Modern Ekklesia

Through the years I’ve refined a process that I go through every week in preparing my sermons. I don’t cover the complete process of how I select which texts I’ll speak on, but I’ll jump right in, assuming that you’re at your desk with the Scripture and you’re prayed up.

1. Take notes as you read and study the Scripture. This is the first step. At this stage you don’t yet have an outline or a main idea. You just want to get a “lay of the land” and get a feel for what the Scripture is saying and writing down things of interest. During this stage, though, I’m always on high alert and ready to write down some possibilities for the main idea.

2. Come up with your main idea. In this blog post I go into more depth as to what a main idea is, but in short, a main idea is a one sentence application of what your entire sermon is about. The whole thing should revolve and point to that one statement. Here are a few examples that I’ve used in the past.

God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary work (Matthew 28:18-20)

True spiritual blessing comes from serving others (Isaiah 58)

A humble character is attractive to God and people (Ruth)

Once you have the main idea, you have the sermon. This is the part that takes the most time. You can have pages and pages of notes, but if you don’t yet have this, you do not yet have a clear message that’s ready to be preached.

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Have you ever wondered why change can be so difficult? What needs to be done might seem completely logical and make perfect sense. It might be as clear as 2+2=4, but, yet, sometimes people will still be very resistant. Have you ever wondered why? I know I have.

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, in their book Leadership On the Line, perceptively touch upon, what I think, is one of  the real reasons why people avoid change.

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Does your church do potlucks? I know many churches no longer do these. In case you don’t know what this is, it’s just some kind of lunch that’s offered after the service is over.

At my church we used to do these every week. We thought that it was a great opportunity for people to connect with each other and touch base with guests that have come. To a certain degree, this was the case. A few months ago we made the decision to just have a joint potluck just once a month. To be honest, this was mainly a financial and human resources issue. Doing a big potluck every week requires quite a few volunteers and a lot of cleanup, so we decided to do something else for the other weeks. Outside of the church doors we set up some tables with drinks, muffins, cookies, and that sort of thing.

And guess what we noticed? We noticed that people were actually interacting a lot more then they were in the potlucks. In a potluck, people typically sit with the same people, in the same areas. If they do sit with a guest, they have the ability to connect with 3-4 people, perhaps. Notice the fatal flaw here? It’s all the sitting that’s happening.

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I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with small groups.

I love being in them, but getting them to work well has always been a lot of work. And it’s not that I haven’t tried or don’t have experience or training. I do. And I feel like I’ve tried most models out there.

I’ve done cell groups. Initially they started off well, but over time people began to complain that they wanted more diversity in kinds of small groups, and we felt like we weren’t able to meet the spiritual needs of a broad number of people.

We began semester-based small groups last summer and the launch went really well. But I had a certain issue (the same that I had in cell groups): people were always hesitant to open up their homes. And due to the way I was trained up, people had to meet in homes or other places. Never at church. So here’s what I began to notice over time, though, as I continued to lift high the home-small groups: that insistence became a bottle neck in our ability to help people have a small group experience. We could never find enough homes to accommodate the small groups that we wanted to have.

This was a big problem, of course, because I had been trying to implement the principles behind the book Simple Church, and I didn’t want to go back to another model.

But then something happened.

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I’m probably more busy right now than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m married with two young children. I’m busy leading a church that doesn’t have a lot of stability. I’m going back to school and doing lots of work for that.

And here’s what I’ve found happens as a result: creativity is swallowed up in the busyness. There’s not much room left to think, and as a result creativity dies. Busyness is the enemy and the Achilles heel of leadership.

That is not good.

That’s why I was encouraged recently when I read this post by Michael Hyatt on creating more “head time.” He says, “Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking. We are so busy doing that we have, I fear, almost forgotten how to think. Yet it is our thinking, more than any other single activity, that influences our outcomes.”

What does he recommend to that end?

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You’ve probably heard the word “postmodernism” before, but have probably wondered what it meant. Or perhaps you’ve heard of this thing called the emerging church. Ring a bell? A lot is being written these days about how to reach postmodern people, but are the conclusions actually biblical?

James A.K. Smith, author of Who’s Afraid Of Postmodernism, takes a stab at identifying what postmodernism is actually about, and makes some recommendations for the church.

But first let’s take a step back.

Postmodernism, generally speaking, is a philosophical idea that says that there is no such thing as absolute truth. It’s a reaction to the modern age that was fueled by the philosophies of Rene Descartes in the 1600’s and later in the French revolution, that taught that everything should be examined through the filter of reason. If you can prove it through observation and empirical study, then it exists.

Around the time of the 1960’s or so, some French philosophers began to articulate a new worldview. A worldview that was aversive to this modernistic approach. Specifically, these philosophers were Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault.

Let me take them one at a time to briefly explain what they taught, and then elaborate on what James Smith recommends for the church as a result.

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