Today I’m giving the keys to John Bishop, our Groups Pastor. He and his wife Heather are one of the couples who sold their houses, quit their jobs, and sacrificed tremendously to move to Charlotte and help start Elevation.

I asked him to answer the question:

Was it worth it?

Here’s what he said:

ABSOLUTELY!!!

However, when Pastor first asked us if we wanted to start a Church with him our initial response was absolutely NOT!

In our minds, starting a Church meant a lot of things most of which could not be described with words like: successful, enjoyable, exciting, spiritually uplifting, amazing etc…

We thought that a church start by definition would be a small group of disgruntled weirdos who met together and shared the bizarre little idiosyncrasies that caused them not to fit in with other people. With that image in our minds there was no way we would ever be a part a church start… so we thought!

Then Pastor described what he meant by a church start; a clearly defined vision from God that had been growing in him for 10 years, a clearly defined target and a clearly defined purpose. The more we heard about what he meant by starting a church the more excited we became.

When we sold our home we didn’t do so begrudgingly. By then, we knew that we were a part of a huge revolution. Before we knew which city we were going to, we knew that we had committed ourselves to something amazing.

There have certainly been challenges. We struggled financially. I was finishing my first year of a master’s degree when we moved so I couldn’t get a “real job”. We didn’t know anyone in Charlotte and we had left all of our friends behind so we struggled with feeling lonely and isolated. Sure, we had the team, but we were all so focused on the people we were trying to reach that we didn’t have time to get together. There were other struggles as well, but without a doubt it was all worth it.

We are having the time of our lives seeing God do amazing things among the people of Charlotte and within our own family and we wouldn’t trade the worst day of the past two years for the best year of our life before God decided to use us at Elevation Church. We love this city! We love this vision! Bring it on!

Remember the Nintendo game Duck Hunt? (I lost my high school and
younger audience… they think World of Warcraft is hi-tech, they just
don’t know do they?) I feel sorry for Duck Hunt. It was kind of an
afterthought/add-on to Super Mario Brothers. The two games came on
the same game cartridge, which came free with the Nintendo if you bought
the Nintendo version that came with the gun. And getting to shoot a
gun at your TV screen was a pretty exciting proposition.

I’ll get to the point.

Duck Hunt was a relatively challenging game, if you played by the rules:
Sit at least 6-8 feet back from the screen, aim the gun and shoot the
ducks—from a distance. Those dang ducks were pretty elusive.

But…
Most of us found a way around that really quickly, didn’t we?
Instead of sitting 6-8 feet away, we positioned the barrel of the gun
directly on the screen. And we blew those ducks’ heads off point blank.
Poor ducks.

How did we make a frustrating activity foolproof?
We found a way to beat the system.

One of the reasons Elevation has grown and advanced:
We keep finding ways to beat the system.
Not the system defined in the Scriptures. We’ll never beat that.
Wouldn’t want to. Wouldn’t dare to try.

But ineffective man made systems? Stupid programs? Pointless processes?
“We’ve always done it this way?” kind of systems?
Models of doing ministry that don’t fit our vision, context or current
needs? Beat ‘em, cheat ‘em, break them in half.
Put the gun directly on the screen and pull the trigger.

I’ll share two examples of conventional ways of doing things that we’ve
obliterated. Then you can think of your own… In your church, business,
family or personal life.

We’ve replaced the traditional emphasis on church membership
with and emphasis on participation.
Before we launched, I asked Larry Brey, our Assimilation Pastor, what the
point of membership was. Why not just stress participation in Groups,
Giving, Serving and Evangelism and remove the formal barrier of
membership? We’re more concerned about getting people plugged in than
signed up. In the South, where church membership is sacred and social,
this was a pretty rigid rule to break. But we broke it in half like Daniel
LaRusso breaks boards. Sorry, that was dumb. All this Nintendo talk is
giving me flashbacks.

We offer very little formal pastoral care outside of Small Groups.
But don’t you care about people? Yes. We care the most about people
who are far from God. So we keep our primary focus on them. We do
try to help people get hooked up with good professional counselors as
needed. And certainly our staff steps in to help folks with personal and
family crises, to the best of their ability. We just decided from day
one not to be a full service pastoral care church, where hired guns visit
all the hospitals and pray for all the problems.
We believe the most Biblical and replicable model of pastoral care is
getting people to commit to community (in our context, through small
groups) so they can minister to each other deeply and consistently.
This keeps our staff focused on creating experiences where Christ can
be worshipped and the Gospel can be preached every Sunday.

There are many other examples, but you see the pattern.
When you change the rules, aim the gun and zero in at point blank
range, you shoot more ducks. You win the game, because you beat
the system.
And, in our case, you reach more people. A lot more.

We can rip off other people’s stuff with the best of em.

This week at our Central campus we’re rocking our very own mid summer Confessions of a Pastor series with an Elevation twist, of course.

Hey Scott, thanks for inspiring me to make the title way too long. Consider yourself ripped off too.

The guys did a great job with the graphics and trailer, and I had to brag. Check it out here.

Gonna be fun. And bold. And honest.

Elevation, bring your peeps. It’s our best series ever, you know.

Inside joke.

By the way, someone sent me an email asking if Jesus would be pleased if we were rocking out to Zepplin like the series subtitle says when He comes back.

I don’t think He would.

He’s probably more of a Hendrix fan.

This post seemed to hit home for some folks, so I thought I’d build on it a
little more.

When you see someone who has a skill, position, or level of
accomplishment more advanced than yours, there are two wrong responses
you’ll be tempted to choose:

1. Imitation
Like I said in last week’s post, I’ve wasted too much time trying to borrow
an approach wholesale, without letting the Holy Spirit internalize and
customize the application to fit my gift mix and calling. It’s okay to
imitate, but only through the filter of who God created you to be and what
He’s equipped you to do.

2. Intimidation
While some people are inclined to rip off what they see God doing through
someone else, others take a different but even more counterproductive
approach:

They back down from what God has called them to do because watching
the All-Stars do it makes them feel J.V.

Examples:

You go to a conference at Fellowship Church to be encouraged and
uplifted, and come back more discouraged and downcast than ever
before. You’ll never have a building that modern, a staff that big,
singers that hip, location that accessible, wardrobe as cool as Ed’s…

And so what was meant to pump you up actually brings you down, because
it seems so unrealistic that you’ll ever ascend to that level.

One of my preacher friends actually told me that he doesn’t ever listen to
other preachers because he doesn’t want to be compared to them. It
makes him feel inferior. That’s too bad. He’s too insecure about who he
is in God to let someone else’s strengths enhance his ministry. What a
waste. He’s missing out.

Another one of my friends used to go to a church where the pastor prayed
3 hours a day. Instead of being encouraged because he had a godly pastor,
he kind of felt like: “Well, I’ll never be able to pray that long, so why even
pray at all?”

Don’t take it to that extreme. Instead, think: “Well, if he can pray 3
hours a day, surely I can pray at least 5 minutes a day, then maybe 10,
and one day, who knows?”

Better yet, ask the pastor to mentor you in how to have a rich prayer life.

When you strike up a friendship with someone and eventually discover that
they are much more financially secure than you, do you automatically
calculate all the big breaks and silver spoons that got them there? Or do
you ask them if you can buy them a cup of coffee so they can tell you how
they did it, and help you develop your own roadmap to financial freedom?

When confronted with someone who is better than you, or whose
achievement is bigger than yours, do you hide behind intimidation?

Or do you ride the wave of inspiration?