I love getting around leaders who make me think. Yesterday I had the opportunity to be at the North Point staff meeting where Reggie Joiner spoke.
After serving at North Point for over 10 years, Reggie left the staff there to devote all of his time to ReThink. As part of that move, he's traveled the country meeting church leaders. Yesterday, he shared some of his learnings. Here are a few highlights that got me thinking:
- People who are anti-mega church tend to be the people who already go to church. That hit me pretty hard. Obviously, large churches do a pretty good job of attracting unchurched people. Church people find large churches too big. I'll chew on that one awhile.
- Maybe the job of the communicator is not to resolve tension, but to create it so that people leave having to wrestle with what was said. I love that! I think that happens a bit already in good preaching, but what would happen if we made that a goal? In family ministry, we say that what happens at home is as or more important than what happens at church. Maybe that's true of big church (when adults gather) too.
- You can tell people they are significant, but until you give them something significant to do, they won't feel significant. Okay, that's just way too true. It made me think - maybe the problem of burnout in churches is not that we have given people too much to do, maybe it's that we've given people too many insignificant things to do.
What do you think? Do we need to create more tension - more wrestling, in preaching? Do we ask people to do things that are not really significant? Is there anything wrong with a large church?
PS. If you want more stuff like this, you might want to get down to this conference where this kind of sharp thinking will be all over the place.
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