Pastor Steven Furtick

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.