Jun 2007
Archive

Guest Blog: John Bishop

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!

Beat the System

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.

Confessions Trailer

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.

Choose Inspiration, Resist Intimidation

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?

Be Ruth’s Chris, Not Golden Corral

I’m currently composing a rough draft of Elevation Church’s best practices for early stage church growth. We’re going to hammer out the dents and consolidate them at our staff advance (it’s an advance, not a retreat… retreating is for sissies) in July.
In the meantime, I’ll post a few for mass consumption.

Here’s one:
Be Ruth’s Chris, not Golden Corral.

Ruth’s Chris serves the best steaks in town, for my money. I prefer the filet w/ extra butter, served on a sizzling plate capable of burning your hand to the bone.
Of course, they serve other things, but what are they known for? Steaks. Good steaks. Some of the best steaks. Expensive steaks.
I go there when I want to eat a great steak with my wife in a perfectly engineered environment. And when I want to drop some serious coin.

I must admit, Golden Corral is another one of my favorite restaurants. Quite the contrast, I know.
I go to Golden Corral when I want a little bit of everything. None of it is particularly great, but you can eat almost anything you want. And you can eat as much as you want.

Most churches are more like Golden Corral than Ruth’s Chris, don’t you think?
A little bit of everything. A program for everybody. Every night of the week. All you can eat. None of it is very excellent, but boy, the menu (church calendar) is robust!

Elevation’s philosophy:
Don’t try to do a little bit of everything.
Give everything you’ve got to a few things.
Make the best steaks in town. Steaks so good that people wouldn’t dream of haggling about the price, or suggesting that they should be allowed to go back for free seconds.

Develop a worship service so impactful with music so powerful and preaching so anointed and creativity so inspiring and greeters so helpful that people will come from miles around. Make it sizzle.
Focus like a laser on reaching people far from God through preaching the Gospel and enabling Christ centered worship.
And send the buffet Christians to the restaurant down the road.

Spiritual Dividends

Ok, I’m no financial planner, so forgive me if my terminology is embarrassingly off on this one. But the concept is good.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that I can make my money work for me. Through the magic of compound interest, I can put money in a mutual fund, not touch it for years, and, if the fund is good, the amount will increase exponentially. I don’t have to add any money to it. It just grows, and grows, and grows. Pretty cool.

This past Sunday after the third service at our Central campus, they told me 25 folks gave their lives to Christ at our Union campus. It’s an interesting phenomenon. 25 minutes away on the other side of town, the sermon I prepared and preached over a week ago was playing on a video screen, earning compound spiritual interest for the Kingdom. Our Union Campus director, his staff, and the amazing volunteers were the fund managers, making sure that the investment was perfectly positioned for maximum yield. And God’s Word didn’t return void.

We show the sermons on a week delay at our Union campus. While there are a few drawbacks to doing it this way, there are also some advantages. We’re kind of able to forecast what’s going to happen at Union based on the response at Central the week before. So when 71 people gave their lives to Christ at Central last week, we told Union: “Get ready! The wave is gonna hit your shore in 7 days!” Of course, God ultimately determines the results, but it’s kind of like seeing into the future.

I know there’s a lot of controversy surrounding campuses that use video preaching exclusively. I’ll simply say this: it’s pretty neat to see God use the same sermon in two different towns on two different weekends to bring almost 100 people to faith in Christ.
Isn’t the Bible the ultimate example of compound spiritual interest?
Thousand of years after being written, John’s Gospel is still paying dividends, glorifying Jesus, changing lives.
And with the technological advancements that are ours to harness, the market is hotter than it’s ever been in the history of humanity.
I’m going for broke.

Free to be yourself

I asked my friend Dwight Robertson to critique one of my sermons via cassette tape (remember those?) back when I was in college.
He liked my passion, but he had some concerns. He didn’t say my theology was sketchy. He didn’t detect spiritual pride, or anything like that, really.

But to him, my preaching style sounded an awful lot like another preacher we both knew and loved. My vocal inflections mimicked his. My word choices were almost identical. I was practically a carbon copy. And that bothered Dwight.

I was kind of caught off guard by this criticism. I mean, is it a sin to be inspired by someone else and desire to emulate their effectiveness?
Of course not.
The problem comes when what I see God doing through someone else puts the handcuffs on the unique gifts God has deposited in me.

Not only is it permissible to have heroes, role models, and mentors-
it’s mandatory for those who want to get better.
But sometimes your admiration for that person’s ability can actually lead to bondage.
When you hear a great preacher preach (let’s use Rob Bell for an example, because he’s freakishly smart and very original) your first thought may be:
“I wish I could bring it like him.”
Well, you can’t. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to bring it like you.
Rob Bell is already bringing it like Rob Bell. So you don’t need too. God’s already got the Rob Bell thing covered, that’s why he made Rob Bell.
Besides, only a freak can know that much about first century Judaism. So don’t go there.

Instead, think:
“Man, he can really bring it. I want to be able to bring it better next week than I did this week. I want to be able to bring it at the highest level of my capacity.”
And then get to work preparing instead of wasting time comparing.
Let the inspiration of how others preach, lead, and walk with God drive you to greater preparation and better creation, not imitation (dang, I’m flowin’).
Otherwise, you’ll limit yourself to being a second or third generation copy. A cheap replica.
Don’t let some other church’s growth confine you to the parameters of “the way they did it.” Learn from them. Steal some stuff, and translate other stuff to fit your context… eat the fish, leave the bones.
But don’t ever believe the lie that there is one monolithic method God blesses.

Instead of allowing someone else’s success to enslave you to emulate efforts, I pray that when you see God’s hand on others it would set you free to be yourself better than you ever have before.

You know what I do for fun?

Go ahead, take a guess.
What do you think my hobby is?
When I have some time to relax, what would I rather do than anything in the world? (Other than spend time with Holly and Elijah)

Did you guess:
Fishing?
If so, you couldn’t be more wrong. I used to like to fish with my dad, but that was just so I could get him out in the middle of the river and talk his head off for hours at a time. There’s a fine line between something being relaxing and boring. Putting a worm in the water crosses that line, for me.
Hunting?
Yeah, waking up at 4:00 in the morning and sitting perfectly still in a tree in the freezing cold is exactly how I want to unwind on a Saturday.
Golf?
I can’t play golf, because as a pastor, I try not to curse, except while I’m preaching. The few times I played golf, I wanted to say some pretty bad words to the ball. Think Happy Gilmore.

It turns out that my idea of a good time is…
Wait for it…
Listening to and watching other preachers.

I know, it’s sick. I realize that listening to preaching for fun must indicate a serious psychological problem. But what can I say?
I’m addicted to the art of preaching.
And it’s not just a phase. For the last 11 years and counting, I’ve devoured any preaching I can get my hands on. I love it all. Good preaching, bad preaching, country preachers, refined preachers, 3 point alliterated outlines, post-modern narrative ramblings, screamers, forced hushed devotional whisperers, edgy stuff, stuffy stuff… my appetite for sermons is never satisfied.

I even have a tape deck in our bathroom so I can play old Johnny Hunt preaching cassettes while I’m in the shower.

I would rather have a front row seat to hear my favorite preacher than a box seat at the Super Bowl. I know it’s weird. Leave me alone.
If the worst addiction I’m ever guilty of is preaching (#2 is Diet Coke), I think I’ll be just fine.

Gotta go, Joyce Meyer is on. After her, Charles Stanley.
I told you, I like it all.

What got you here won’t get you there

Let me try to ramble my way into hopefully saying something helpful.

I’ve been thinking about a leadership paradox that confronts me almost daily.
Leaders who refuse to cooperate with this principle get choked to death by it.
Leaders who don’t know about it are perpetually blindsided and bewildered by the implications of ignoring it.

It goes like this:
What got you here (to your present level of effectiveness)
Won’t get you there (to the next level of growth)

If your church is going to grow, the way you spend your time and the activities you perform as a leader should be constantly shifting.
If you keep doing the stuff you did in order for the church to grow from 0 to 100, the church won’t likely grow to 200. If, after the church grows to 200, you keep fulfilling the same functions as a leader, you’ll never see 500. Same for 1000. And 2000. I hear it works this way as you grow to 10,000, 20,000, and beyond.

The idea of letting going and changing positions is particularly hard for founding pastors to digest and apply.
Because when our churches were starting, we did a little bit of everything.
In my case, everything included leading worship, eating breakfast and lunch with prospective members and community contacts (at my own expense) up to five or six times a week, even writing personal thank you notes to every first time guest, just to name a few.
All of this was necessary for our “fetal” development.

But what if I still made the chord charts and posted the mp3s and led worship and preached for 3 services per Sunday?
What if I still wrote personal thank you notes for every first time guest? (There are hundreds every month)
What if I still ate lunch with everybody who emailed the office asking me to? (I’d weigh 400 pounds)

Elevation’s growth and development would be paralyzed from the neck down.

I wouldn’t be able to give priority to prayer and preaching.
I wouldn’t be able to reflect, dream, and receive vision from God.
I wouldn’t be able to devote myself to leadership development and critical decisions about advanced strategic plans.

If I kept on doing what I’d always done, we’d keep getting what we’d always had.

If you want your church to grow, the way you lead must change.
Often and dramatically.

This includes:
The number of meetings you’re in.
The number of emails you see.
The number of phone calls you take.
The number of phone calls you make.
The level of access you allow.
These things must change. Constantly.

This question should filter every decision about how to invest your working hours:
What is the highest and best use of my time at this stage in our church’s development?

But the shift is not just about the way you spend your time. It’s about:
What’s worth the investment of your emotional energy?
What things will you and won’t you mentally obsess over?
What functions do you need to release in order to reach for something higher?

I know it’s counterintuitive, but I swear it’s true:
If you want the church you lead to grow more, you’ve got to do a lot less.

Warning: Taking the steps I’m talking about will result in serious withdrawal pains.
Because you trade the instant gratification of “productivity” (hitting send and receive on your email 50 times a day or approving a purchase order for a microphone)
for the long term benefit of shaping systems.

But don’t you owe it to those you lead to make the shift?
What shift do you need to make in this season of your leadership?
Get your team together, figure it out… and expect an explosion of growth.

Guest Blog: Chunks Corbett

“I need an Executive Guy”

At Elevation Church we have developed relationships with a lot of the up-and-coming church plants around the country. One of the shifts that is quite common is the Pastor leading the staff through an Executive Pastor. This is something near and dear to me because this is what I do at Elevation Church.

First of all, I didn’t go to Executive Pastor School, seminary or even business school. Pastor Furtick pulled me out of the church planting hotbed field of physical therapy. I spend 8 years treating back and neck pain in preparation for leading Elevation Church-which may have been better since I came in with no preconceived notion of what my role was supposed to look like.

The point of this post is to describe the relationship that I have with Pastor and explain to church planters that finding the right guy for the job is important. In fact, you better be able to identify talent and calling in someone, and if you don’t develop them, it’s a formula for frustration.

We’ve got a pretty good dynamic right now at Elevation. But I can assure you that it didn’t start that way. When people observe the structure at Elevation, these are the things they don’t see:

Pastor and I were best friends for years. Before Elevation, we never did “ministry” together but we vacationed with our families and invested money together. We never served on church staff together, but we ate together at the Golden Corral many Saturdays (early staff meetings). We didn’t read church planting books together, but we did tear real estate books in half and each read a half at a time.

Does this mean that you have to hire your best friend to be your “executive guy”? No, but you better trust him. In fact, most guys would have a problem transitioning from friend to employee honoring and some Pastors may not be able to make the shift. But if you can’t trust your right-hand guy then you’ve got problems. And if you lead through a team, you better trust those guys with your kids and with your social security number.

Other things that aren’t seen in our relationship are the constant tweaks. We work through things that are uncomfortable, things that are often awkward but things that always make us stronger and thus Elevation stronger. Honestly, we make some adjustments that are as hard on Pastor as they are on me but the point is that he is very active in my development. He never avoids confronting me even if he knows it is going to hurt a little.

If you want an “executive guy” to excel in his role and not frustrate you, you better be able to develop him. I didn’t exactly come in here knocking it out of the park and rightfully Pastor didn’t expect me to. But he has never sat in the bleachers and watched me. He has been there constantly nudging me in the right direction, helping me know how he thinks and getting me around the right people to learn from. And if I do something he doesn’t like, he tells me. He doesn’t let me frustrate him. It’s then up to me to make the adjustment. From there my competence can be measured. If you wait for them to change on their own, get a comfortable chair or get busy helping make them better.

In the end, my point is that it’s not just a Pastor’s job to identify talent in someone he trusts as his “executive guy”. That’s only half of it. Pastor Furtick would have been sorely disappointed in my abilities had he not invested in me. Finding your guy is not the magic pill to having your problems go away. If your Executive Pastor isn’t working out or your lead team is dysfunctional, maybe they’re in the wrong seat. Or maybe you’re not doing your part to lead and develop them.

Quotes that changed me PART III

“God is only going to use you more… “

I had a really great college experience. I started and directed a big choir and band that grew to about 100 people and sang black gospel music, even though most of us were white. I also preached all over South Carolina, led bunches of football players to Christ, met Holly and convinced her to marry me, and, oh yeah, went to class and graduated.

The months before my college graduation were a weird transitional time for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I was very much looking forward to ending the steady four year diet of Ramen noodles and make Holly my permanent roommate.

But part of me wondered:
“What next? Maybe it’s all down hill from here. Maybe college was my spiritual high point… and now it’s on to the real world… work, mortgage, taxes… maybe my best days of ministry are behind me.”

I was talking on the phone with my friend Clayton King about all of these doubts one night about 4 months before I graduated. Clayton is an evangelist who started a ministry out of his college dorm room about 12 or 13 years ago. He now preaches to over 250,000 people (that’s a modest number) every year and holds summer camp for about 3000 students in a little town called Boiling Springs, NC.
He was trying to convince me to move to Boiling Springs after graduation and travel and preach for his ministry, Crossroads. And I did.
Holly and I moved to Boiling Springs 2 weeks after we graduated, and I worked with Crossroads, preaching to students all over the country for 3 years before moving to Charlotte to start Elevation.

But that’s not the point.

The funny thing is, he probably doesn’t even remember the conversation from that night, but it flipped the script on my perspective and set my imagination on fire about the future God had planned for me.

As Clayton was trying to talk me into moving to Boiling Springs and living off my speaking honorariums and love offerings instead of taking one of the 3 offers I had to go make a salary at some pretty large churches, he said something that pushed me out of the boat:

“Steven, the best is yet to come in your life. God is only going to use you more. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Anyone who has been through a major life transition recently can relate to the intense fear that threatens to paralyze you as you try to figure out what to do next.
I thank God for Clayton, who reminded me at an all-important crossroad in my journey to anticipate that the best is always forthcoming as I follow Christ in faith.

If you are stuck in a portal of uncertainty right now, be encouraged.
God’s calling on your life has not diminished.
Jesus has gone before you and prepared a future of blessing and impact.

He’s only going to use you more.

Quotes that changed me PART II

“I really believe you have the integrity to handle great success… “

Craig Groeschel said this to me a few weeks ago. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t just say stuff to hear himself talk. He’s also very discerning and prophetic, I think.

The reason this quote meant so much to me is that I’m absolutely terrified of screwing up.
I’m not talking about making a dumb decision. I already do that a lot, and life goes on.
The type of screw up I’m talking about is the disqualifying kind.
Unfortunately, you don’t really have to use your imagination to picture this scenario.
Christian leaders seem to drop like flies these days. No need to name names. You’re already listing them in your mind. And the list is way too long.

In fact, in my short ministry tenure, I’ve already preached in the churches of 4 different ministers who couldn’t keep their pants on, and are now out of the game because of an extra marital affair. It makes me mad, it makes me sad, and it scares me to death.
I’ve also preached in the churches of guys who are out of the ministry because they were using drugs behind the scenes. Others are sidelined because they couldn’t keep their hands off the money.

Nothing frightens me more than the possibility that I could hurt my family, my church, and the worldwide cause of Christ by committing a sin from which my marriage or ministry could never recover.
I have placed thorough and rigid systems of accountability in my life, and I work hard at loving God with my whole heart every single day.

But I needed to hear a great general in the body of Christ like Pastor Craig say that he believes in me…
that in our short friendship he’s seen all the indications that I’ll make it…
It makes me really want to prove him right.
And, in Jesus’ name, I believe I will.
Thanks Craig.

Quotes that changed me PART I

There have been many things folks have said to me that have stuck to my soul over the years.
Most of them came from my parents, who always spoke life, encouragement, and hope into their kids, and made us believe anything was possible.

But there are a few things that other pastors have said to me at pivotal times that also made an irreversible difference in my life.
I want to share a few of those with you over the next couple days.
Hopefully, as you read them, you’ll realize that your words also have the power to sink deep down into someone’s soul and change his life forever.

Here’s #1:

“I’ve never seen anyone that God has His hand on like He has His hand on your son… ”
Pastor Mickey White

Pastor Mickey is over 65 years old. He pastors a mission church that had about 100 people coming at the time (over 10 years ago), and he needed someone to work with the 20 youth who were coming.
I was 16, had been saved 6 months, and he thought I was the man for the job.
I thought he was drunk.

So one evening he came to my house, sat down on the floor, and explained to my parents that he believed in me and wanted me to come be his youth minister.
I asked the obvious question:
“Why me? I’m 16. There will be kids in the youth group older than me. And besides, I have no clue what I’m doing. Right?”

I’ll never forget what happened next. This 60 year old man stood up, stared at me for a few seconds, then turned away from me, looked at my parents, and gave a pretty convincing speech:
“I’ve worked with students in the FCA program for many many years. I’ve seen lots of talented Christian kids come and go. But I’ve never seen anyone that God has His hand on like He has His hand on your son.”

Now remember, I was blessed to grow up in a home where my confidence was built up regularly. I was always believed in and celebrated. Always.

But there was something about a preacher with gray hair telling me, a high school junior, that I was uniquely and powerfully gifted by God in a great way.
I believed it.
And that belief became an integral part of me.
God has His hand on me.

I served as Pastor Mickey’s youth minister until I went to college.
I did lots of dumb things.
And he told me they were dumb.
I preached for Pastor Mickey sometimes on Sunday mornings.
I said a lot of dumb things.
And he told me they were dumb.
But he believed in me through it all.

I probably wouldn’t be pastoring a church with almost 2000 people showing up weekly as a 27 year old punk if Pastor Mickey hadn’t believed in me as a 16 year old punk.
Because he saw God’s hand on me.
And he told me so.

The Curse of Creativity (Just Post Something)

The other day I was talking with a very well known radio personality about how weird it is to have a creative-type job that requires feeling “inspired”.
My dad is a barber. He doesn’t have to be in a creative or inspired mood to cut hair. He just does it. Sure, you have days where you don’t feel like cutting hair, but no worries. You don’t have to be in the zone… you just have to do your job.
Lots of professions are like this.

But when your occupation revolves around preparing sermons, writing books, developing scripts or composing songs, you can’t just create quality stuff non stop. You’re not a machine. Sometimes you feel the flow and sometimes you feel nothing.
When you are feeling it, you might come up with the entire 3 point outline for the sermon in 3 minutes.
When you’re not, you might stare at your computer screen for 3 hours and come up with less than 3 words that are any good.
But you can’t just wait until next week when you might be “feeling it” a little more. This isn’t a hobby.
For the preacher, Sunday’s coming every week, whether you’re ready or not. The production department needs your outline by Thursday, regardless of your mood.

And on Sunday around 11, the people will be looking at you, expecting you to say something. And it had better be good. And serious. And funny. And motivational. And concise. Every single week.

Another example is this blog. I’ve committed to post here at least 5 times weekly. It started as a hobby. Now it’s a serious discipline.
This blog is a major component of my ministry. I speak to thousands of people every week here. It makes my life accessible to people at Elevation that I’ll never personally meet.

Sometimes my biggest concern is how to keep the entry short enough that you’ll actually read it.
Other times I’m tempted to make Lori write something and pretend she’s me because I have absolutely nothing I want to say. You’d never know it was her, would you?
Unless she started talking about really girly stuff or country music.

I’ve heard all kinds of helpful tips for how to deal with creative brain block:
Take a walk, see a movie, listen to U2, listen to Carman, work on something else totally different to clear your mind…
None of these approaches is bad.

But I’ve noticed that a lot of my creative friends (I won’t call any names) who blog take a pretty extreme approach. If they can’t think of anything to post, they just don’t.
They duck out and don’t post anything for weeks, sometimes months at a time.
This is a bad approach.

I mean, if you just set up a blog so Aunt Karen can see pictures of the kids, you’re excused from this discussion. Blog when you want to, and only when you want to. When you’re “feeling it.”
And I’m not saying never take a break from blogging or other forms of creative communication.
Strategic Sabbaths replenish your bandwidth and allow some of your best content to upload.

But you simply can’t just stop creating every time you’re feeling uncreative.
Consistency is a key component of creativity.

Those of us who are in creative professions have to show up whether we feel like it or not, just like the mechanic, the accountant, and the receptionist.
Successful songwriters have one hit song because they wrote 1000 crappy ones.
And eventually, the creative breakthrough happened.

One songwriter told me this:
Half the battle is just showing up.
I think that has profound implications for the blogger and the preacher.

To all my blogging buddies who haven’t posted in over a week:
Just post something.
Anything. You’ll eventually say something good.

To all my preacher pals who are feeling the Monday morning hangover and don’t want to dive in this week because you think yesterday’s sermon flopped:
You’ll be ok. Go download a friend’s sermon on your iPod, take a walk, and start preparing. God will meet with you and speak to you. Wait for Him.

You know what?
I didn’t feel like writing this entry today.
But I just proofed it, and it ain’t half bad.
Glad I showed up.

Blown Away…

Just a quick Sunday post to let you know that today Elevation Church saw 71 people give their lives to Christ. Praise God! We continue to be blown away and had phenomenal attendance, even on the first day of summer vacation.

Union Campus, get excited about what God has for you all next week!

Pastor’s Picks

Best song the production guys let me hear this week:
Some song about an Umbrella? :)
Sounded pretty cool.

Prayer of the week:
Damion prayed that God would give the Creative Team “superpowers” for our meeting Tuesday. I laughed uncontrollably for the rest of the prayer. Then we all flew around with wings and shot fireballs at each other.
God, give us SUPERPOWERS. That’s a new one.

Biggest struggle of the week:
Holly and Elijah were gone Monday and Tuesday night.
I ate like a college student, slept on the couch, and worked too much.
I’m glad they’re back. I suck as a bachelor.

Favorite Bible passage of the week:
Nehemiah 13:25
I know some of you never read the verses, but you owe it to yourself to click on this one.
I’ve read it before, but, wow.
They don’t teach you that in Bible college. Maybe they should.

Best surprise of the week:
Well, it was actually last week, but the prize goes to my assistant Lori, who somehow got me and Holly a free upgrade to the Presidential Suite at the Southpark Marriott.
Score.

Goodfellas

We have some remarkably good men at Elevation Church.
I met with a group of them last night to discuss the most exciting opportunity our church has ever had, and afterward I told them:
“It is extremely rare for a pastor to have a loyal and fiercely dedicated group of men like you holding his arms up.”
One of the men in the room who was the son of a preacher growing up said:
“Pastor, I second that. After all I’ve seen in my life, I can say that it is very rare… “

An unofficial core value of Elevation is respect and honor for spiritual leaders.
It is part of my DNA, and consequently, it is in the gene pool of our staff, volunteers, and small group leaders.

It makes me sad that so many pastors are forced to waste their spiritual vitality sitting through agonizing 4 hour meetings several nights a week convincing boards and committees that repainting the baseboard in the women’s bathroom in the Fellowship Hall isn’t an excessive “waste of God’s money”.
It’s heart breaking that so many wonderful gifts inside of powerful pastors lay dormant because they are not given any room to run or latitude to lead.

I am truly thankful today for all my fellas at Elevation.
Like my staff guys, who I honestly believe would (and could) jack your jaw if you started any stuff with their Pastor. Just try it.
Like the hardcore heavy hitters on the production team whose alarms go off well before 5am on their only day off.
Like Nick Griffin’s single guys small group that prays for me every day and gave me a gift card to Outback yesterday. (Hey Holly, wanna go on a date?)

There are hundreds more… and I want you all to know I’ve got your back.

I couldn’t lead a church made up of manipulative passive aggressive girly men.
Thank God I don’t have to.
The men of Elevation cover me, fight for me, pray for me, believe in me, receive from me, honor me, and speak courage into me.

And it makes it easy to lead the charge.

Trainers and Partners

Yesterday morning in the weight room I told Chunks about an idea for a sermon analogy I may use on August 26th. Yeah, I’m a freak. I think about my sermons that far in advance. Chunks liked the illustration, and said I should try it out on the blog in the meantime. So I will.

Chunks and I lift weights together 3 or 4 days a week. He’s a good workout partner because he:
1. Makes sure I actually go to the gym.
2. Makes sure I don’t drop weights on my head. Although he did drop some weights on his nose one time. True story.
3. Motivates me to complete more repetitions than I would normally complete.

Now, every morning when we’re in the gym, we see people who have hired professional trainers to help them get in shape.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve thought about doing it before, and I may still do it one day.
But there is a big difference between a trainer and a partner.

A trainer tells you what to do and watches you do it.
A partner does it along side you.

I’m not saying that one is better than the other in the weight room.
But at Elevation, we want people to have spiritual partners, not just trainers.

In the typical church model, the professional trainer (Pastor) is hired to do all the ministry for all the people.
When they’re sick, he’s supposed to come see them and pray for them.
When they need advice, he’s supposed to counsel them.
When they’re not doing well spiritually, he’s supposed to magically know about it, and help them get back in the game.

He’s a trainer who tells them what to do.
But how many people can he do this for? 20? 50? 100? 200?
Eventually his ability to serve as personal trainer for every member will exhaust itself and become the chief limiting factor in the growth of the church.

That’s why I believe so strongly in our small group system.
It provides an opportunity for members to develop a network of partners…
To motivate, assist, and encourage one another rather than relying on the trainer to do it for them.
It allows us to grow far beyond the limits of the volume of ministry that one man can handle. Because every member becomes a minister.
It’s a Biblical model, and it’s a better model.
If you’re an Elevation attendee, and the only spiritual exercise you get weekly is on Sunday morning while the professional trainer is motivating you from the stage, you need some partners for everyday life.

Email Groups Pastor John Bishop at jbishop@elevationchurch.org and hit the weights.

Take it Up

For the first 6 months at Elevation, I led the music.
I know that most of the time when lead pastors say that, the follow up line is something about how terrible it was and how relieved everybody was when that day ended because they had no musical talent.
But music is actually something I love and am pretty good at. I credit all my musical abilities to my mom. She sang to me all the time when I was little, bought me my first Psalty tape, started a youth choir at our church, made me take guitar lessons… I have been passionate about music since I can remember… thanks to her.
I was leading bands made up of college students when I was only 14.
And there’s rarely a silent moment in my office or car these days… music is always playing…usually loud (right now it’s Pearl Jam, Corduroy).

Churches reflect the personality of their leaders in a lot of ways…
So it makes perfect sense that music would be a big priority at Elevation.
We buy good sound equipment, only use talented players (sorry LB), and turn it up really loud. Really really loud.

But a few months ago, I started feeling like it was time to take it up a notch musically at Elevation.
Part of the vision that God gave me for our church is that our music would have a national and worldwide impact. I believe thousands of people all over the globe will one day be singing songs that were birthed in this house.
I think we’ll release worship CDs that will inspire a new wave of excellence and creativity in the body of Christ way beyond our four walls.

I always knew that was the ultimate destination, but I was unclear about who God would use to take us there.
So in August, we’re bringing on 3 guys to be a part of the team full time and take the musical experience at Elevation to a whole new level.
Wade Joye, Chris Brown, and Mack Brock are three guys who I have worked with in ministry over the last few years. And I’m excited to announce that over the next 2 months they’ll be moving to God’s favorite city and uniting their superpowers to dominate the musical landscape of Charlotte and make sure that the best music that happens anywhere in town happens every single Sunday at one of our campuses.
I had a meeting with them last night about how they’re going to take this thing from good to great in the Fall.
Let me just say… Elevation, be afraid. These guys ain’t playing. And they’re very good.

Welcome to the team guys. Looking forward to the ruckus.

Please Stop Pickin’ on Joel

As in, Osteen.
As in, the pastor of the largest church in America.
As in, the guy that all seminary students seem to love to hate.

Yep, I hear it all the time. Guys take one systematic theology class, a semester of Greek, and all of a sudden they’re self appointed theological traffic cops.
And their favorite preacher to burn at the stake is none other than the smiling preacher and best selling author who packs the freaking Compaq Center 2 times every freaking Sunday.

I’ll admit, he’s an overbearing endorsement of the benefits of good dental hygiene (I mean that he grins too much. By the way, I do a great Osteen impersonation… remind me to show you sometime).
And if I were stranded on an island and could only have one podcast to listen to, it wouldn’t be Lakewood’s Sunday morning sermons. Alas, if I could only have one book, it wouldn’t be Your Best Life Now. Sorry.

But to all of you mean spirited name callers who have made a career of condemning celebrity preachers:
Who the heck do you think you are to criticize a man who is impacting a city like Pastor Joel is impacting Houston?
Or like Rick Warren is impacting the Saddleback Valley?
(Insert name of controversial preacher and city here… )

Osteen preaches to 40,000 people weekly…
You couldn’t get 40,000 people to come hear you preach if you gave away free Escalades at the door.

“Yeah, but Joel Osteen’s preaching isn’t Christ centered enough. And he didn’t make a bold stand for the exclusivity of the Gospel on Good Morning America that time. And, for crying out loud, he reads a stupid email forward at the beginning of every message before he does that ‘This is my Bible… ‘ thing… “

Well, if you feel that way:
Criticize by creating, not by running your stupid mouth, regurgitating page 87 of Desiring God, and doing damage to the cause of Christ by casting aspersions on a fellow minister of the Gospel.

If you’re concerned about a lack of cross centered preaching, then preach the cross yourself instead of wasting valuable time opining about how someone else should do it better.
If you think Osteen’s messages are too fluffy and lacking in Biblical content, then devote yourself to teaching God’s Word with passion and depth, and get after it. But don’t hate on a man you’ve never met and analyze the entire content of his ministry based on a 27 minute weekly broadcast. That’s illogical, narrow, and unfair, and you know it.
Don’t hurl insults at someone with a big church simply because you can’t make your church grow, and although you’d never admit it, you’re jealous.
That’s right… most of the time the motive isn’t defense of the Gospel… it’s jealousy and presumption.

You know, I think it’s absolutely essential that Christians think critically about what is being taught in Christian pulpits. We must preserve sound doctrine. We must guard against erroneous theologies.

But we must also guard against the kind of spiritual smugness that makes the world look at us and go:
“I thought they were wearing the same jersey… ”

Fun Friday Free For All

I have no idea where I’m going with the title of this post.
But I noticed the other day that only about half of my normal readers read my blog on Friday.
So I’ve decided to do something to sweeten the deal and entice you to stay faithful on Fridays.
Hence, I’m introducing Fun Friday Free For All… a summary of the five coolest things that happened to me all week.
This is the first (and probably last) installment of this latest stevenfurtick.com feature. Enjoy it while you can.

1. Holly asked Elijah “What was your favorite part of vacation last week?” and he said “Daddy.” Hard to beat that.
2. I got to meet Bill Hybels yesterday. What a giant. It seems like my generation sucks at honoring great men of God. I want to change that trend. I’m trying. I honor you Pastor Bill!
3. I think Elevation is going to partner with my friend Clayton for a project that will revolutionize a lot of student ministries, ours included. More details in August, and not a moment before.
4. I walked around a piece of property that could become a very important piece of property to us very soon. More details in mid-June, and not a moment before.
5. This event has yet to occur, but will undoubtedly be the coolest event of the week. Today is me and Holly’s 5 year anniversary. I’m taking her for an in town overnight getaway, Elijah free (THANKS MOM!), and we’re sleeping in and ordering breakfast in bed. And we might hold hands and stuff. You never know.