Motives
…if someone is pre-committed to falsity and will not pursue God with pure heart and motives, they will hear only what they want to hear. The horrifying result of impure motives is that people sincerely believe it is God who has spoken, when all along it is was their own lying hearts.
Alan Hirsch in Untamed: Missional Discipleship
Worse than not doing Christianity, is doing Christianity with selfish and impure motives.
How Can My Church Get Involved in Church Planting and Multiplication?
Reaching North America for Christ is too big a task for one church to handle. New Church Multiplication is one of the best ways for us to work the North American fields to the edges. And every church can get involved in multiplication of new Churches. How? The sky is the limit. There is no right or wrong way to support church planting. The question is, what are you willing to do? How big of a commitment are you willing to make?
Here are three levels of relationship that excludes no church from involvement. I offer a few suggestions that are not meant to be an exhaustive list under each level.
It’s All About Relationships
Continuing our Close Encounters series at Bridge Church. Talked this week about the importance of relationships in Jesus’ ministry and the need for relational approaches to reaching our friends for Christ. In the book Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and Churches that Reach Them by Ed Stetzer, Richie Stanley, and Jason Hayes, they demostrate this need with statistical data. A few statistics:
- 17% in todays world would go to church if seeking spiritual guidance. The church is no longer the place to go to find answers about spirituality.
- 90% believe they can have a good relationship with God without being involved in a church.
- 91% have at least one Christian among their close friends.
- 90% said they would be willing to listen to someone share his or her beliefs.
- 60% said they would be willing to study the Bible if a friend ask them.
- 48% would be willing attend a small group of people to learn more about the Bible and Jesus.
So people do not consider church for answers, but they have connections with Christians in our churches and would even be willing to open their lives to listen to friends. So releasing and empowering Christians to reach their network of friends off of our campuses should be a major part of our strategy. Neil Cole in his book Church 3.0 comments about this research with this question: “Why is it that when we consider ways to reach out to the lost we always plan events rather than using the natural relationships God has already given us?” Could this be a solution to our churches budget crunch? Less expensive productions, more releasing people to form organic relationships that will bring others to a close encounter with Christ.
Current Church Planting Bibliography
More than occasionally I’m asked by people interested in Church planting, “Hey, what should I be reading?” Here’s my current top ten list of favorites in no particular order. Most of these are in the category of “I wish I’d read that before I planted a church.”
- Church in the Making: What Makes or Breaks a New Church Before It Starts by Ben Arment. Honest book about the difficulty of planting a church. Discussion questions after each section would be great for Core Group Training.
- Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church Does More by Doing Less by Dave Browing. Great book to help with focus and vision. Here’s a brief review I wrote a few years back.
- Planting Missional Churches by Ed Stetzer. The textbook.
- Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers by Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird. Great book for churches wanting to sponsor churches or plant multiple churches and campuses. Research based. Great reference guide to what’s up out there in Church Planting.
- The Multiplying Church by Bob Roberts. From an experienced sender. The chapter on Starting a Church Planting Training Center at Your Church would be worth reading for every sponsor church pastor. My thoughts here.
- Church 3.0: Upgrades for the Future of the Church by Neil Cole. Challenging questions and answers for the church going forward into the future. Can’t get this book off my desk right now.
- Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community by Ed Stetzer and David Putman. “Don’t plant the church in your head. Plant it in the community.” One of my fav Ed Stetzer quotes. This book helps us do that.
- It’s Not Personal: Surviving and Thriving on the Journey of Church Planting by Brian & Amy Bloye. Reading right now. Incredibly honest look at the life of the church planter.
- Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Movement by Dave & Jon Ferguson. Great text book for starting at every level. Includes great chapters on multisite and sending out church planters, which is a core competency of the Ferguson’s church.
- Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church by Reggie McNeal. Is it going to be about how many, how much, how often? I hope not. This book will help you get the right scorecard.
Other books that have been foundational for our current church plant: The Externally Focused Church by Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw, The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, Total Church: A Radical Reshaping Around Gospel and Community by Steve Timmis.
What would be your recommendations?
The Tangible Kingdom: Posturing Toward Others
Summer is here and for Bridge Church that means seven or eight mission teams, a Zephyrs game or two, renting out the largest water slide in southeast Louisiana, Worship Gatherings at the YMCA, building a few handicap ramps and other crazy compassion/service projects. And one of the most exciting things for me is that in Community Groups we’ll be working through the Tangible Kingdom Primer: An Eight Week Guide to Incarnational Community. It’s a simple study designed to challenge us to intuitively live life on mission for others. Looking forward to leaning in on what it means to be the presence of Christ in my neighborhood and community. One of the basic concepts in the study is the idea of posture, which is defined as “the way a person or community expresses itself toward others.” My personal posture and that of churches in which I’ve been a part of, has often been self-centered, inward focused, and closed off to nonconformists and anyone on the outside. What would it look like for us to posture ourselves and be present with those in the world? What honestly is the posture of your life? Toward the needs of others first or personal safety and satisfaction? Looking forward to tracking with Bridge Church through the TK primer. Contact me for more info.
Here are a few resources for those doing the TK:
- The Tangible Kingdom book.
- The Tangible Kingdom video.
- Tanglible Kingdom Primer Introduction. 17 minute description and training session led by the Author.
- Order the TK Primer and check out other Tangible Kingdom resources here.
- Follow the TK guys on Facebook.
Close Encounters – Summer Message Series at Bridge Church
We’ll begin a new message series this Sunday at Bridge Church. Close Encounters: Conversations that Bring Transformation. We’ll be looking at Jesus’ one on one interactions with people in the Gospel’s. The Big Idea will be that close encounters with Christ bring life transformation. The secondary idea is that we can be catalyst for life transformation as we bring people into a close encounter with Christ. Some of the questions will be asking: How did Jesus deal with shameful sinners, the wealthy fringe, those with major health issues, the religious zealot, the sinful fridge, people with rough edges, those who had doubt, the political idealogue. These are the people that we are walking past and relating to everyday. What can we say to lead them to see the light of the Glory of God in Christ? Let’s take some lessons from the Master. Should be a lot of fun.
Memorial Day
Very proud of my family who have protected and are protecting our freedom in the US Military. My Grandfather, PT Corley, served in North Africa during WWII. My Father, Danny Corley, and his older brother Robert served in Vietnam. Then today, Burt Corley just returned from Afghanistan and is a veteran of several theaters of war and conflict since the early 90’s. Chad McCann is currently in Afghanistan with the Louisiana National Guard. Whit Gallaspy has served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and is expected to make another deployment in the near future. If I’m leaving someone out, family, please remind me.
Praying this weekend and always for all of our troops. And not taking for granted the freedom that they have and are providing for my family.
Interesting side note: a relative of mine has found two great, great, great uncles of ours who were injured in the Civil War. She found their application for VA disability in the late 1860’s. They were injured in the battle of Hope Church, which actually was the name of our first church plant :)).
The Church Has Left the Building
This weekend marks Bridge Church’s 4th Faith in Action Sunday as a church. The idea is to have as our natural rhythm spending one Sunday per quarter serving the community in intentional ways. Our projects thus far have included kids activities and block parties at a local trailer park, building handicap ramps/porches for elderly and disadvantaged residents, serving at Nursing homes, visiting and bringing care baskets to area ICU waiting rooms, prayer walking, cooking for low income housing residents, trimming trees around a local trailer park, cleaning up yards, etc. Click here for a video of one of our past FIA’s.
This Sunday, we’ll meet at the West St. Tammany YMCA for breakfast at 9am and then break out to put our faith in action.
Recent Conversations
“My son had been asking questions about Christianity, but then he had a verbal altercation with a neighbor who goes to church every Sunday.”
“I was thinking about visiting _______ church, but somebody came into my business acting like a jerk, and they were wearing a T-shirt from there.”
“I’m a security guard and work details for churches. I see how they act toward us when they’re leaving, so I’d never go to church.”
“When I was 14 I went to church, but got called into the pastors office and yelled at for shooting spitballs, so I never went back.” (Now he’s 30 with a criminal and painful past).
Really wanting the church to think through our attitudes and actions outside and toward those on the outside of the church building. I’ve read the fastest growing religious affiliation is the unaffiliated. My desire is to not be a stumbling block for those who need to see the beauty of Christ.
Lane Corley 