This reiterates a question I often ask associate pastors, board members, or members (I rarely ask senior pastors, they’re not given to analytical questions.  It makes them nervous   They’re just trying to keep things together day-to-day with some tenuous veneer of why they’re in charge).

My question is “If Church is the Answer, What’s the Question?” 

It’s a query that’s rarely met with a ready answer.  For most people church is simply an ipso facto equation: we have church so that we can have church.  It is an inelegant tautology, wrapped neither in an enigma nor surrounded by a mystery, but rather gummed together with civic religion and sticky to the touch with sentimental pap and platitudes.

What questions are driving your church?  Some exeptions aside, natch, pastors and staff tend to see church as answering the question of “Where can I get a job?”, “How can I keep this job?”, and “Why do these people keep bothering me?”  Board members, elders, donors come to the church looking for ways to ingratiate themselves into a captive audience where their influence can be felt and heard. “How can I be important?” is their question.

Since these questions are vital to the identity and survival of those in charge, the answers will become manifest in the subsequent church programming and experience.  This is not to say most pastors and leaders are nefarious, they’re just too caught up in the wrong set of questions because their peers and published professionals are pushing the wrong set of questions.

But it’s the other questions that people come to church looking for answers.  Questions dealing with love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

How can I find community?  Where can I find people who will love me and nurture me?

How can I find transformation?  Where can I break free from the thoughts, habits, and environments that keep me struggling, that keep me repeating my past?

These are the questions that people come to church looking for answers to.  They are looking for a life-changing experience.  Being “relevant” is not an adequate substitute for community or transformation.  Where pastors and people become confused is when they start thinking of church as the problem, rather than the solution.  If church is the problem we set about fixing church.  We tweak, rearrange, change the music, change the format, change the carpet.  Church is not the problem.  The problem we are solving is getting people deeply engaged in a community of the Spirit. This is a community where we eat, pray, and love outside of the Sunday morning routine.  We are marrying people, not the church.  Don’t marry the church.  You will begin to dislike people because they mess up your programs, routines, and services.  Pharisees married the church and it didn’t work out well in the long run.

If church is the answer, the question is, “How can we create a community marked by God’s love, overflowing in the Spirit, and connected in Christ’s body?”  The focus needs to be shifted to people, not the church.

“The question is not who’s best at performing high-priority functions, but which things can you and only you as the CEO get done?

If you don’t ask yourself that question, your time allocations are bound to be wrong. Lots of CEOs who have been great number twos flounder as number one because they are implicitly asking the wrong question. That happens because they usually rose to CEO by being very good at getting things done themselves.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/10/what_not_to_spend_your_time_on.html

So the question isn’t, “Who’s the boss?”, the question is “Why are you the boss?”.  Too many pastoral and ministry staff fall into doing the work rather than equipping others for the work to be done.  That’s because many pastors aren’t sure of how that equipping takes place.  So they usually settle for being busy as a means of justifying their role as pastor. 

The pastor’s role is to create the context, frame the discussion, and ensure that empowerment takes place.  Sunday sermons are not the main function of a pastor.  The first role of a pastor is ensuring that your people are being progressively exposed to life-changing experiences within the context of community.  The role of the pastor is to ensure that people are being transformed and maturing, not just showing up and volunteering.  Worship services, healing services, or community outreach are great starting points.  But these are events.  The pastor is not an event director, but the expert in Christian maturity, in development and transformation, and in community.  Anything short of that and the pastor will be doing the wrong work.      

Remember, regardless of what you know or think you know about branding, your church is a brand. 

If you’re just trying to do church, you will end up doing supeficial and gimmicky marketing aimed at simply luring people to your Sunday service.  Like asking people to drink Pepsi instead of Coke.  There’s no substative differences between the two, so the goal is to create pretend benefits for choosing one over the other.  

Most churches think they’re different or better than the church down the street.  But 99% of the times these differences are in intention only.  I’ll concede that many churches want to be different, but then they do the exact same things every other church is doing.  Not a recipe for different.  And certainly no closer to becoming a better church. 

Real brands don’t need cliches, copying, or the next book on being Church Different.  To move beyond good intentions and minor doctrinal distinctions, start helping people lead better lives.  Help people navigate, celebrate, and make meaning out of their lives. Don’t worry about your brand, worry about connecting with people.  A real brand will follow.

It seems that this is role of community: bringing out the gifts in people.  People are expressive and creative.  Our job is to create the relationship and space for that to be developed and experienced.

Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program handed out almost $5 billion to promote these ideas. States leapt to be eligible for the money, promising to open more privately managed charter schools, to fire the principal of every low-performing school, to fire most or all of the teachers in schools with low scores, and to close public schools if their scores are low.

None of these approaches works.

Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17 percent) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37 percent) are even worse than the neighborhood public school. Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17 percent) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37 percent) are even worse than the neighborhood public school.

The musician Brian Eno invented a word to describe “genius” as the entirety of a scene, rather than the work of an individual:

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

You see:

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques
• Network effects of success
• Local tolerance for the novelties

When you find this place, hold on.

This is a truism in business as much as it is in any ministry or nonprofit.

“ I call this the mythological-industrial complex, because it serves the interests of many players in preserving the status quo. It sells newspapers and magazines. It helps investors boost their profile and convince entrepreneurs that they offer value-add. It helps companies with PR. It makes successful founders famous. I’ve certainly been a beneficiary of these forces. Yet I worry that it deters new entrants from disrupting incumbents: if your idea looks a little dubious, your career a little messy, your team a little dysfunctional, if you lack superhuman design skills, maybe you should just give up. You don’t have the Right Stuff to become an entrepreneur.

Lessons Learned: Stop lying on stage (via pegobry)