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Message Application & Spiritual Gifts - Part 1

At CCC we're in the midst of the CCC at the Movies series, where we take some popular movies and look at the truths about God they communicate, whether on purpose or not.  Two Sundays ago David shared a message based on the movie Kung Fu Panda - which is a totally awesome movie. 

In the message David talked about spiritual gifts, and how in the movie the panda (Po) had to figure out how he was gifted and how to best use that.  Two thoughts came out of that message for me.  One, I'm thinking about adding something to my blogging rhythm.  I'd like to post each week about how I'm going to apply what I've heard in the message at CCC on Sundays.  Reason being, messages should move us to action because simply knowing more about the Bible makes us more proud, not more like Jesus.  I hope to start that this week.

It also reminded me of something cool I learned from Darrin Patrick at the Exponential Conference this year.  But, that will be in tomorrow's post.

Church Surveys - Extremely Helpful

Our church was started to reach people who are not a part of any church.  We are constantly trying to evaluate how well we are doing in light of that vision.  Last month we had a church-wide survey that had a ton of questions that helped us evaluate how well we are doing in a number of different areas.  Here are some of the interesting things we found:

• Our attenders are 60% married & 40% single (that's adults & students responding) 
• Our most common age brackets are 28-35 & 23-27  
• Since we launched, 55% of new attenders have been from another church and 45% have come from an "unchurched" background.  That is much better than the national average for churches and we have actually gotten better recently (it's 50/50 in the last year specifically)
• 71% of people came to CCC because they were invited  
• Our Starting Point environment is extremely helpful for getting people connected in small groups (twice as likely to connect) and contributing on ministry teams (three times as likely to serve)  

We also learned there are some things we can improve on:

• Communicating what Starting Point is and why it's valuable to newcomers and long-time attenders. 
• We can communicate about membership more clearly and regularly
• We can improve on how well we track assimilation on an individual, and church-wide level

The survey was a bear to analyze but it provided a lot of great information, only a portion of which I mentioned here.  It will probably be a yearly thing for us and should go a long way towards helping us constantly get better at everything we do.

Does your church do surveys?  If so, could you send me a copy?  If not, why not?

Exponential Conference - Day 2 #exponential09

Our staff team is here in Orlando, FL for the Exponential Conference.  It's a conference (also called National New Church Conference) that is geared towards church planters, church planting churches and networks.  Here are some highlights from my experience on day 2:

• The True North band has lead worship for the conference and has done a great job.  


• Craig Groeschel did a great job in the opening session of day 2.  He talked about necessities for a movement.  Marc Choi from Onnuri Church in Korea (small church of over 40,000), started off the session telling the story of Onnuri Church, his involvement, and his story about planting a church here in the U.S.


• I attended a breakout on the internet, websites, and the church.  It was awful.  


• The day ended with a Tok Box interview (pre-recorded) of Ajai Lall and Derek Duncan, pastor of East 91st Street Christian Church.  Derek was transparent and authentic and his message was simple and powerful.  


• I attended a breakout session with Efrem Smith that was pretty helpful.  It was about serving to build community.    


• Hearing from church leaders in other countries was awesome because the church is exploding in other countries around the world.    

Here are my favorite quotes:

• "A movement will never be about your ministry, it will be about His kingdom."  - Craig Groeschel


• "Don't blame yourself for the declines (in church attendance) or you'll take credit for the increases" - Craig Groeschel  


• "We need to courageously surrender" - Ajai Lall via Derek Duncan  


• "You're never ready to plant a church" - Derek Duncan  

Exponential Conference - Day 1

Our staff team is here in Orlando, FL for the Exponential Conference.  It's a conference (also called National New Church Conference) that is geared towards church planters, church planting churches and networks.  Here are some highlights from my experience today:

• Erwin McManus was the speaker for the opening session.  Erwin always blows my mind with the way he teaches.  His teachings always challenge me to dream bigger and live more like Jesus.  He really is an artist in many ways, chief among them being his use of words and his great storytelling to communicate his message.  He taught from Acts 17 and brought fresh insight.  I could have listened to him for the rest of the day and would have been thrilled.  


• Tim Keller made an appearance via video and had some good insights.  He said that church planters should make a deal with their family to overwork for a specified time during the early stages but cut back to a healthy schedule after the specified time period, no matter what. 


• I went to a breakout session lead by Gary Lamb.  I follow Gary's blog and twitter but had never met him or heard him speak.  Well, there were no surprises.  He was passionate, funny, loud, and little crazy which made for a great breakout session.  He talked about how to do church in a portable setting with excellence, but without spending a lot of money.  Tons of great practical advice.


• The other breakout session I attended was lead by Brad Leeper and was all about how to foster extravagant generosity.  It was interesting to find out that he helped plant a church in Baltimore, MD that most "church people" in Baltimore know of.  Small world.


• We had dinner with Stadia (a church planting organization CCC works with) and all of the church plants that Stadia helped start.  It was cool to see all the new couples who will be planting churches in the upcoming year.     

Some of my favorite quotes from the day:

• "Love covers a multitude of irrelevance" - Erwin McManus


• "Answering the question - what do you do? - by saying you're a pastor is like saying 'I'm a cannibal, want to have lunch'?" - Erwin McManus


• "The popular phrase 'money follows vision' is a lie." - Gary Lamb (He says that is true after you have launched a church but not so much before.  Before it's about relationship and vision.


• "Church planters are the biggest excuse makers" - Gary Lamb  

Launch Seminar with Nelson Searcy

Yesterday I attended the Launch Seminar with Nelson Searcy & Kerrick Thomas that was held here in Baltimore.  The seminar is based on the book of the same name and is all about how to launch a new church.  Here were some great points from the day:

• The call to ministry is the call to prepare
• Launch large, launch quickly, and launch from the outside in  
• Four calls of a church planter:  
  • My call to start a church  
  • My spouse's call to start a church  
  • Our call to a specific place to start a church  
  • Our call to reach a specific people  
• Generally, you will reach people who are younger than you (the average age of the people on stage will be close to the average age of the church)  
• You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with  
• People say no to what's confusing     

Some of those lines are directly from Nelson or Kerrick and others were borrowed from others.  It was a great seminar with a lot of helpful content.  Check out David Jackson's live blog of the day for a lot more detail.

Anybody want to plant a church in Vermont?

Is religion an important part of your daily life?

That's the question that was asked to 350,000 Americans in a recent Gallup pole.  On average, 65% of the people responded "yes" to that question.  But, what should be no surprise, it's not even across the country.  The Bible Belt had the most people answer yes to that question with the northeast and northwest responding with the most "no" answers.  Here are the 3 highest and 3 lowest:

3 Highest:
Mississippi - 85%
Alabama - 82%
South Carolina - 80%

3 Lowest:
Maine - 48%
New Hampshire - 46%
Vermont - 42%

My home state of Maryland comes in around the middle of the pack, with about 65% saying "yes".

Which brings me to the question in the title - Anybody want to plant a church in Vermont?  I've heard multiple debates about whether or not it is more difficult to plant a church in different parts of the country.  I think one would have to be quite naive to think that it is not.  Is it measurable?  Probably not, at least not accurately. 

In order to even compare the effects location (by state) had on two different church plants, so many of the other factors would have to be the same.  Same caliber leader, same size launch team, same quality people, same funding, same target demographic, same population density in target location, etc.  In other words, nearly impossible.  

Oh, and I don't consider religion a part of my daily life, but I do consider following Jesus a part of my daily life :)

Networking Baltimore Churches

I figured I'd blog about an idea I've thought about recently.  With my passion for the local church, specifically in Baltimore, I'm regularly thinking of possible ways to help churches in Baltimore work together to transform this city.  I really believe that it will take churches working together to create the type of change this city needs.

One idea I've tossed around is a website dedicated to aggregating news and information related to churches and ministries in Baltimore.  One step in helping churches work together would be to help churches get to know each other.  Reading about what's going on in other churches around Baltimore would hopefully help churches feel more connected to each other.  It could even prompt churches to help each other if there are clear opportunities in front of them. 

At this point I've pictured a website that is primarily a news page in blog format, but also pulled blog posts, news headlines and twitter posts from churches and church leaders in Baltimore.  The question that plagues me is whether or not churches and church leaders in Baltimore would care enough to follow and contribute to such a website.  But, such possibilities of failure never stopped me before so I'm going to check with my brother in-law who could actually get this rolling from the technology standpoint. 

By the way, if you want to steal this idea and implement it yourself, please do.  Just let me know how I can help.

Elevation Church :: Three

 

Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC is having a one-day, one-time only event for church leaders called Three.  There are many things about Elevation Church that interest me and are reasons why I read Steven Furtick's (their pastor) blog.  One is that they launched just a month before we did.  Another, the reason most people know of them, is because they now have over 5,000 people attending weekly.  That's the kind of growth you rarely see in churches.  Especially considering there was nothing special helping that from the beginning.  When I say that, obviously there were a lot of special things (like, God), but sometimes you hear stories of churches growing at amazing rates and don't realize they planted with 1,000 people or split from a megachurch or something like that.  I'm not saying that's bad, it's just different (our church launched from a megachurch). 

Another reason I read Steven's blog and follow Elevation is because Steven is wise beyond his years, particularly in regards to leadership.  I'm sure Elevation has learned a ton of things going from a church of 120-something to 5,000+ in 3 short years.  Three is an opportunity for church leaders to learn from Elevation's wisdom and experience.  If I had the money and time, I would definitely go.  However, I don't, so I'm just bitter about it.  But, now you know about it and maybe I can experience it vicariously through you.

Passion City Church & Awakening

Louie Giglio and his team - Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Nathan & Christy Nockels (Jennifer's FAVORITE singer) are starting Passion City Churchand their first meeting in ATL is February 15.  I mention this here because I talked about it before here and here.  I love how they are creating a culture of generosity right from the beginning, starting with their first meeting.  They are asking everyone who attends the meeting to help contribute to help a single parent in the Atlanta area and to provide scripture for a people group in SE Asia.  It's also pretty cool that they plan to use different locations to meet in throughout the early stages. 

Awakening is a book full of photography by Jeremy Cowart that was taken on the Passion World Tour.  The book will be available this spring and the video on the website highlights some of the great pictures that were taken. 

The Baltimore Project

The Baltimore Project is a website where you can find out information about a new church plant coming to Baltimore.  Tally Wilgis will be the lead planter.  I have never met Tally, and only heard about him through the internet world (Twitter, actually).  I immediately subscribed to his blog because as I have said before, my dream is to see Baltimore flooded with new church plants and renewed existing churches.  

In this post Tally calls for church planters and people who love them.  I love church planters, particularly in Baltimore.  He will be launching a site tomorrow on www.thebaltimoreproject.com where you can follow him on a tour he is taking to learn from church leaders and raise the awareness of this project.  

Baltimore needs a ton of new church plants.  I'm pretty much going to stalk every new church plant I hear about in order to be networked with as many churches in Baltimore as I can.  I really believe that it will take tons of churches and leaders working together to make Baltimore known for strong, healthy churches.