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Hiring Operations PeopleToday

Step one: Have them get a personality transplant.  It’s something my business owner uncle told me no one can do.  He has been in business for more than 35 years and says he has yet to find someone who can exchange personalities (this of course is not referring to anyone who has schizophrenic tendencies).  So either they fit with the organization or they don’t.  I don’t want to believe it, but I have seen it enough times now…I have no choice.  Operations people are notorious for being task focused and lacking in people skill.  This is all fine and dandy until it is within the context of working in a church.  The church is not just made up of a gathering of people…it is people.  So, when your job is to work with people, you better like working with people.

 The church cannot afford to not hire the best, most well rounded, skilled, articulate, lover of God who can win and influence people.  Those people who are not that have no place on a church staff.  They can make wonderfully productive contributions as the church, but will wreck your church’s junk if they are part of your staff.  The Church leadership will always be cleaning up after them as they leave their wake of insensitive destruction because of their focus on accomplishing the task at hand.  The skilled operations people kn

Famous Ones: Is Influence Overrated?Yesterday

Eugene Peterson– translator of The Message and author of all my favorite books– described a period of boredom while serving as the pastor of Christ our King Presbyterian Church near Baltimore, Maryland. In an interview several years ago, Eugene admitted that a sort of negative ambition lay at the root of his restlessness. “I just thought, ‘Well, I’m 40 years old– I’d better make a move so somebody notices me’…In the best sense, ambition can be simply wanting to do your best. But, sometimes ambition can be simply the need to be noticed.”

As it turns out, our need to be noticed may not be helping the Kingdom anyway. A Barna study from 2006 showed that roughly 66% of Americans had never heard of the preacher T.D. Jakes. 60% had never heard of Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson. And what about Rick Warren, whose books have sold well over 25 million copies? 75% said they didn’t know who he was.

For all the time we have spent accumulating influence, for all the efforts to build platforms under our best speakers and leaders, what do we have to show for it? Large crowds, high sales numbers, and that elusively unquantifiable thing called “buzz”?

In our attempt to reach the world, have we created Christian celebrities instead? What if we have simply justified fame by calling it by a different name?

To be fair, crowds followed Jesus all the time. What is interesting– and instructive– is how Jesus responded to crowds. He

FatherlessYesterday

In 1995, before leaving on a ministry trip to Australia, I read a true story about a seminary student who struck up a conversation with a teenager who had been living on the streets of Melbourne. As the student tried to share the Gospel, the teenager asked pointedly, “What is God like?”

What a loaded question. The seminary student had one chance to share the Good News with this teenager and felt pressured to come up with just the right answer. His mind raced. Reflecting on what he had learned in his recent studies, the young man replied, “God is like a father.”

Without hesitation, the teenager snapped, “Well, if He’s anything like my old man, you can have Him,” and he walked away. Later the student learned from a social worker that the teenager’s father had beaten his mother and raped his sister repeatedly. The word “father” had dialed up all kinds of emotions and terrible memories, and the door to sharing the Gospel had been slammed shut.

This story vividly illustrates the relationship between the impressions left on us by our earthly fathers and our perceptions of God. Because this teenager had a bad experience with his own father, he was unable to grasp the goodnes

Easy WorshipYesterday

This summer, I was in Thailand leading worship at a conference.  I traveled from the states with about 90 other musicians, medical professionals, IT geniuses and childcare workers to facilitate a conference for missionaries from all over Southeast Asia.  Our first day on the ground in a foreign country, where do we eat?  McDonalds!

Ironically, this location was chosen due to health concerns!  Are you kidding me?

Honestly, I think there were two unspoken reasons for the decision:
1.  Fear (we might get sick, the food somewhere else might not suit our tastes)
2.  Laziness (we’ll actually have to find another place, we can’t order by meal number)

These are two of the very same reasons Western churches all look like they are made from the same corporate cookie cutter.

In our worship gatherings, how often do we do something (or not do something) because of fear?  Fear that we’ve never done it that way before or that people won’t like it?

Or how often have we neglected helping people engage because it’d just be too much work to do something else or because we’d actually have to engage our imagination and creativity during the week?

Top 10 Moments of Christian BashingYesterday

A group called the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission put together a list of what they believe to be the top 10 moments of Christian bashing in 2008. Named on the list were former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin being criticized for her faith, radical homosexual groups’ vandalism of church property in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 and Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. You can read the full list here, but it lacks the esoteric humor of a Letterman Top 10. We can only assume next year’s list will include an entry about people bashing the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission for this year’s list.

Related Articles

• November 6, 2008 — Branding the Church
• August 20, 2008 — Joel Auge | On the Blue
• October 20, 2008 — Preachin