at different points in the circles, it makes sense to specialise. Small groups are set up for seekers, for team members, for specific needs and for growth.

In our situation, we currently have growth groups operational, which is appropriate for our people. But if (as I hope!) that we really get into a serious effort to reach our local area, one of the first things we'll need to set up is a small group specifically aimed at helping people become Christians and developing good habits of maturity.

5) Add staff on purpose.

This is something we've actually been doing in our search for a staff member for the church. It's not enough to find someone who has a good personality and competence; it's important that their passion is about one of the purposes of the church (and clearly, it needs to be a purpose that your church is actually working on!).

One interesting thought - if he were starting a new church today, Rick Warren would recruit five volunteers for unpaid staff positions - a music/magnification director (worship), a membership director (fellowship), a maturity director (discipleship), a ministry director (ministry) and a missions director (evangelism). He would aim to eventually make these people part time and then full time.

6) Structure on purpose.
Once again, Warren talks about putting people into teams based around the purposes of the church rather than traditional departments. This is interesting precisely because it is both so counter-cultural and yet so logical. The reason I say this is logical is because each team will know exactly what it is aiming to accomplish, its boundaries and its goals.

7) Preach on purpose.
Here's a point on which I disagree a little with Warren. He says that a church needs to ensure that preaching focuses on each of the five purposes during the year. I can see the benefits of this, but my own opinion and training is that the preaching should be more based on the Word of God itself than on categories we place it into. That said, maybe it is worth asking the question every time one preaches - "What purposes does this passage impact?"

That said, Rick suggests that this shouldn't take up the entire year. He says "A four week series on each of the five purposes need only take up 20 weeks a year". So maybe there's something to this.

Maybe we could do both. Perhaps we should ensure that during a typical year we got some stuff from the psalms (on worship), some material from Paul (discipleship), some stuff on the Great Commission (evangelism), A pastoral epistle (fellowship) and some teaching on spiritural gifts (ministry).

8) Budget on purpose.
I have never really had too much interest in budgets, but it is interesting to ask what a church's budget says about its priorities. Simply put, you should be spending the majority of money on what you think is most important.

9) Calendar on purpose.
Again, interesting - Warren says you should calendar 2 months of each year to give special emphasis to each purpose. This would be linked to the teams discussed in structure - each team would be given the task of emphasising that purpose church wide during their months. He gives the warning "Don't fool yourself- if you don't schedule your purposes on your calendar, they won't get emphasized".

10) Evaluate on purpose.
This, at least, is simple and understandable. If you wish to remain effective as a church, you HAVE to ask yourself "how are we doing?" every so often. Again, a metaphor I like - Imagine NASA doing a moon shot with no tracking! And evaluation must be involving each of the purposes.

Whew! Made it through all of them. Once again, this is good stuff. Next time we'll be reaching out to the community . . . .

Oh, and just in case stuff happens - I'm taking the kids to the SCG tomorrow night, so there is a distinct chance that we might not make it back till very late. This could mean we don't get to blog then. I'll try, though, because I'm starting to get excited about all this . . . .

Purpose Driven Church Ch8a - Applying your purposes

Sorry about the delays! Let's get into it.

Chapter 8 is long - very long. It's a chapter with 10 points. Fortunately, we can break them down into small groups of points. Tonight we'll check out the first two.

The overarching idea of the chapter is this - how does the purpose of the church affect the way it does things? The point in business and in other organisational structures where plans tend to go to weeds is in the APPLICATION (or lack thereof). My friends will know that I am fond of the joke "What is the difference between theory and practice?" (the answer being "In theory there IS no difference . . . ").

The ten points of this chapter are 10 areas of application.

10 Ways to be Purpose Driven:
1) Assimilate new members on purpose.
The strategy used by Warren at Saddleback involves the Circles of Commitment diagram (as seen in my last posting). The idea is a continual process of moving unchurched people from community to crowd (for worship), then moving crowd to congregation (for fellowship), then from congregation to committed (for discipleship), then from committed to core (for ministry), then moving the core back out to the community (for evangelism).

Warren suggests growing the church from the outside in. This challenges what I learned at Student Life, though only in order rather than in substance. Tradtionally, you start with a core group, and grow a ministry team, followed by a larger group, yada yada yada.

The problem with this approach? By the time the core has become discipled enough to be of any use, they have often lost contact with the community and may well be afraid of interacting with those outside. He quotes Peter Wagner in calling this condition "Koinonitis". I like that. But I don't actually like the concept, because I recognise it all too well - it's Church as I have experienced it much of my life! Whilst we do have a desire for mission, it is comfortable as we are, and it's hard to stoke the fire. We are very much in a condition where we are all core and nothing else. Everything the church does is done by the same people. Most of us have few unsaved friends, at least that we talk to in an average day.

It's bad fitting so neatly into an illustration, when that illustration is a "do not do" rather than a "do"!

Fortunately, Warren has a potential remedy. "A church with this problem needs to learn how to develop the other four circles."

He discusses the start of Saddleback. I have to admire his chutzpah. They focussed entirely on the community, specifically the unchurched. This involved meeting hundreds of people door to door. He deliberately sought out people who didn't go to church and surveyed their needs. He developed relationships.

The next step was a letter to the community announcing the beginning of the church, sent to 15,000 homes (wow!), and this letter was based carefully on the results of the survey. Advertising was key because they didn't actually know enough people to rely on word of mouth.

Pause here - we could do this! This is where the profile we've built from Carols could come in handy - we could go around to people saying "the people that run Carols at MPPS", and discussing the relaunch of Sanctuary.

Resuming, the next task was to take that crowd and introduce them to Christ. He uses the image of a rocket launching off the pad, and recognises that this took a lot of energy. In the first year of the church proper, most of the sermons were simply "God's plan for your life" and similar gospel messages.

Then in the second year of the church's existence, Warren worked on turning the crowd into a congregation. This year the sermons were on "Why do we have Church anyway?" and similar.

The third year was all about raising the commitment level. Series on growth were the order of the day. Now, this was still present previously; but now it was the focus.

From here on the idea was to give people the opportunity to get involved in ministry. The idea was communicated that a non-ministering Christian was a contradiction in terms.

It was at this stage that there formed a recognisable core, and staff were added to assist him in the other processes needed.

The starting point is ASSIMILATING NEW MEMBERS.

Warren defends the slow speed of growth. I say I'd LOVE to have growth like he had, even at the start! Given that I have laboured for years with little or no obvious growth, I'd be delighted to move slowly but surely and obviously!

2) Program around your purposes.
Choosing or designing programs should reflect each of your purposes. Remember that each circle corresponds to a particular purpose of the church. So far, so good. But here's the scary bit - "Kill any program that doesn't fulfil a purpose. Repace a program when you find one that does a better job than the one you're using."

This is a hard lesson for me because I dislike change. For example, to me it would be natural to have a youth group come hell or high water, regardless. If I were told "Youth group isn't doing anything, kill it," I'd struggle!

But if this is correct, then there's no point in having a program unless it is fulfilling a purpose!

An interesting concept he has here is "bridge events". Our carols would fit this description - community wide events that make the unchurched in the community aware of the existence of the church. These are for the Community.

For the crowd, he has Seeker services.

For the Congregation, it's small groups.

For the Committed he has the Life Development Institute, which is an intensive Bible study program.

For Core is the SALT meeting.

NO SINGLE PROGRAM, no matter how great it is or how well it has worked in the past, can adequately fulfil all the purposes of the church.