The Goings on and Work of Sam Mahlstadt

It seems that people are looking for a few good books for the Summer. I have fielded several requests for what to read lately, and I have been recommending a few books over and over. So, here they are.

For great fiction: Life of Pi by Yann Martel  or The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

For theology/Christian living: Crazy Love by Francis Chan or Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell

For faith-centered techies: Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps

No book outside of the Bible has affected my view on living the gospel as much as Crazy Love, and no one has challenged me to wrestle with Scripture and pursue the art of the sermon like Rob Bell.

No book has made me want to cry like a baby so many times as The Book Thief, and no one has dealt with deep issues of life in the fiction format as creatively as Yann Martel.

I haven’t finished reading Flickering Pixels, but it is doing a work on me right now, challenging and informing me in the area of technology and how it shapes our faith.

So, if you don’t have a list of books to read this summer, give these  guys a read. Let me know what you thought if you have already read any or end up reading one or multiple. I would love to hear how about your experience.

You have probably heard of them, and if not, I have a treat for you. Fiction Family is a duo made up of Jon Foreman of Switchfoot and Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek. They worked together and cut a 12 song album while still touring with their respective bands. I have heard about them, but I just heard this song for the first time. These dudes rock. You can download the song for free on their site, fictionfamily.com. The song has been played over 36,000 times on Youtube and another 19,000 on Vimeo. Enjoy!
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I just watched a TED talk given by Seth Godin that I have heard about but not seen until now. It is something that everyone can relate to and be inspired by, but I am going to look at it through the lens of ministry leadership for a moment. (you can watch the entire talk here)

He asks the following question to open his talk: “What do we do everyday?” we being the TED audience (very smart and influential). His answer to his own question is this: “We find a piece of the status quo, something that bothers us, that needs improved, something that’s itching to be changed and we change it.” He adds that we are aiming for “big, permanent, important change.”

I believe this is the heart of creating culture, where we embrace a counter-culture lifestyle of following Jesus while embracing the culture in which we live to create a new culture. Loving our enemy by having a conversation. Being deeply generous in the face of greed. Putting action to ideals regardless of the personal or corporate cost. This is aiming for big, permanent, important change.

He noted a shift in effective leadership style; from mass marketing to connecting people to ideas. This is what he refers to as Tribes, also the title of his book on the subject.

Some simple steps he mentions, that are exceptionally applicable to ministry leaders:

• Find something worth changing and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes – it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement.
• Find a group that’s disconnected but has a yearning.
• Tell a story to people who want to hear it
• Connect a tribe who are desperate to be connected to each other,
• lead the movement
• Make a change.

Jesus upset the way of the religious elite, told the story of God’s Kingdom and assembled an eclectic group. He taught them a new way to live, and empowered them to continue telling the story. Here we are, 2000 years later, living in the midst of that revolution.

Continue fighting the staus quo, continue dreaming a big dream, and continue persuing something larger than yourself. I would love to know, what has God placed inside of you that could use this application? What are you dreaming that still needs to be put into action?

It is important how we position ourselves in social networks in order to maximize impact. If you are a leader in ministry, especially one who produces material (speaks and/or writes), beware how you enter a social network. Remember this: because of social technologies, everyone can create, criticize and broadcast with ease.

Not everyone has access to a stage and microphone or gets phone calls from publishers, but that doesn’t stop the creation of material. With the likes of free blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, everyone can write, direct and star in their own story.

There are some great conversations happening already, from a myriad of sources. It is okay to simply be a part, observe and take it in. Consume. Resist the urge to constantly lead, and your leadership capabilities will benefit.

When it comes to utilizing new media in the presentation of the gospel, the answer is to maintain balance. We are wrestling with an ancient text that tells a story far grander than that of which our microwave society is used to dealing. It is like we are picking up an epic novel but all we read are chose your own adventure books and graphic novels. It requires a different approach, a different strategy and a different set of expectations. When dealing with the story of the Gospel, we cannot sell it short by being unwilling to deal with the depth and span of the story within the story. The Gospel is the story of  the good news, that God has reconciled creation to Himself. The story of redemption, however, is set in a moment that is part of a much larger series of events. A great moment indeed, but simply a moment, saturated in a cultural and historical context. It is the climax of the epic, not the epic itself.

It helps to think of it like this, we find ourselves in the falling action of the storyline, or the dénouement: the exposition (beginning and introduction of setting), rising action, conflict and climax have all occurred. We are now in the falling action of the story, waiting for the conclusion, which will reveal the ultimate moral.

When you look at the story of the Gospel in regards to a story arc, it helps provide some context – the story has been going on for a long time, and we find ourselves co-writing the ending. This brings weight to the topic.

So we must deal with the weight of the story when we begin to engage new social medias in our presentation. By simply adding a “text the pastor your question” segment to a worship service, we risk simplifying the greatest story ever told, thereby minimizing the implications of the story. But, by allowing audience participation, and facilitating discussion, we are allowing others to participate in the telling of a beautiful and dramatic story, which can be an incredibly powerful moment for all those involved. Balance is key if we want to be successful in our presentation of the Gospel, never forgetting the magnitude and influence of the story, while continually engaging those who are willing to participate.

Help write the story, never stop telling the story, and find a balance that engages the audience (everyone who is listening to you) and maintains the power of the storyline.

I have been doing a lot of tweeting lately, and less blog writing. It’s quicker and easier, making it the best solution to broadcast my goings on (I know you are all on pins and needles wondering what I’m up to). There are a few reasons for the blogging decrease, sort of  represented by the two pictures above. The first, a picture of my moleskin is there to represent my writing. I went to school to pursue a career in writing until God intervened and I switched my focus to vocational ministry. I believe God has placed a gift inside of me that deserves attention and developing, and I believe writing is a major part of the call on my life.

The second picture represents the information meetings that we are helping put on for One Church. We hold our meetings at Starbucks for a few reasons: people gather around coffee, coffee shops are natural meeting places, and coffee is symbolic of community in our culture for the two aforementioned reasons. The turnout has been great, and we are excited to branch out from the Starbucks meeting room and begin gathering in spots around the community and in people’s homes. People are ready and excited for what is going on with One Church, and it’s going to be a crazy next few months as we strategize, market and build this new church community.

Stay tuned for the next couple posts; I am going to be focusing on new media and how it should and shouldn’t be used by churches. I would love your thoughts, Lord knows I have plenty.  Until then…please pray for our growing launch team.

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Click on the widget to join me in partnering with One Church. My goal is to raise $1000 to help with the launch. You can read more about my goal and info about One Church here.

Geoff Surratt (three sets of double letters makes for a great name) just came out with the book, Ten Stupid Things That Keep Churches From Growing: How Leaders Can Overcome Costly Mistakes, which you need to read if you are part of making church happen. As part of a church plant, I would very much like to avoid being a part of any of the stupid things Geoff identifies. (You will see that we have already avoided one by partnering with ARC). Specifically, I would like to avoid the dumb mistakes new churches make as they initially build their community. As a leader of a church planting organization, I figured we may have a thing or two to share. So, here is what I asked him, and what he had to say:

Me: What is the number one thing new churches do that stifles growth coming out of the gates?

Geoff: I think the number one thing that slows the growth of new church plants is to underestimate the importance of three things (clever, huh?):

1. The cost of getting started. Once the church launches you will never have enough time, enough people or enough money. I have yet to hear a church planter say, “I raised way too much money before we started. We had to stash the extra cash in bags under our bed because we just couldn’t spend it fast enough.” As painful as it is the more money you can raise before launch, the better chance you’ll have for success early on. Everything will wind up costing 20% more than you thought it would and offerings will be at least 20% less than you could ask or imagine.Another seldom heard church planter phrase is “Keep your core team as small as possible.”  More is definitely better when attracting leaders to your cause. As a side note, if you can’t build a large core team, it is very unlikely that you will build a large church.
2. The value of relationship. Church planters are entrepreneurs at heart. The first phrase most of them uttered as babies was, “I can do it myself.” The reality is, however, we all need somebody to lean on. (Cue the music) There are several great church planting organizations looking for sharp church planters; you’d be crazy not to connect with one of them. My favorite is the Association of Related Churches because Seacoast was a founding member.
3. The importance of delegation. In the book 10 Stupid Things that Keep Churches from Growing I identify trying to do it all as the #1 stupid mistake that pastors commit. In meeting with hundreds of pastors of churches of every size the thing I see again and again is that they are doing the work of the ministry rather than training others to do the work of the ministry. From setting up chairs to aiming projectors to picking songs to cleaning bathrooms church planters can spend so much time elbow deep in working that they cannot lead. Every pastor needs to be willing to do whatever it takes to reach people for Christ, but the most important thing he can do is give a part of the ministry away every day. I think there are really four steps to giving away ministry:

Connect the dots. No one wants to clean bathrooms but most people would like to change the world. The pastors job is to connect the dots through vision from clean bathrooms to changed lives.

The Big Ask. The most effective volunteers are already too busy doing other stuff to help you in the church. The people with plenty of time have plenty of time for a reason (Often it begins with an “L” and ends with “oser”) That’s why the pastor has to learn to make The Big Ask of the busiest people. We call those people high capacity volunteers.

Show them the ropes. Once a pastor talks an unsuspecting soul into working in the nursery he often then hands her the teachers guide and says to call if she has any trouble. That is a volunteer who will soon be handing the teachers guide back because, “I realized that this job is just too big for me.” To truly engage leaders church planters have to be willing to invest the time to actually mentor others.

Quit. It is too early to quit the church. What a church planter needs to do, however, on a regular basis is evaluate everything you do. Make a list of every activity you do related to ministry for a week. Then sort the list into three piles: What can only you do? What could someone else do? What should no one do? And then get busy training others to do the work of the ministry.

Many thanks to Geoff for stopping by Creating Culture. If you are in church leadership, or are an active member of a church, go buy the book, you will benefit from his insights.

When I throw around the term new media, what I am referring to is media that has been developed in the wake of the digital and computerized era.  Almost synonymous with new media is a sense of interconnectedness, where everyone can create, edit and criticize. A great example of this is the near disappearance of print encyclopedias, and the emergence of the online collaboration with countless topics – Wikipedia. Thanks to the internet, and also the smart phone, almost anyone in our culture can create information and broadcast it to the world (or no one at all) in little time and with little effort, from nearly anywhere. There is a sense of what I like to refer to as guarded authenticity that accompanies this social media {new media}. People want to see beyond veneers, but are slow to open up for a look at who they really are, what they really aspire to be, and what they really think. So it is an awkward dance of sorts, people trying to figure each other out, all the while demanding authenticity without wanting to reciprocate too quickly. This is going to mark the generation rising in the ranks as we speak. One of the requirements of young (18-30) churchgoers is a sense of authenticity from the pastors. As I see it, social media is an unprecedented way for church leadership to show a side of themselves that wouldn’t be seen on a stage, or in the pulpit. By using Facebook or Twitter, these leaders can showing pictures of vacation and relay the aggravation of the horrible traffic on the highway. Wait a minute, I can relate to that! These media platforms can humanize those who are only seen in a worship service setting, and allow them the opportunity to walk out their faith in practical, everyday ways with those in their social network.

I know that there is a fine line church leaders have to walk in these scenarios, but it is worth the effort.

Would you be interested in interacting with your church leadership online? Would it change how you tend to view them? If you are in church leadership, are you concerned with social media? embracing it? ignoring it?

It was very cool to have Kem Meyer stop by the blog the other day to talk Less Clutter. Less Noise. I enjoy her insights about communication, and I love that she is bringing it from the front lines.

There have been some good responses about technology following the post. There are a few things I would like to wrestle with over the next week or so:

What exactly is “new” media?

How do we balance new and old media in our presentation of the Gospel?

How do we position ourselves in the online communities formed around social networking?

I would love your thoughts on these issues in the posts to come, and I hope the thoughtful and engaging conversation continues.