Jack’s Buzz

My friend Joe Kennedy blogged for church planting book recommendations. He was blessed with plenty, and will get plenty more. The good news is that Joe will make a lot of people feel happy and fulfilled. The bad news is that he will get a Library of Congress worth of suggestions, most of which will be a complete waste of time.

Cut to the chase–there are so few worthwhile books on church planting that you could avoid the genre and be quite successful. That’s not to say a church planter ought not read; it is to say say what he should read should not be concerned with how to plant a church. Most of the stuff on that topic is limited to planting a particular church among a particular people; i.e., most church planting books present a model.

Rather, a good church planter understands two profound realities: (1) how God works, and (2) how people work. Once on the field, he takes those two and sharpens them to: (1) how God is working in this place at this time, and (2) how can I help the people in my community respond to the Gospel.

That may seem to be an oversimplification, but in today’s hectic world, who needs more complexity, right? OK, here’s a list (click my titles to get something FREE):

Is it a shameless plug to hype my stuff on Heart Attitudes or Redeeming the Culture through Missional Living? Certainly not!

• Willard, Divine Conspiracy (listed first for a reason)
• Foster, Celebration of Discipline (spiritual disciplines to get your through the coming drought)
• Erickson, Christian Theology (good to know doctrine and where it came from)
• Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians (a doctrinal steak in a very small bite)
• Rae, Moral Choices (why should one do this or that?)
• Maston, Biblical Ethics and Why Live the Christian Life (deeper treatment of the biblical bases for mores)
• Schwartz, Natural Church Development (Helped me find the “leaks” so the church would grow naturally as was its Owner’s intent)
• Murphy, Handbook for Spiritual Warfare (thick and deep, but probably the best treatment on the subject)
• Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (how the church interacts with the world)
• Shurden, Not a Silent People (why it’s actually quite cool to be a baptist)
• Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (story of St. Patrick and a lesson on how to reach postmoderns)
• Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (how Christ builds His church)
• Boer, Pentecost and Missions (what really happened at Pentecost and how it effects church planting)
• Collins, Good to Great and the very brief supplement written for non-profits (how to find and place the right people)
• Frangipane, The Three Battlegrounds (simple, biblical explanation of spiritual warfare)
• Coleman, Master Plan of Evangelism (when this is avoided, evangelism becomes odd)
• Bullock, Fools and Follies (how to spot a fool and what to do with him or her)
• Friedman, The World is Flat (understanding the world in which we operate)
• Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (helps make quiet time more profitable)
• Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (too few church planters are likeable–this helps)
• McCarthy, The On-Purpose Person and The On-Purpose Business (how to know what you’re supposed to be doing)
• Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible; The God Who is There; and just about anything else he wrote (helps us understand how God works and how people tick, which really are the two keys to Christian leadership)
• Moreland, Love God with All Your Mind (antidote to church-light)
• Buckingham, Now Discover Your Strengths (how to find and work from your passion)
• Duncan, Time Traps (how to stop spinning your wheels and achieve something)
• Drucker, Post Capitalist Society (why the old world died and what is next)
• Maxwell, Developing the Leader in You and Developing the Leaders Around You (obvious)
• Miller, Motivational Interviewing (stop self destructive behavior)
• Donnithorne, The West Point Way of Leadership (leader development)

That’s enough for now…

Email has changed the workplace in both directions–made us simultaneously more efficient and more impatient; more communicative and less civil. We’re richer in our ability to communicate with more people, but poorer in our communication abilities. Email, like so many new things, is at once a blessing and a curse.

Most of us get far too much email. Every day people send each other about 40 billion messages; all seem urgent, but none are, really. The computerized cyberworld generates another 17 billion auto-alerts, few of which really matter one bit. Then there’s spam—another 40 billion tense offers for important things like a new mortgage or help with my eBay account. USA Today reports that white-collar workers receive 140 emails a day (Oct 5, 2007). From my experience, half of what’s not officially spam is about as important as spam; so my meaningful email total is about 35 messages a day. On average most of us biz workers spend an hour and a half on email every day.

How do We Stop this Madness?
Evidently several companies—and maybe you?—want to get a handle on the downside of email. U.S. Cellular, Intel, and PDF Worldwide have declared Fridays to be email free. That’s right, no spam, no IM, no critical, red-flagged, read-this-or-you’re un-American junk. No jokes, no cute stories, no prayer requests for your third cousin’s ex-wife’s sister, and also nothing important via email. Instead, pick up the phone or walk down the hall and talk to a person like a person.

Civility returns to the workplace, what a concept. I wonder if we can do that in churches? I wonder why we churchy guys didn’t figure it out first. Well, let’s at least get in on a good thing. Let’s tame this beast.

Thoughts on Handling the Email Beast

1. Don’t use email to avoid dealing with a problem. Make the tough (phone) call; that’s what leaders do. As followers of Christ, you’re leading someone somewhere whether you want to or not. You shall be my witnesses means we already are His witnesses–it’s not an option (Acts 1:8).
2. Set aside time to check email and stick to your schedule. Don’t let email programs interrupt your work. Remember that the program is on your computer for your convenience and efficiency.
3. If you’re being paid to work, work. Stop wasting my time and everyone else’s with useless information we do not need. Stop sending me spam jokes, invitations to buy candy from your kid, or the latest YouTube time waster. Do your job for crying out loud. Screen your mailing list for –here’s a key term–relevance. Blanket emails to everyone in the company are not helpful if the information if only useful to a select group of people. Stop being lazy.
4. Cull your inbox. Use the little flags. Answer important items first.
5. Refuse to answer anyone who ignores the subject line. My email program automatically deletes any message with a blank subject line. I never even see it. This little trick saves me looking at a ton of spam, and from having to try to figure out why someone wants my time.
6. Practice email free Friday. In fact, just before you go home every Friday afternoon, just dump your entire inbox in the trash without ever having looked at it. You’ll be flat amazed how much you get done on Fridays. The feeling of accomplishment will make your weekend so much better.

Web developer Edward O’Connor did just that. He declared email bankruptcy after three years—dumping his entire 750-item inbox no matter the consequences. What if you did that and lost an important message from your boss? Just say you’re having problems with your email—they’ll understand!

Janet & I watched Rocky Balboa, a.k.a. Rocky XLII. Rocky movies are getting to be like Super Bowls. They could use Roman numerals nobody understands, “What’s an L stand for? If there’s an X before the L, how many is it?”

Not just that numbering thing throws me off but Rocky spits out cliches and blood with remarkable regularity. Original dialog or realistic boxing cuts this film down to a 28 minute After School Special. This sappy film somehow earned a 76 on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess nobody heard that Stallone was busted in Australia transporting several vials of anabolic steroids.

With all that, there was one redeeming scene that landed a great punch. Rocky is trying to get his narcissistic son to realize that life is not always pretty. In fact, it’s often pretty cruel, but the measure is not on what knocks a fellow down, rather that he gets back up. Rocky tells the kid, “You got to keep moving forward.” I love that line! Keep moving forward. “Rocky” spoke from experience, of course, and I bet you can too.

Unfortunately, this fantastic scene of the father (who had it too tough) explaining life to his son (who had too easy, but still needs to learn from his own pain) is ruined at the end of the movie. But hey, let’s not let that bit of Hollywood underwriting dissuade us from understanding the deeper reality. A few inspired thoughts to close:

Prov. 24:16 [The godly] may trip seven times, but each time they will rise again. But one calamity is enough to lay the wicked low.

Prov. 24:10 If you fail under pressure, your strength is not very great.

Phil. 3:13-14 No, dear brothers and sisters, I am still not all I should be, but I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us up to heaven.

Keep moving forward.

One of my students–we’ll call her Kim–recently reinvented event evangelism for the entire Southern Baptist Convention. Kim was driving across town to meet friends so they could all go around and tell people about Christ–she was going witnessing, which is an SBC event designed to bring masses of people to Christ and fill our churches with souls just saved. As an event, it is marginally effective.

On the way to the event, a pair of lost souls plowed their car into Kim’s. By Providence, only machinery was blocking the road–no persons or animals were harmed. As they waited for the police to arrive, Kim decided (this will blow your mind) to tell the occupants of the other car about Jesus. Their conversation progressed so nicely that Kim found herself praying a spirit of lethargy over the police so the conversation could keep going.

(Here in New Orleans there are large, miraculous prayers like “Lord, give us leaders with a clue,” and there are small, simple, what I call done deal prayers that are almost automatically answered affirmatively like, “Lord, make it take a long time for the cops to get here.” Kim prayed in faith, and God did His part.)

Anyway, the NOPD gave Kim time to learn that her new friends were very interested in leaving religion behind to follow Jesus for real. They were so interested that when the officer finally showed up, they kept putting him off so they could ask Kim questions about her faith.

What started as a trip to an event became an event in itself. Evangelism moved from being something to go and do to something a Christ-follower does as she goes, or, in this case, stops going. Kim will change the world with an attitude like that.

I have been serving (or at least trying to understand the conversation) on a NAMB team tagged Event Evangelism. I wince every time I hear the name because it seems to emphasize the oddity that helping others connect with Christ has become. Events are unusual things that do not happen everyday–hence, the name event–and most of what I hear indicates that many of us think evangelism is a carnival presented to an unwilling public.

That is NOT to say that I advocate the end of event evangelism. Just that we understand the real purpose for events. God does not give us money for events so that we may show the world how poorly we can replicate a County Fair. Events introduce church people to looking-for-church people, and that is a great way to spend time, energy, and money.

Kim’s car wreck evangelism event reminds us that people are drawn to Christ in endless and fascinating ways, not often programmed or even understood as such at the time of their happening. We tend to think that our sharp marketing will lead people to Christ. It won’t. Our love leads people to Christ. (And, by the way, our marketing ain’t really all that sharp.) Christ-followers can demonstrate deep concern for others–especially if they just slammed their car into our car. Concern for life cannot, however, be left alone. It walks alongside a verbal witness of the Author of life.

Make sure your event does what good evangelistic events do: introduce looking-for-church people to your church people. Make sure your life events do what they’re supposed to do: talk about Jesus as you are going about.