While changing jobs, houses and states twice in a year I thought it would be fun to move the blog as well. I have purchased a new home on WordPress, so this Typepad powered site will be winding down soon. You can find the new site here: www.geoffsurratt.com
See you there!
I hate to wait. I hate to wait at the DMV, I hate to wait in the line at WalMart, I hate to wait in a traffic jam. But what I really hate is waiting on God; waiting for my church to grow, waiting for an answer to a prayer, waiting for my next Kingdom assignment. I knew three years ago that God was leading me into a new ministry role. While I loved what I did at Seacoast Church I felt strongly that the Charleston chapter was coming to a close. Once I came to that conclusion I assumed that I’d do a little prayer, read a little scripture, ask a little advice and BAM, I’d be on to my next assignment. Two years later I was still waiting, and waiting, and waiting. This week I want to share some of the lessons I learned while waiting for God to open a door.
I am expert at making myself, and everyone around me, miserable while I wait. Let me share three quick tips if you too would like to become join the misery loves company club.
Worry is a great way to fill the hours, day, weeks or months you have to wait. Some questions to stoke the worry fire:
Why is this taking so long?
Why won’t God answer my prayers?
Why are other people moving forward while I’m not? (This opens the comparison closet which is a great dead end to explore while you are waiting)
Unfortunately worry doesn’t really move the ball forward, but it does fill the time and accomplishes the goal of making everyone miserable
Luke 12:25-26 ( NLT ) Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things?
When I am waiting I feel like I have to make something happen. It is up to me to get the ball rolling. I just need to push harder, get others motivated, use my super powers to change my circumstances.
I was at the airport recently waiting on a delayed flight. There was a lady next to me yelling on her phone at an airline employee that this delay was absolutely unacceptable. She was so mad she looked like she was going to pop a vein. In the end we both got on the same plane at the same time. The only difference was I didn’t need a vodka martini to calm my nerves.
That’s the problem with stress, its fun while you’re fuming but it seldom changes things. But, again, it accomplishes the goal of making you and those you love miserable while you wait.
Complaining takes the pleasure of worry and combines it with the satisfaction of stress. Complaining takes many forms; a deep sigh, a prayer request, a testimony at small group. Complaining says, “If I have to wait, then those closest to me should suffer too.” And there is nothing that makes time fly in the waiting room like the airing of grievances.
The problem with complaining is that it is like scratching poison ivy; it brings immediate relief, but it makes the situation worse in the end.
In the past few years I have been learning that worry, stress and complaining just make waiting more difficult for me and those around me. I have also gained some perspective about waiting rooms. I’ll share what I’ve learned tomorrow.
Let’s look at some ways you can make portable sustainable.
These are just eight ideas I have come across in working with portable congregations over the past ten years. What ideas have you tried that has made portable sustainable for your church?
Let’s be honest, Mr. Church Planter, what you really want, what you really NEED, is a permanent building. You have gone about as far as you can in the gymatorium; it is time to get a big boy home. If you had a building you could have an office where no one ever changes a diaper, your church nursery could look more like Disney and less like Alcatraz, you could stop choosing drummers based on their ability to lift speakers on to stands. You are ready to call the real estate agent and find your holy nirvana. Before you pick up the phone let me throw out a couple of hidden costs you may not have considered.
When I was at Seacoast Church we transitioned six campuses from portable to permanent, so I’ve been down this road a few times. Buildings have a lot of upside, but there are some major hidden costs. Before you pull the trigger let me share some things I’ve learned about permanent locations.
Buildings attract Christians
How many unchurched people (who aren’t attending any of the other churches who already have buildings) are sitting at home thinking, “Now when that really cool new church meeting in the middle school gets a building THEN I’ll give my heart to Jesus”? They aren’t going to 1st Baptist or 1st Presbyterian or 1st Unitarian, all who already have way better buildings then you will ever have, why are the going to show up at your newly renovated warehouse?
Christians on the other hand LOVE buildings. They can smell a new church building from miles away. That’s why you see big attendance jumps in some churches (especially churches in the Bible Belt) when they open a new building. If your target audience is now sitting in someone else’s pew, then a new building is just the bait to lure them in. If you really are after the unchurched a buidling might not have the impact you think it will have.
Think about it. Who is putting the biggest pressure on you to get a permanent facility? Is it the guy whose life was a complete disaster until he found Jesus at your church, or is it the family who moved over from 1st Church because “they just weren’t being fed”?
Buildings eat 24/7
When you get a permanent facility you won’t have to set up and tear down any more, but you will have to pour endless amounts of cash into the care and feeding of your new money pit. You will now have utility bills, common area maintenance bills, roof repair bills. You will have the joy of adding a janitor and/or facilities manager to your staff. When the air conditioners break you get to fix them. You also get to install burglar alarms and fire alarms and sprinkler systems.
When you rent a facility for the weekend you write one or two checks a month (depending on how you pay the janitor). When you rent or own a permanent facility you get to write check after check after check. Hopefully enough new already tithing Christians will show up so you can keep the lights on.
By the way, the upfit (tenant improvements) of the new facility are going to cost more (a lot more) and take longer (a lot longer) than you have planned for. Trust me on this one.
Buildings modify vision
Once you have a permanent location the vision of your church will be greatly impacted by your building. A lot of what you do will be guided by paying for your box, filling up your box and expanding your box. You can no longer move to a bigger box down the street, you are now locked in.
Church buildings are not evil, obviously most churches have had them for the past 1700 years. But if we are going to really make a dent in reaching lost people I think we are going to have to literally think outside the box.
Tomorrow I’ll share some tips on how to stave off the building monster and stay portable as long as possible. What tips do you have for other church planters on succeeding at portable?
One of the first questions every church planter (after, "Why won't you turn the music down?") will face is “When will we move into our own building?” The school, theater, cardboard box is fine for today, but what they really want to know is when we’ll be a “real church”. This begins as a solo, grows to an ensemble, morphs into a chorus and soon emerges as a significant choir. If you listen very closely you can hear the chant echo across the fruited plane even now, “We want a building, We want a Building, WE WANT A STINKIN’ BUILDING!!!”
And why do they want a building? Because a building will make your church much, much more effective and fulfilling your God-inspired vision. If we had a building…
We could do more discipleship classes
We could help feed the poor
We could house widows and orphans
We could host teas and coffees (and poker nights if you’re reformed)
And as a pastor you dream of a building of your own…
You could sleep in until 5:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings
You could have a real office instead of a corner of the spare bedroom
You whole staff would have a place to plug in their laptops at meetings
You wouldn't have to shout over the coffee grinder during counseling sessions
There is no doubt that in many ways a permanent building makes some things easier. Not having to set up and tear down every weekend might add five years to the life span of the average church planter. Not having to whisper (or shout) during counseling would probably be more effective. But there are some major drawbacks to having a 24/7 building. Let me throw out some things a building won’t solve today, tomorrow we’ll look at some of the challenges a building brings and Thursday I’ll give some ways to stave off the building zombie choir.
First, a building won’t make you a real church. I’m sure you realize that the Christian church built few, if any, buildings before 300 AD. There were likely some renovated homes and expanded shops, but the real building bug didn’t bite until Constantine had seen the light. Then the church got busy building and they made up for lost time.
The sad thing is that many of the church buildings are now just shells. They are beautiful to look at, but there is no life inside. The reality is that the church was vibrant before the first building was built, but in many cases that vibrancy died after the cathedral was completed. The building didn’t kill the church, but it didn’t sustain it either.
There are many examples of vibrant, real churches with no buildings. In Hawaii most newer churches have no hope of ever owning a building, yet they continue to grow and thrive and plant new churches. I met a young man the other day who pastors a growing church for homeless people in the Miami area, and they meet under a tree. I realize those are extreme examples, but the point is that a building doesn’t validate a church, the anointing of the Holy Spirit validates a church.
And if you have a leadership development problem, a discipleship problem or a volunteer recruitment problem now, you will still have those challenges once you have a building. If people aren't growing at your church now they still won't be growing when you put a permanent roof over their heads. Rather than focusing on the nirvana of building ownership you will be better served focusing on the core challenges and keeping the buiding monster at bay.
“Mom, can I go to a movie with Mark?”
“No”
“Why?”
“Because you are a Surratt and Surratt’s don’t go to movies.”
“But Mark’s mom is letting him go!”
“I’m not Mark’s mom and Mark is not a Surratt”
“I wish I wasn’t a Surratt”
“We can arrange that” (Mom was not the touchy feely kind)
The point of this post isn’t the good or bad of being raised in a somewhat legalistic home. The point is that my mom established that being a Surratt meant something, She wasn’t referring to our reputation or notoriety, we didn’t have any. No one, outside of students of obscure Civil War history, had ever heard of the Surratt family. But to mom we had an identity and we were to respect that identity and live a life worthy of the name we had been given.
Although my mom has been gone for over 20 years and I now attend movies on a regular basis I can still her admonishing me, “You’re a Surratt.” And that makes me proud. It makes me want to aspire to something. It makes me want to bring honor to our family name. When I had kids of my own, though the issues had changed, they were raised with that same phrase echoing in their ears. And I imagine my little granddaughter will one day be heartbroken when she realizes she too has to live within certain boundaries because, “You’re a Surratt”.
Give your children a name. Teach them to respect that name. Don’t allow them to feel superior to other children, but at the same time let them know that their name stands for something. They will chafe under it when they are young, but they will take pride in it long after they have moved out of your house because you have given them a legacy.
Before I go any further in this series let me share one of the bedrock truths of parenting I’ve come to believe after 25 years as a parent and 30 years of being around children’s ministry; kids will become what they will become. I have seen really lousy parents raise really good kids and I’ve seen amazing parents raise horrendous kids. So don’t take too much credit and don’t beat yourself up too much. You can certainly do things to help your kids along the way and there’s no doubt you can screw them up, but in the end what they become is up to them and God. Just do the best you can.
That being said let’s take a look at the second lesson I’ve learned about raising decent kids:
Lesson 2: Lose some battles but win the war
When my daughter was five she hated attending the mid-week children’s program (“Missionettes”) at the church where I worked. It was a program designed for little girls who liked dolls, dressing up and earning badges for homemaking. My daughter preferred basketball, magic tricks and earning badges for building things. (She idolized her older brother, and those are the things they did in his “Royal Rangers” group). Every Wednesday night was a battle. I threatened, I spanked, I forced her to sit in her class and pretend to care about girl things. I thought it was imperative that I win this battle, I could not let my four year old make her own decisions. Where would that lead?
The reality is that I woudn’t have gone to Missionettes even if I had been beaten and threatened. It was really poorly run and the polar opposite of who God wired my daughter up to be. This wasn’t just a defiant four year old (which she wasn’t defiant in any other area), this was a child who genuinely hated to be locked in that room for two hours a week. I should have realized that this wasn't a hill to die on, and figured out a viable alternative.
A friend told me recently about some great parenting wisdom he had learned from watching one episode of Dr Phil. (I believe that is the maximum life-time allowance without losing your man card.) Dr. Phil told a mother that there are battles and there are wars in raising kids. He said the difference is whether the consequences of losing are permanent. Missionettes was a battle I could have lost and my daughter would have been none the worse for it. She is now a beautiful young lady who loves shoppng for clothes and playing beautiful music. I'm pretty sure Missionettes had nothing to do with her success.
When my son was a teenager his room was a constant irritant for my wife. It looked like small clothing bombs had gone off, then covered with layers of crumpled paper and topped off with discarded candy wrappers. For awhile we considered bringing in a HazMat team. In the end, however, we decided to keep his door closed. If he wouldn’t attract rodents and city health officials, and do his own laundry; we wouldn’t stress out over how clean he kept his room. We decided this was a battle not a war. Fast forward to today and my son is happily married, working as pastor at Seacoast Church and is a great husband, dad and leader. I don’t know if he cleans his room.
So what battles are you treating like wars? Are there some areas with your kids where it might be ok to lose? I can tell you from the empty nest that most of the things you’re stressing about today as a parent are no big deal in the end.
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Leaders are always shocked, SHOCKED when a church begins to decline in attendance. The interesting thing is that every church eventually stops growing, if not then we would see churches with millions of members that are hundreds of years old. And if its God's will that churches should grow forever then every church Paul planted was out of God's will because none of them are around today. Just like businesses churches have a life cycle. Most newer churches grow for 15 years and then level off. Some exceptional churches grow for 20 years. There are very few examples of churches that actually grow for more than 25 years.
But there is hope in Kodak's legacy. From the CNN article "...there are the people: Even though the company has cut thousands of jobs, much of its generally well-educated workforce has stayed in the area, many starting tech-related businesses." Though their core business is gone (have you bought a Kodak camera lately) the pioneering legacy of founder George Eastman lives on in the entreprenural spirit of Kodak's final generation of employees. In a way Kodak will never really die.
And that is the hope for every church. We can vow to break the mold and pour all of our resources and energy into sustaining a growth curve for 15, 20, 25 years. Or we can begin now sowing substantial time and talent in discipling and training a new generation of church planters who will take the seeds of our oak tree and plant an orchard (via @johnworcester). If you want to see your church live forever invest in young leaders and send them out into the field well-prepared and richly resourced. Be like Kodak.
We’ve been doing some pretty serious “how to do church” posts the last couple of weeks on the blog. so I thought for the rest of this week we’d look at more life lesson stuff. One of the most challenging and rewarding parts of my life is being a parent, so I want to share some lessons from the last 25 years of parenting. I originally wanted to call this series, “How to not suck as a parent”, but I was worried how that might show up in search engines. So let’s talk about How to Grow Kids You (and your friends) Enjoy.
Lesson 1: Children make lousy centerpieces
Little kids, at least mine, are so cute and cuddly it is easy to make them the center of your universe. “What can Mommy and Daddy do to make your little life more wonderful?” The goal becomes maximizing happiness while minimizing pain no matter the cost. The problem is that catering to their little wishes and whims turns children into pests that your friends want to squish like cockroaches. (I’m serious, ask them.) Eventually you too will be looking at the can of Raid and thinking thoughts of pesticide. Stop the madness before it starts.
The best advice I got on parenting was from Gary Ezzo who taught me, “Treat your children as welcome guests in your home. You and your wife had a home before they showed up, and you will have a home after they leave. The children need to know that the home does not revolve around them.” My parents lived by this motto long before Gary was wrote a book. My siblings and I always knew that we were loved, we were cared for and we were welcome in our home as long as we knew our place. And that place was not the center. Center was for God, next to God was mom, right next to mom was dad. I think I came somewhere between my little brother and the sofa. At least I was ahead of the dog. I think. And oddly enough we all turned out fairly normal, mildly successful and mostly happy. Who knew?
Start early and stick with the program. Sometimes you will say no because they don't need what they are asking for, sometimes you will say no because you can't give them what they want, and sometimes you will say no because there is no better lesson in life then to learn how to deal with no. And sometimes you will say yes just because it is so much more fun than no. Love your kids, play with your kids, care for your kids. And remind your kids often that their happiness is not the goal of your home. The goal is to raise kids people like so that when they leave, and they will leave, they will have a successful life and you will have a happy home.
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I am the husband of Sherry, the father of Mike and Brittainy, and God's adopted son.
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