Category: Assemblies of God

Crunch All You Want, We’ll Make More

I real­ly like the fake church sign in this arti­cle from Lark News. Thanks to Church Mar­ket­ing Sucks for notic­ing the sto­ry.

Federal Governance And Its Discontents

This is sort of ran­dom, but I find it fas­ci­nat­ing so please bear with me:

When­ev­er pow­er is split between one cen­tral and sev­er­al region­al author­i­ties, we are talk­ing about a fed­er­al sys­tem of gov­er­nance. The most obvi­ous Amer­i­can exam­ple is the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment (Wash­ing­ton, D.C.) ver­sus the state gov­ern­ments.

In a fed­er­al sys­tem of gov­er­nance there is a built-in ten­den­cy towards ten­sion between the cen­tral author­i­ty and the region­al author­i­ties.

Each side is try­ing to do the best they can from their per­pec­tive, yet each side keeps mak­ing deci­sions that don’t make sense from the oth­er side’s per­spec­tive. This results in a lack of con­fi­dence in the oth­er side. Most region­al author­i­ties prob­a­bly have a 85–95% con­fi­dence fac­tor in the nation­al lead­er­ship (which is rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed by the nation­al author­i­ty). This dis­trust cen­ters on two areas: com­pe­tence and char­ac­ter.

  • incom­plete trust in com­pe­tence: I believe that you mean well, but that you lack the nec­es­sary atten­tion to detail/big pic­ture perspective/fundraising knack/writing ability/knowledge of the issues/etc.
  • incom­plete trust in char­ac­ter: I don’t think that you’re evil, but I do think that you’re oper­at­ing with a dif­fer­ent set of val­ues than I am. You define hon­esty dif­fer­ent­ly than I do, or you have a per­son­al as well as an orga­ni­za­tion­al agen­da, or you lack the courage to dis­ap­point peo­ple, etc.

I’m not talk­ing about a com­plete lack of con­fi­dence, mind you. I’m mere­ly talk­ing about a lack of com­plete con­fi­dence. A com­plete lack of con­fi­dence calls for dras­tic action. A lack of com­plete con­fi­dence calls for mid-course adjust­ments.

Some spe­cif­ic exam­ples of a lack of com­plete con­fi­dence:

  • “Will this real­ly hap­pen or is it just a big todo about noth­ing?” (char­ac­ter)
  • “This is what they say here and now, what will the emails say in three months?” (char­ac­ter)
  • “This is what they want to do, but can they real­ly pull it off?” (com­pe­tence)
  • “Are they will­ing to actu­al­ly enforce this pol­i­cy or it real­ly going to be the same-old same-old?” (com­pe­tence and char­ac­ter)

The Assem­blies of God tends to use a fed­er­al sys­tem of gov­er­nance:

  • Spring­field, MO ver­sus Dis­trict Offi­cials
  • Dis­trict Offi­cials ver­sus Sec­tion­al Pres­byters
  • the nation­al youth depart­ment ver­sus the dis­trict youth depart­ments
  • Chi Alpha (see my notes on a Chi Alpha lead­er­ship team meet­ing)

Since we have a fed­er­al sys­tem of gov­er­nance we should­n’t be sur­prised when the same ten­sions emerge in our move­ment that we see in oth­er fed­er­al orga­ni­za­tions. But we are sur­prised. Not only are we sur­prised, we tend to diag­nose it as a spir­i­tu­al prob­lem such as dis­uni­ty, a fail­ure to sub­mit to author­i­ty, an exam­ple of uneth­i­cal lead­er­ship, or the politi­ciza­tion of a spir­i­tu­al orga­ni­za­tion.

While a spir­i­tu­al prob­lem may be present and exac­er­bat­ing the sit­u­a­tion, it’s not the causal fac­tor. The ten­den­cy towards ten­sion is pro­duced by the struc­ture itself.

Is the fed­er­al sys­tem a bad sys­tem of gov­er­nance? No. It just pro­vides us with chal­lenges that we need to over­come: oth­er sys­tems pro­vide oth­er chal­lenges and there is no panacea.

So what should we do if we real­ize that a lack of con­fi­dence is hin­der­ing our effec­tive­ness?

A few things occur to me:

  1. Remem­ber that this is a nat­ur­al prob­lem, not an intrin­si­cal­ly spir­i­tu­al one.
  2. Remem­ber that this is not evi­dence of a fail­ing orga­ni­za­tion or fail­ing lead­er­ship. This will recur over time regard­less of the orga­ni­za­tion’s health or the lead­er­ship’s com­pe­tence (although the fre­quen­cy and dura­tion of the cycles of mis­trust will tell you some­thing sig­nif­i­cant about the orga­ni­za­tion and its lead­ers).
  3. Real­ize that you would prob­a­bly agree with the oth­er side if you had their respon­si­bil­i­ties and resources. You’ve seen it a mil­lion times: some­one who pre­vi­ous­ly agreed with you changed posi­tions and all of a sud­den became unrea­son­able. You would do the same thing.
  4. Be reluc­tant to crit­i­cize where you are not will­ing to help. I say “be reluc­tant” rather than “refuse” because some­times you’re asked for feedback–giving it hon­est­ly is a mat­ter of integri­ty.
  5. Be frank about the ten­sions and their rea­sons. Forth­right­ness is the long-term key to health. Pre­tend­ing that they aren’t there exac­er­bates the ten­sion.
  6. Focus on the issues and not the per­son­al­i­ties (and most assured­ly not on the his­to­ry).
  7. Pray.

Seven Things I Love About Chi Alpha Nationally

I was think­ing in the show­er about how won­der­ful Chi Alpha is.

Here are sev­en spe­cif­ic things I love about our move­ment:

  1. We have a great cul­ture in Chi Alpha. Almost all the big buzz­words in lead­er­ship (men­tor­ing, learn­ing orga­ni­za­tion, authen­tic­i­ty, being mis­sion­al, etc) have been core parts of our DNA for decades.
  2. Most of the best peo­ple I know are Chi Alpha lead­ers. Read that again if it’s con­fus­ing.
  3. Chi Alpha offers great train­ing. Whether it’s in the area of lead­ing a small group or sup­port-rais­ing, the train­ing is top-notch and use­ful.
  4. Chi Alpha con­sis­tent­ly offers life-trans­form­ing region­al and nation­al con­fer­ences (with some of the best wor­ship to be found any­where, I might add).
  5. Chi Alpha is part of the Assem­blies of God, and the Assem­blies of God rocks in ways I can­not even begin to describe here. Some­day I’ll have to make anoth­er list of sev­en things about them.
  6. Chi Alpha is very entre­peneur­ial. I have almost com­plete auton­o­my with­in my sphere of respon­si­bil­i­ty (the cam­pus I am assigned to). I can pret­ty much do what­ev­er I want, and yet I know that if I need help or coach­ing it’s just a phone call away.
  7. Chi Alpha is very mis­sion­al, both in what we do on cam­pus and in what we seek to do beyond it. We teach our stu­dents to be effec­tive for Christ in a non-Chris­t­ian envi­rone­ment and we do it so well that they have become the recruits of choice for some of our sharpest mis­sion­ar­ies around the globe. Which is why Assem­blies of God World Mis­sions sank over a mil­lion dol­lars into The World Mis­sions Sum­mit ear­li­er this year–and which is why they got over 700 recruits in return.

Chi Alpha’s Advisory Leadership Team

I just spent 16 hours trav­el­ing in order to spend 18 hours in Spring­field, MO.

First, an apol­o­gy to all my Spring­field friends, but I lit­er­al­ly had zero free min­utes the entire time that I was there (I am now at an age where I view sleep as non-option­al). I’ll try to carve out a more flex­i­ble sched­ule on future trips.

Which leads me to the point of this post: I’m on Chi Alpha’s new­ly formed Advi­so­ry Lead­er­ship Team (ALT). I would have pre­ferred to be in the CTRL or DEL group, but ALT is where they stuck me. 😉

This group is com­prised of three local Chi Alpha lead­ers (present­ly me, Dick Her­man and Mark Bri­ley) along with the res­i­dent nation­al Chi Alpha staff and meets every two months to advise the nation­al direc­tor on strate­gic deci­sions and pol­i­cy issues.

This is my own quirky and high­ly sub­jec­tive take on things.

Things I Learned:

  • Scott Mar­tin had to fight to keep the World Mis­sions Sum­mit from open­ing with a human video (and one involv­ing swords, at that). We all owe him a tremen­dous debt.
  • The biggest Chi Alpha min­istries are:
    • 600 stu­dents at San Diego State Uni­ver­si­ty with Sue Hegle.
    • 430 at West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty with Brady Bob­bink.
    • 275 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Arkansas with Matt Car­pen­ter.
    • ??? at Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisiana-Lafayette with Eric Treuil (his num­bers aren’t on file, but I esti­mate his min­istry prob­a­bly fits here on the list).
    • 190 at Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty with Mario Solari.
    • 175 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta-Duluth with Chuck Haavik.
    • 175 at Ten­nessee Tech Uni­ver­si­ty with Jonathan Scales.
    • 160 at Mur­ray State with Mark Ran­doll.
    • 150 at Mis­souri State Uni­ver­si­ty with Noble Bow­man.
  • Most Chi Alpha groups meet on Thurs­day or Tues­day at 7pm.
  • Only 19% of Chi Alpha stu­dents have an Assem­blies of God back­ground.
  • Chi Alpha at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty saw 40 stu­dents get saved last year. Big props to Andy Cun­ning­ham.

Things We Dis­cussed There Which I Am Also Free To Dis­cuss Here:

  • Fill­ing out the annu­al Chi Alpha cen­sus needs to be part of the annu­al affil­i­a­tion process. Not fill­ing it out (and not affil­i­at­ing) will be grounds for hav­ing your pay­check with­held, just as with our month­ly finan­cial reports. Also, this needs to be doable online.
  • We spent a lot of time talk­ing about Chi Alpha’s deci­sion-mak­ing process and orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture. There’s a lot of that I can’t com­ment on yet because our Nation­al Direc­tor is going to be talk­ing to many peo­ple one on one to explain things to them. Here are things I think I can safe­ly say:
    • Chi Alpha does­n’t exist in a vac­u­um: we’re embed­ded in the Assem­blies of God and are absolute­ly gov­erned by its con­sti­tu­tion, bylaws, and pol­i­cy man­u­als. The most impor­tant take­away from that is that the Nation­al Direc­tor is pret­ty much the pope of Chi Alpha when it comes to nation­al deci­sions (as opposed to dis­trict and local deci­sions).
    • In addi­tion it is help­ful to real­ize that there are four tiers (for lack of a bet­ter word) of lead­er­ship with­in Chi Alpha.
      • The Nation­al Direc­tor
      • Nation­al Staff
      • Translo­cal Influ­encers (Area Direc­tors, CMIT Direc­tors, DXARs, nation­al Resource Per­son­nel, etc). This is the most con­fus­ing, because most of the groups at this lev­el are entan­gled (almost every­one who serves in one of these roles also serves in at least one oth­er translo­cal capac­i­ty) and there’s not real­ly a hier­ar­cy among them (for exam­ple, CMIT direc­tors are sub­or­di­nate to DXARs in cer­tain respects but not oth­ers and CMIT direc­tors are more influ­en­tial with­in Chi Alpha than DXARs). Real­iz­ing that they are all in rough­ly the same tier of lead­er­ship (which they express in very dif­fer­ent domains) is help­ful when try­ing to fig­ure out how this beast called Chi Alpha actu­al­ly works.
      • Local Staff
    • Func­tion­al­ly, each lev­el has auton­o­my with­in their assigned lev­el of respon­si­bil­i­ty (for exam­ple, no one can tell a local staffer what to preach on any giv­en week). Micro­manag­ing is the root of all kinds of evil.
    • We real­ly need to define for each group exact­ly what deci­sions they are empow­ered to make with­out fear of their deci­sions being med­dled with. We also need to clar­i­fy who reports to whom. This has to be in a pub­lic writ­ten doc­u­ment that every­one can look at.
    • The real chal­lenge that we face is trust. My own take on it: many of the tier 3 lead­er­ship lack con­fi­dence in tiers 1 and 2. Some lack trust in the com­pe­tence of the top tier lead­er­ship and oth­ers lack trust in the char­ac­ter of the top tier lead­er­ship (update: I do not mean that they lack trust com­plete­ly; rather, I mean that they lack com­plete trust–a non­triv­ial dif­fer­ence). Most Tier 4 lead­ers seem unaware of this dynamic–they tend to hold the Tier 3, 2, and 1 lead­er­ship in a cer­tain amount of awe and imag­ine that they’re all best friends. Many of them are good friends, and almost all like one anoth­er and are com­mit­ted to work­ing togeth­er effec­tive­ly. But there’s still a break­down in trust between the nation­al lead­ers and the rest. (update: I wrote an arti­cle explain­ing that this is a ten­den­cy intrin­sic to fed­er­al gov­er­nance)
  • We need a nation­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive to serve our stu­dent-led groups. We’ve invit­ed Dave Short to fill this posi­tion (con­tin­gent on his dis­tric­t’s approval).
  • The prob­a­ble (but by no means cer­tain) evo­lu­tion of the ALT will inl­cude all the Area Direc­tors along with a non-DXAR non-CMIT Direc­tor rep from their region. Sort of like the Gen­er­al Pres­bytery of the Assem­blies of God.

Any­way, I put all this online for two rea­sons:

  1. As a local cam­pus rep­re­sen­ta­tive I feel an oblig­a­tion to let the peo­ple I’m rep­re­sent­ing know what’s going on. As long as it’s not con­fi­den­tial I’ll talk about it freely. If it is con­fi­den­tial I’ll tell you as much as I can.
  2. To ask for feed­back. You can either com­ment on this post or email me direct­ly. I’ll be sure to post the agen­da for the next meet­ing once I get it so you can give me input on that head­ing into it.

Vaguely Surprising

The Assem­blies of God State­ment of Fun­da­men­tal Truths appar­ent­ly mer­its an arti­cle on Wikipedia.

Actual Details On The Giant Black Box Called Springfield

Rich Tatum post­ed a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on the recent Assem­blies of God restruc­tur­ing process. These are the kind of details I’d like to get from head­quar­ters instead of the usu­al rah-rah stuff I get in the min­is­ters’ let­ter or Enrich­ment Jour­nal.

Overwhelming Generosity

Paula and I loved our first microwave. It had this awe­some dial that did every­thing. You did­n’t need to punch a number–you just turned the dial and mag­ic hap­pened.

One sad day our microwave died. Food stopped warm­ing yet the microwave kept churn­ing, lead­ing us to sur­mise that radi­a­tion was seep­ing into our chro­mo­somes.

So we got a replace­ment microwave from a friend. It was great, but the light did­n’t work and the food did­n’t rotate. And we often sus­pect­ed that radi­a­tion was still seep­ing into our chro­mo­somes (but only half of them owing to the lack of rota­tion).

And that’s just one rea­son we’re so grate­ful for last night: many of the Assem­blies of God church­es in the South Bay threw a Christ­mas par­ty to cel­e­brate AG US Mis­sion­ar­ies. We and the Har­lows were the recip­i­ents of out­ra­geous gen­eros­i­ty. Dana got books, stuffed ani­mals, a play tea set, a stroller, some garb, and an enor­mous lady­bug pil­low (with match­ing sheets and cov­er).

And we got a ful­ly func­tion­al microwave. No more radi­a­tion-steeped DNA, no more inex­plic­a­ble tans, just hot tasty food on demand.

And the icing on the cake? Not too long ago an alum­nus of our min­istry gave me a PSP (a com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed and much appre­ci­at­ed gift).

We are blessed beyond mea­sure. Say what you will about the hier­ar­chy of the Assem­blies of God, the tremen­dous gen­eros­i­ty of our laypeo­ple is unmatched.

Pastor, Is Your Church Too Small?

He even looks a little like a pastor...Adam Long recent­ly emailed this to me and some oth­er friends and with his per­mis­sion I post it here for the world to enjoy.

A dis­claimer: I don’t know any­thing about Nel­son Searcy. He’s prob­a­bly a great guy who has very help­ful insights. The com­men­tary below isn’t about him or his ministry–it’s about his mar­ket­ing. In fact, it’s about the way most min­istry train­ing is mar­ket­ed. And it’s pret­ty fun­ny.

I have a long run­ning prob­lem with the con­fla­tion of cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket­ing and church life. Yes, yes, I believe in redeem­ing the cul­ture. No, no, I’m not a Marx­ist. But I think that we may be head­ing down a dan­ger­ous road. And we need to think things through before div­ing in.

So here’s my prob­lem. I think there’s too much sim­i­lar­i­ty between mar­ket­ing for “church growth” ser­vices and male enhance­ment prod­ucts.

Please don’t dis­miss this. I’m not try­ing to be unnec­es­sar­i­ly provoca­tive. I don’t com­plete­ly buy Freud, but so much church growth mate­r­i­al seems to tap a cer­tain form of envy that strikes many males.

Just take a look at the fol­low­ing quotes from the attached piece, “WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT A COACHING COMMUNITY WITH NELSON SEARCY.”

  • Assim­i­la­tion has been huge!!!
  • I was slump­ing in my per­son­al growth
  • This would have saved me sev­er­al years of frus­tra­tion
  • You don’t have to be alone, do it alone
  • Coach­ing Com­mu­ni­ty gave me more con­fi­dence, com­pe­ten­cy
  • Do it! It is worth expo­nen­tial­ly more than the fees!
  • Don’t miss this oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow your­self

I’ve heard peo­ple com­pare TBN to the Home Shop­ping Net­work. It’s so easy to make fun of oth­ers as long as their reli­gious style dif­fers from ours. But what hap­pens when “our” groups sound like Enzyte com­er­cials? Seri­ous­ly? What do we do?

The uber-wit­ty Antho­ny Sco­ma replied:

That is hilar­i­ous, but you missed the best line, My being chal­lenged as a leader has raised “the bar” for lead­ers in our church.

Good News/Bad News

When I’m not out preach­ing, our fam­i­ly attends Path­way Church in Palo Alto. Path­way is an 8‑month old church plant. Good things are hap­pen­ing there–a Mor­mon lady con­vert­ed last week, for instance.

But any­one who’s ever start­ed a min­istry from scratch knows that some days are just painful to be a part of. Things go wrong that you would nev­er imag­ine could go wrong.

This was one such day.

  • Good News: guest shows up based entire­ly on our inter­net ads.
    Bad News: while chat­ting with the pas­tor before the ser­vice she is struck solid­ly in the neck by a fris­bee and has to go home, take some med­i­cine, and lie down.
  • Good News: I brought five stu­dents from Stan­ford to check out the church.
    Bad News: every sin­gle one of our reg­u­lars who was­n’t help­ing missed church today. Every. Sin­gle. One. Dur­ing wor­ship it was me and the stu­dents in the con­gre­ga­tion.
  • Good News: the songs were real­ly cool songs.
    Bad News: two of the micro­phones stopped work­ing between the sound check and the start of ser­vice and some­how the key­board became pos­sessed by a demon. At least, that’s my best guess. It sure moaned as though pos­sessed.
  • Good News: Scott’s ser­mon was thought­ful and well-pre­sent­ed.
    Bad News: the trans­la­tion that was shown on the screen was dif­fer­ent from the trans­la­tion Scott was read­ing despite being pur­port­ed­ly the same (fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion reveals there are two edi­tions of the New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion–our pew Bibles are the first and our com­put­er Bible is the second–who knew?). The effect was dis­con­cert­ing and dis­tract­ed from an oth­er­wise excel­lent mes­sage.

I’m not one to hyper­spir­i­tu­al­ize things, but I see a cor­re­la­tion between the suc­cess our church has been enjoy­ing late­ly and all the “nobody’s fault” glitch­es that popped up today. The Bible teach­es us that we have an ene­my, and some­times he leaves scat behind.

This is clear­ly going to be one of those ser­vices we spend a lot of time laugh­ing about in a few years… espe­cial­ly the fris­bee in the neck bit. How ran­dom is that?

Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our dis­trict spon­sors an event called The Lay Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. It’s a big con­fer­ence designed to help church vol­un­teers do their jobs bet­ter. There are about 50 learn­ing tracks (each with four work­shops) rang­ing from chil­dren’s min­istry to using the inter­net effec­tive­ly to using light­ing and sound sys­tems. We, of course, spon­sor a col­lege min­istry track.

I men­tion all this by way of intro­duc­tion to men­tion two peo­ple I inter­act­ed with this week­end: Dan Bet­zer and John Abela.

Dan Bet­zer is a leg­end in the Assem­blies of God–he’s an incred­i­ble speak­er, a mis­sions fanat­ic, and an extreme­ly suc­cess­ful pas­tor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, inci­den­tal­ly, blogs).

Any­way, I learned two things about him this week­end:
1) he once lost his min­is­te­r­i­al cre­den­tials for sev­en years for flout­ing the hier­ar­chy’s rules
2) he’s such an intro­vert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that peo­ple feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have nev­er had a con­ver­sa­tion. I gleaned one tid­bit from his ser­mon and anoth­er from a friend of his.

The sec­ond per­son I met was John Abela. John is a for­mer core mem­ber of the phpBB2 team and runs the most pop­u­lar con­glom­er­a­tion of Assem­blies of God web­sites in the world. I am told that his total band­width exceeds that of all the nation­al Assem­bly of God web­sites in every nation com­bined.

That tick­les me. Many of our lead­ers attempt to lead by lim­it­ing infor­ma­tion and don’t seem to real­ize that’s no longer pos­si­ble. John has effec­tive­ly done an end run on a ton of stu­pid rules in the Assem­blies of God and because he’s a layper­son no one can stop him–he’s got no cre­den­tials for them to revoke. I love it.

He men­tioned that he gets a phone call from some AG offi­cial or anoth­er about once a week ask­ing him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allow­ing for con­ver­sa­tion­al hyper­bole, that sounds about right. He’s mak­ing peo­ple ner­vous enough that we’ve even had res­o­lu­tions at Gen­er­al Coun­cil prompt­ed by one of his sites.

Any­way, I just want­ed to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s mak­ing our move­ment bet­ter by using the web to help peo­ple. Kudos to him.