I write this on an Amtrak train returning from a 4th of July weekend with my young adult son in New York City.  We are headed to DC for fireworks tonight before he flies home tomorrow.  He and I had great fun in New York.  I had never seen Times Square at 2 am, but when you travel with a 21-year old, you shift into a slightly different time zone.  Yesterday, after we watched the Yankees toast the Toronto Blue Jays (in about 97 degrees), we noticed that our subway train back to Manhattan was headed ultimately to Coney Island.  Neither he nor I had ever been to Coney Island, but we had read all kinds of stories and seen movies about it - so we said, “Let’s just stay on the train all the way to the beach,” About ninety minutes later (we were riding the local) we arrived in this large railway terminal on the lower coast of Brooklyn, with thousands of people pouring out of trains onto the beach and into the amusement parks of Coney Island. 

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At the center of the blitz of new United Methodist church development that is swirling around Chicagoland, there is a village.  Actually, there are two. (more…)

If Hamlet had been a 21st century American pastor, perhaps this would have been a big question on his mind, and on his lips.

In 1997, the church I served began a concerted effort toward planting a second campus. I was chosen to become the campus pastor. By the time I left that congregation in 2002, we were three years past worship launch on that campus, and in the midst of launching a third site. Those two campuses now exceed 1000 worshippers a week, in addition to the people gathered at the original campus. Over the years I have worked with numerous churches developing multi-site ministry – and also worked alongside churches who were simply planting a new church that would be independent of them. Both of these are excellent models for expanding faith community.

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We human beings, with the best of intentions, often do stupid things.  Especially in moments of revolution, we find it easy to throw out the baby with the bath water.  And then we fail to notice that something of value is getting lost in our zeal for reform.

It happened to the Marxists of the last century, who somehow threw out human rights in order to save human rights.  Never did fully figure that one out.  It happens regularly to liberal Protestants, who in seeking to reform the church, sometimes react to symbols that have been used oppressively by wanting to chuck the symbol as well as the oppression.  For example, I run into liberal congregations who have developed allergies to talking about Jesus, as if Jesus is nothing more than the JEEsus of TV preachers and the Pentecostal mega-church circa 1978.

Now the same phenomenon is happening with the emergent generation of young adult church leaders, many of whom see no reason to retain the concept of church membership.  Of course, the old bath water that they want to chuck is cheap membership that means nothing, the practice of clubby Christianity, and hyper-focus on organizational affiliation to the neglect of following Jesus.  Again and again, I hear young leaders dismiss the value of church membership, as if it is a dinosaur, going the way of the Kiwanis Club.  They see membership as the symbol of all that went wrong with their parent’s church. (more…)

My friend David Arruda is a pastor in Massachusetts.  Many years ago, David was running several businesses at the same time.  He had gathered a management team of folks with a highly structured approach to business.  They constantly tried to slow down decisions, seeking to run every idea by senior management before people on the front lines could act.

One day, determined to teach another style of leadership, David took a marker and wrote the following words on a whiteboard: “Have fun.  Take risks.  Go fast.”  The next day, the mantra had caught on and he found it on whiteboards all over the building.  When David transitioned into pastoral ministry, he held on to this winning mantra, adding the words, “for Christ’s sake.”

Today I am working with David to develop a network of home fellowships sponsored by 14 mainline congregations south of Boston.  We are seeking to develop an approach to building new faith communities that serve and disciple persons who are largely beyond the reach of the staid, historic congregations who are sponsoring this effort.  We are borrowing ideas from other Christian groups and applying them in ways that are still very new for mainline protestants in the USA. (more…)

I was leading a a focus group with a United Church of Christ congregation talking about missional outreach when a middle-aged woman directly across the table from me blurted out, “I could never bring myself to invite anyone to church.  I am just not comfortable doing that!”

She dared to say out loud the oft unspoken (and not so mysterious) reason why so many churches do not reach their potential. She spoke for millions of American church-goers who feel that inviting people to church is an invasive and highly uncomfortable thing to do. However, in this case, the woman added that she shares in the church’s annual mission trip to help Mayan peasants in Guatemala - and that the experience each year is so life-changing that she cannot help but talk to her friends about it.  So she persuaded one of her friends to come on the trip this last year.  Her friend was similarly moved.  The friend made some great friendships with church members on the trip, and ended up joining the church.  I looked the woman across the table directly in the eyes and smiled, saying, “Guess who’s an evangelist and she doesn’t even know it?”  (more…)

I travel all over the country working with Christian leaders.  Everywhere I go people ask great questions.  Often I start a seminar by asking people to write down the one or two most pressing questions about ministry that they have brought to that event.  There is power in getting focused, and just being able to verbalize a question that cuts to the heart of one’s journey.

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