Is your church a “Me Monster” or are you a “Moon Walker?”

Is your church telling a compelling story in the marketplace that no one can top?

Excellence has stopping power.

Story has stopping power.

Everyone has a Brand Identity. It is what is making your first impression.

Story Sequencing

1. Brand Identity (Introduces)

2. Brand Experience (Investigate): Are you exceeding expectations?

3. Brand Association (Internalize): Are you truthful? Are you trustworthy? Are you temporary?

Brochures are a “Pre-experience” not just ink and paper.

You can’t tell effective stories if you don’t document effective stories.

For more from Kevin check out www.brandpoet.com

“The enemy says be afraid of your pain, but God says let me leverage your pain.”

Check out People of the Second Chance to learn a little bit more about Mike.

What can God leverage right now in your life?

For me, it’s the empty feeling of not having our three adopted children home yet, and seeing the movie Blindside didn’t help a bit. By the way, this is a movie you will want to own. Without a doubt it’ll start showing up in my blogs.

What about you? What pain can God leverage right now?

Stacy referenced a contemporary of his in describing the five types of preachers.

1. The Comfort Dispenser – Gives Tylenol to cure all ills
2. The Pedantic Scholar – Waxes eloquently in order to impress
3. The Social Prophet – Sees the ills of society and cries
4. The Bible Repository – They know the book, but do they know the God of the book
5. Incorporates all four – Strive to be five

Always reflect on these things when preparing a message:

1. Why should I listen?
2. How are you introducing the text to the dilemma
3. Put people in the movie, help them become part of the text
4. Is there a common thread throughout the message? There should be no waste.
5. There MUST be redemption in your story.

After transitioning into my new role as Serve Pastor, aka Missions Pastor, I ran across Brennan Manning’s book shipped from Neue, aka Relevant, and it all became quite simple…

“How do your people love?”

How well…

How often…

Who…

Dave Gibbons, at the Story Conference, raised questions that really point back to,

“How does your leadership love?”

2 Peter 1:1-13 is a passage worth hanging on the wall of every Church Leader, Discipleship Pastor, and Church Guru. The end result in making Disciples is Christlikeness, and Christlikeness’s primary character trait is Love.

Verse 3 implies that our knowledge of Jesus should grow. Verse 5 implies that the promises of Jesus need to be applied for growth to take place.  Verses 5-8 indicate that the end product of growing will be love for EVERYONE. In fact, growing in knowledge is synonymous with growing in love.

The Church is in trouble when partaking in Bible Study is more important than serving widows, orphans, and the poor. Studying the Bible is beneficial, but it should never be done in lieu of or instead of APPLYING it through acts of service to the unloved.

Here’s the rub…this is not easy, nor comfortable. This kind of love is a violent kind of love that reaches inside the hearts of people exposes their wicked and diseased hearts and offers the balm of the blood of Jesus Christ that will heal them. More on this later…

Musings from Chris Seay

We are shaped by the stories of our ancestors.  A portion of who we are is the way that it is because they were the way that they were.

Our sermons need to be less about five things to do or three points. They need to tell a story, The Story, in such a way that people are driven to the scriptures in order to discover for themselves what it means.

Musings from Nancy Beach

The Gospel is three parts: part tragedy, part comedy, and part fairy tale. The Tragedy is that man is a sinner and wicked. The Comedy is that Jesus saves us anyway. The Fairy Tale is that it’s too good to NOT be true.

I pray that my small attempt at making notes does the same for you. First, I would encourage you to read Isaiah 6, and while we usually stop at verse 8 I urge you to press on and focus on what happens after verse 8. Because Isaiah is given a disturbing message to communicate, with verse 13 being Dave’s focus.

“13 And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”

NOTES…

Why can’t we measure success in churches by:

1. Eradicating the foster care need in our community
2. Eradicating poverty in our community
3. Caring for the elderly in our community

Instead of…
1. Church attendance
2. Baptisms
3. $

Dave is not suggesting ignoring what we typically measure in the Church, but it needs to be tempered with “Are we making a difference in our communities?” kinds of questions. If we cannot answer these kinds of questions affirmatively then it makes the typical measurements of success irrelevant.

What if 80% of our budget was spent on outreach instead of our venue?

What is missing in spiritual formation in churches?

1. There is no one size fits all. We need to customize a path based upon collaborative resources
2. We miss the intersection between a person’s story and the Holy Spirit by trying to immediately funnel them through a series of steps with the false promise that at the end of the funnel they will move from broken to whole and from newborn to fully devoted follower of Christ.

Churches need to start asking, “What do we NEED to feel uncomfortable about?”

Churches need to develop a theology of suffering because walking people through suffering can birth a HOLY seed.

The Church is NOT a Yacht Club.

The main thing for the church is to throw drowning people the rescue ring of Christ (cue Flood by Jars of Clay).

Excuses for not throwing Christ to the people (I’m highlighting excuses I commonly hear at HCC):

1. The Depth Excuse, “I’m just looking for something deeper” – ALL rescues happen in DEEP water! Philippiams 1:6

2. The Knowledge Excuse, “I just don’t know enough to rescue people.” – If you don’t know your own story of transformation then maybe you’ve never been rescued because that is the only thing you need to know.

3. I Need to Pray About It Excuse – We’re commanded to do this, so why do you need clarification?

4. The Sheeple Excuse – When you are comfortable with growing in numbers by transfer from other churches, then you cease being the church. True growth is through baptism.

My reflections:  True growth is in baptism of the unbeliever, and a growth in love and compassion by the believer for the unbeliever.