6. Learn a foreign language.  I don’t have this mastered.  In fact, I am not close to considering myself bilingual; however, there is tremendous value in working on learning another language.  The reason is worldviews are manifested in languages.  As I learn multiple languages, I am gaining an understanding of the diversity of worldviews.  If it does nothing but help me see that my way of thinking isn’t the only way to think and see the world, it will accomplish much.  For example, when I learned the Bambara word for bike, I learned it actually translates “iron horse.”

7. Find a local community care outreach and serve your community. Just like learning a language gives you different perspectives on life, so does serving in a different socioeconomic environment give you a greater perspective on people.  Sit in their home (if they even have a home), eat a meal in their context.  We had some college students that traveled the States on a month long journey; stopping, staying,a and eating in soup kitchens. Obviously, this wasn’t a typical college vacation to Cancun.

8. Host an exchange student. I have seen families open their homes to high school students from Turkey, Germany, China, and others.  Amazing cultural exchanges take place that will broaden your global understanding, enlarge your heart for the nation of your student at lea, connect you with people around the world, and the list goes on.   In two of the three scenario’s the students went back to their home country followers of JC.

9. Adopt an international student into your home and family life. I love seeing what God has done in a family in our church that has taken on connecting and periodically hosting about 10-15 college African college students from the UofA.  They love on them, serve them, share life together over the holiday’s and throughout the year.  One of the Nigerian students is working on his PhD and has the vision to go back to Nigeria and become the President.  Can you imagine if his vision becomes true. To  think that along this young man’s spiritual pilgrimage he points back to his faith growing through this family and his time spent in their lives.

10. Walk through a different neighborhood or apartment complex. Whether the neighborhood is socio-economically different than your “normal” or it’s an area a different ethnic group tends to congregate and live, walk through those sidewalks or streets.  Relocate your exercise routine there.  Drive through there.  But, on your journey, open your eyes.  Instead of seeing them or “not” seeing them at all, ask God to open your heart to see them how He sees them.  Pray as you walk, run, drive, and GO!

I am privileged to pastor the most amazing church in the world (at least from my perspective:).  This has been a 10 year journey for all of us.  The church launched in 2001.  It has been a journey to raise up believers that are world-class Christians.  World-class Christians are what we are striving to raise up at GPC.   How does a church raise up World-class Christians? How can I be a world-class Christian? Here are a few of the things that has helped me in my journey.

1. Read your Bible looking at for the “nations”- Here is a good exercise for you.  Read your Bible and start circling every time it speaks of the nations worshiping Him, going to the nations, that God wanted to bless the nations and then compare it to the amount of time you focus on one nation, the USA.  I am currently circling every time I see the “nations,”  “peoples of the earth,” or like phrases in the Scriptures.  I want the scope of my life to be measured by the scope of God’s heart.

2. Watch the BBC news- I don’t know how to say this, but frankly,  America is absorbed with itself.  American media, either by cause or effect, is absorbed with American life more than any other.  You watch any of the news channels (CNN or Fox) or any of the nightly news and 90% of what they cover is about what happens in our 50 states.  If I want to know what is happening in the world, I watch the BBC.  I watched  BBC World News this morning before having my quiet time to get a thorough overview of what was happening in the Arab world since there is so much turmoil right now.  I use what I learn to guide my prayers.  I wouldn’t have gotten 1/2 the coverage of the world in the same amount of time had I watched an American news outlet.

3. Keep an up-to-date Passport- I heard Henry Blackby speak to a congregation once and he asked for a show of hands of those who had a passport versus those who didn’t have a valid passport.  He in very convicting and passionate with what he said next.  He called out those who didn’t have a passport as not being ready to go to the nations and that they must not believe in the Great Commission.  With a passport you stand ready to go, where ever, and whenever.  There have been times that I have had opportunities to go to the nations quickly and had I not had a valid passport, I couldn’t have gone.

4. Pray through the global news- As I mentioned in the before regarding the BBC.  I use the media outlets of newspapers, websites, to keep me fresh in my prayer life.  We must all pray for the Arab nations currently.  The changes that are taking place internally in these nations could be huge for the spread of the gospel or devastating.

5. Don’t have a “missions department” Move from missions to mission.  Missions is something we do and a department we staff.  Mission is who we are.  We are on God’s mission. Mission is what we are throughout the church in every single department, in every single staff, and single dollar spent is about mission. That means that we don’t have compartmentalized missions departments.   We expect our Preschool departments to  mobilize and educate even our 4 and 5 year olds.  Our student pastor has forgone taking our students to a camp, and instead the students will feed  orphans of Peru.  Every department, person, and dollar are to be on mission.

When someone wants to leave and go for 2 weeks to 2 years, we don’t simply send the people to an agency to do our preparing, sending, supporting, and doing our missions for us.  We go with every member, supporting them in every way possible.

To be continued…

1. The team:  Wow.  I can’t say enough about the chemistry of a team, but we had it goin’!  I could name them off and say that Sherry, Christy and Jason were the rock stars in the medical gig.  Sherry pulling 50 or so teeth (I pulled around 6 and felt like I got a work out).  Her little ole’ arms…well she’s got it.  Jason and Christy were like the dynamic duo checking babies for malnourishment, treating wounds from elephantiasis, and even self-inflicted wounds (thanks Jason for the opening act:)).  We took over $800 worth of medicines  with us to the village and brought nothing back to town (thanks for drinking coffee at the Beyond Borders Cafe.  Your donations paid for the clinic).  Another duo act was Stephen and Russell. They were storying-mad-men.  Sharing stories with over 100 people.  Scott reconnected with old brothers in Christ and told stories from years past that they still recalled.  His greatest contribution may be how he captured the village in photo-story form.  You can almost smell the Sahara sands in the photos. Check’em out on Facebook.  Susan is a new hero of mine.  She is the only woman that I have seen that can manage the chaos of a bush clinic registration, teach a hygiene class, story Scriptures, cook lunch for 20 people, and do it all with a smile on her face!  A team is only a team when all the members are finding their nitch and doing it with excellence.

2. Trip Prep: My favorite person on the planet is my dear wife.  As we story through the gospel of Luke in the village this year, Lori took hours preparing the stories and the team.  I identified the stories, she wrote them and then spent several Sundays training our team in the storying methodology for oral cultures.  Everyone had 1 story they could share anytime anywhere.  We then had T4T stories ready to train nationals to share.  We had master teachers ready to share at night under the star lit skies.  Thanks babe.  You made my job a lot easier.

3. Prayer team: As great as all these elements made for the outstanding trip, I actually think the greatest contributing factor to an amazing trip where we saw a “cousin”  family choose the Jesus road, along with another village lady that Susan was a part of leading to Christ. (ask me off line to explain what a “cousin” family is)  I had never asked a team to be so intentional with their prayer support before.  This time, I asked all the team members to identify 10 people that they knew and trusted  to be vigilante and faithful prayer partners for them and us everyday we were gone. What should have been 70 prayer warriors, turned into 98.

I largely credit the answered prayers of our faithful pray warriors for the GREAT success of our trip.  Thielicke writes, “The globe itself lives and is upheld as by Atlas arms through the prayers of those whose love has not grown cold.” Thank you prayer warriors for having hot hearts and bold prayers while we were in West Africa.

His wisdom, correction and encouragement would not change.  His miracle healings might include AIDS (today is national AIDS awareness day), breast cancer and malaria.  Instead of walking on water, he might helped the Detroit Lions win the Super Bowl (that would be a miracle of biblical proportion). Being a contextual follower of Christ is a matter of becoming one with your culture without giving up the heart gripping convictions that shape you.

Tim Keller spoke at the Lausanne Conference in Cape Town, South Africa recently and gave 10 marks of a contextual church that help believers get a grasp of  what contextualization can look like.   The video is worth watching. Copy and paste the link below and think deep.

http://conversation.lausanne.org/en/conversations/detail/11512

GPC is in the midst of a series of messages called Radical.  We bought a copy of David’s book Radical for all our members and are using it as curriculum for our small groups.  Take the next 35 minutes and spend it in front of your monitor with David’s message, drop to your knees and surrender to God’s mission, then get up and go for it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My skepticism has passed since doing some thorough research.  Once I saw there were many models of multi-sites rather than just the celebrity model that I have sometimes seen, my perspective began to change.  Once I had studied healthier models that were Kingdom minded with a clear missional involvement, and less mega church and attractional, my defenses came down.   (Attractional is simply a program- driven- come- and-see- what- we- do- approach).  I began to see some real upside for God’s Kingdom work in some powerful ways.  The following are some bullet point observations that speak to the advantage of churches using a healthy multi-site approach to launching churches.

10 reasons I am a believer in “Missional” Multi-site Churches…

1. Multi-site churches are a way of putting “local” back in the church.  With the advent of mega churches, the local church has been lost and the regional mega-church born.  When churches do multi-site, they are taking the church back down to a grass roots movement in a community and move away from  larger massive institutions.
2. Multi-site churches create space and opportunity for new leaders to be born and to become. Take for example praise teams.  Once a church has its polished worship band and team, the tendency is to simply work the most talented and  only develop back one or two talent spots for each position.  This leaves a lot of emerging talent on the side.  Multi-site forces every pastor and ministry leader to become a developer of people for future campuses and church plants.  Sounds a lot like a form of disciple making to me.
3. Multi-site churches foster a “going” ethos.  ”Missional” is a term over used and under-defined today.  If you want to sell a book or sound trendy, use the term “missional.” I even hated using the word to describe our version of a multi-site, but there are so many hybrids of the new method.  Though there are many dialects of missional, one thing is unanimous with missional churches – they “go.”  The biggest event isn’t the coming to church, but the going of the church.  They go to the under-developed and under-resourced; they go to the growing populations segments in need of a spiritual community.    Multi-sites create a culture where “going is good.”
4. Multi-site churches take the church to the people, instead of expecting the unchurched to come to them.  It is most important to build bridges to the unchurched.  Caring enough to go to the people and be among the people is more meaningful than saying come to us. People typically will travel as far to church as they travel to work (15-20 min in NWA).  It is beyond reason to expect an unchurched person to travel further than this to attend church gatherings.  Unchurched people won’t go out of their way to go to church.   Neither are the unchurched turned on to Jesus by a church’s polished performance.  Instead, the church living in the community, affecting the community mind, body and soul opens doors to speak into the lives of people far from Christ.
5. Multi-site churches are more efficient with God’s resources and effective in church planting .  A 3-self church plant (self supporting, self governing, and self sustaining) is the traditional form of church planting should still be a priority.  However, some church starts require subsidies of $150,000 or more before they can become self sustaining churches.  Multi-sites can be self-sustaining faster and with less money because the start up cost, logistical organization, legal papers for 501c3 status, and marketing functions are all shared by the launching campus as they have already established systems, processes,  and a name to help the emerging congregation.   Instead of crawling as a baby church, they are able to start walking and running quickly as a multi-site.

There are some things about multi-site churches that I am repulsed by.  However, My definition of what a multi-site church can and should be has been broadened. I now see its potential value.   Next blog post I will give the other 5 reasons I have gone from a skeptic to a believer in multi-sites.

Fifty percent of my doctorate is seeking to upack and identify leading missional churches from coast to coast in America that are being missional.  You can think of missional as the lens through which you see your culture that will then influence the way you approach your ministry (my very elementary description). The culture shapes the ways and means of ministry.

I came across a good video that shows you in a glimpse what I am attempting to study in full.  It is an interview between a couple of guys that I have read their writings and had the privilege to interact with on various levels.  They are seeking to give definition to a very slippery topic.  I think they do a great job at showing the viewers the dynamic nature of and the diversity within the topic.  Plus they are so eloquent in their speech- they are good teachers.  I only wish I could communicate as clearly about the topic as they do:).

Watch and learn.

Ed Stetzer and David Fitch – a missional conversation Part One from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

Saturday at 8:30 AM, 230 volunteers showed up at GPC ministry campus ready to give their day in service to NWA.  Teams were wrapping gifts that our members donated for 140 less fortunate children around the world and sending shoe boxes through Operation Christmas Child.  Two other teams went and served two local shelters for women in transition (Northwest Arkansas Women’s Shelter and Saving Grace).  Others prepared meals for volunteers and people in the community while others assisted with childcare.  Still others collected food for the Salvation Army.

The flagship project of the day was serving the Rogers community through a Neighborhood Makeover project.  Thirty homes were served with  hands in the dirt, bagging leaves, mowing yards, chain saws blazing and tree trimming.   Trash was also collected to our dumpster’s capacity as 80 Grace Point members and attenders put their faith to work and shared hope with people of NWA.   I am so proud to pastor such a serving, giving, and caring congregation.

You have been a blessing to our community, body, soul and spirit…that’s what a church is supposed to be.  Watch this video that captures the heart of the day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A high percentage of their staff (or “members” as most churches refer to them) are a part of the film industry.  They capitalize on their context and employ it as much as possible.  Eric had this link on his blog, so I thought I would pass it on too.  It’s fun and inspiring to watch.

In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins (Good to Great; Built to Last) says the following: (p. 46)

“We anticipated that most companies fall from greatness because they become complacent–the fail to stimulate innovation, they fail to initiate bold action, they fail to ignite change, they just became lazy–and watch the world pass them by.”

Would you say this is true of many churches? That they have become complacent and this is the reason for their lack of growth? Is it true of the Southern Baptist Convention (and other denominations)?

Collins goes on to say:
“It’s a plausible theory with a problem: it doesn’t square with our data. Certainly, any enterprise that becomes complacent and refuses to change or innovate will eventually fall. But, and this is the surprising point, the companies in our analysis showed little evidence of complacency when they fell. Overreaching much better explains how the once-invincible self-destruct.”

Your opinion: do churches  decline because of complacency or over reaching?