Tag Archives: vision

Money and the Vision of a Church

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Most pastors hate to talk about money. People also don’t like to hear pastors talk about money. Yet, money is a huge issue in people’s lives. They mismanage it, get divorced because of it and it often ruins their lives.

The reality for churches and pastors is:

There is a direct correlation between giving in a church and vision.

I was talking with some pastor’s the other day and the question of how to increase giving in a church came up.

Now, if you aren’t a pastor you may think this a coarse conversation to have. Why would a pastor want giving to go up? The reason is simple:

  • Giving is a heart issue. Jesus said as much in Matthew 6:21. If giving goes down, it shows that the heart of the people in the church aren’t there, their passion and worship is somewhere else besides Jesus. 
  • It shows that they might need to hear solid, biblical teaching on the topic.
  • It shows buy-in.

It was this last reason that struck me as I thought about.

While churches can increase giving and generosity by having a giving challenge (you can listen to me here giving our last giving challenge), or teaching on giving (which many pastors need to start doing).

What many churches need do a better job at is communicating a compelling vision. When the giving at Revolution has gone down it has been during the seasons where our vision was cloudy or if felt like our vision wasn’t going anywhere.

Tell stories. Show how your church is winning. Talk about how your vision is happening. Make videos, show people it is happening.

People want to be generous, they want to be part of something that is winning, something that is going somewhere.

Act Your Size

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One of the things many pastors struggle with is how to lead the church depending on the size they are. There’s a leadership adage pastors talk about that if you want to grow your church, you must act larger than what you are. There is a lot of truth in this. But how much larger?

I talked to a guy the other day who leads a church of 100 who has someone answer his email because he heard a larger church pastor say his assistant checks his email. I heard a guy who leads a church of 200 say he doesn’t meet with people in his church because he wouldn’t do that when they were 1,000.

While these may sound ridiculous, they are both true.

At Revolution Church, we’ve always sought to lead the church based on what we would do if we were twice our size.

A few things I think leaders should keep in mind as they lead their churches or teams:

  1. Know what size you are right now. While leaders are to live in the future and be able to cast vision, your church lives in the present. The guy in your pew doesn’t care if you want your church to be large, he wants your attention and has a need he wants addressed.
  2. Be as available/accessible as possible. This is different for each leader depending on their personality and gift set. While you can’t counsel everyone, visit everyone, know everyone, you should do it for some. Andy Stanley said, “Do for one what you’d like to do for everyone.” Your church is never too big, your schedule is never too packed to be a pastor to someone.
  3. Do what you call others to do. If you call your leaders and people in your church to spend time with those who don’t know Jesus, to be a missional community or small group, then you do the same. You are not above this. I see a lot of pastors though who say, “My community is the staff or elders.” There’s some truth to that, but you call others to do it, you need to model it. If you are too busy or too important for community at your church, don’t be surprised when others tell you the same thing.
  4. Think twice your size. As I said before, a healthy way to lead is to lead and think twice your size. It keeps you close enough to where you are and far enough into the future to lead your church well.

Question: How far into the future should a leader think? What ways can you act your size while leading into the future well?

3 Distinctives to a Vision Based on Building God’s Kingdom

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I’m reading through It’s Personal: Surviving and Thriving on the Journey of Church Planting by Brian Bloye. Before sharing all my thoughts on the book in a review, I wanted to share a few things that jumped out to me that I thought needed an entire post.

He shares some great insights into how you know if you have a compelling vision from God for your church and life:

  1. You’ll know that the vision is truly from God, because it’s all about him.
  2. It will be a vision that is too much for you to handle in your own abilities or wisdom.
  3. God will bring the right people to your team, and he’ll keep them there long enough for you to make significant progress toward your goals.

This Weekend @ Revolution: The Kind of Person who God Uses

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Easter was an unbelievable time at Revolution Church. Started off with a powerful Good Friday of walking through the Stations of the Cross and then celebrating baptisms in our Easter services. If you weren’t there, you can listen to the sermon here and see some of the pictures of the baptisms here.

This week, we are continuing our series Weird and I’ll be preaching from 1 Peter 5:1 – 4 and looking at the kind of person God uses. We all want our lives to matter, to make a difference, but God has specific qualifications for the kind of person He uses.

When we think of a leader or a person God uses, we often think of a superhero kind of person. Someone who is strong, maybe good looking, looks and sounds spiritual whenever they open their mouth and seem almost otherworldly in how they live. But is that really who God uses? If so, that creates a narrow view. Yet, many people walk through life and think, “God could never use me.”

Peter points out not only who God uses (and the answer might surprise you), but also when God is most likely to use people (again, the answer on this one might surprise you as well).

This is a crucial week in this series as this gets into the area of leadership. All of us are leaders, we all lead someone in our life. We are all further on our journey with God than someone. The reality is not, am I a leader, but am I a good one?

In addition to talking about who God uses and when he uses them, I’ll also get into what it means to be a leader at Revolution Church, why that matters to you and how that will move us forward to being a church that plants churches. I can’t emphasize enough that you definitely do not want to miss this week or next week at Revolution (you don’t want to miss any week at Revolution, but these 2 weeks are critically important to who we are as a church and where we are going).

It is definitely a week you don’t want to miss.

So, do whatever you have to do to be at Revolution this week (and bring someone with you, you never know how a simple invite can make an eternal difference). An easy to invite someone is to send them an e-vite.

Remember, we meet at 4 & 5:30pm at 6620 E 22nd. St. See you Saturday.

The Circle Maker

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I started The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams & Greatest Fears by Mark Batterson the other night and have not been able to put it down.

I told Katie this morning that she needs to stop reading whatever she’s reading and read this book. It was that good and challenging. There were a few things that jumped out to me from the book.

The first was the idea of drawing circles around prayer. Praying specific prayers. I’ve preached before on this idea and find that praying specific prayers stretches my faith and I see God move in powerful ways because of it. But I like the idea of circling something. For me, I’ve begun circling places I believe God wants us to plant Revolution Churches in Tucson. So this was a great reminder.

Another point was having a vision beyond your resources. I’ve already blogged on this idea, so I won’t belabor it, but suffice to say, if you can afford or pull off your prayers or dreams, they are too small. Another was the question Mark asked, “Is there a limit to God’s power?” All Christians would say no, yet we pray as if there is. We pray small prayers, believe possible things. This is the foundational question of prayer. Is there a limit to what God can do.

By far, the most life changing idea from this book was when he said, “Stop praying for something and start praying/praising through something.” God has already given us the promise of answered prayers and power in Scripture. Start praising God for what he will do. For me, I started to think about our adoptions and that God has already chosen children for our family, so instead of asking him to complete the adoption, I’ve begun thanking him for these children and praising through it. I believe God has put on my heart the prayer of planting a movement of churches around Tucson so that everyone is within a 10 mile drive of a Revolution Church and that 1 million people will enter the kingdom through Revolution (in my lifetime or beyond), so I’m beginning to pray as if that promise has already happened and giving God the glory for it.

While all of this is good, it is easy for this idea and the way Mark communicates it for someone to walk away and think of God as a vending machine. Pray this and you’ll get more than what you prayed for. Give this and God will give you 10 times what you gave. This is a tough line to walk when it comes to faith. Mark handles it well by bringing us back to the glory of God and how that needs to be the heart of our prayers and asking. He handled this well by comparing it to John the Baptist. One of Jesus’ closest friends, John is beheaded, while others are being healed, raised from the dead, walking after years of being lame and John does not get rescued. It’s a tough place to be, it is a dark place to be, but it is also a place that pushes our faith and asks if we truly believe in God and his sovereignty and his plan. The other reality is that sometimes God tells us no and doesn’t answer our prayers the way we want them. Sometimes he doesn’t bring healing like we hoped.

Here are a few other things that jumped out to me:

  • Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers. God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less. If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God. Why? Because they don’t require divine intervention.
  • Prayers are prophecies. They are the best predictors of your spiritual future. Who you become is determined by how you pray. Ultimately, the transcript of your prayers becomes the script of your life.
  • The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.
  • “God does not answer vague prayers.”
  • We usually focus on what we’re doing or where we’re going, but God’s primary concern is who we’re becoming in the process. We talk about “doing” the will of God, but the will of God has much more to do with “being” than “doing.”
  • Faith is the willingness to look foolish.
  • If you aren’t willing to be perplexed, you’ll never be amazed.
  • Many of us pray as if our problems are bigger than God. Our biggest problem is our small view of God.
  • God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is great because nothing is too small for Him.
  • All of us love miracles. We just don’t like being in a situation that necessitates one.
  • Show me your vision, and I’ll show you your future.
  • The degree of satisfaction is directly proportional to the degree of difficulty.

If you are looking for a book that will stretch your faith and prayer life, this is a great book to start with.

Leadership & Netflix

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We’ve been using Netflix for almost a year now, it was a great alternative to cable when football season is not going on as we get the NFL ticket.

When they raised their prices over the summer, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Companies raise their prices all the time and if I wanted the service, I’d pay the price they set.

Today I got an email from the CEO that said, ”I messed up. I own you an explanation…we lacked respect & humility.” Now, I appreciate his willingness to apologize. A great trait of leaders is admitting when they’ve dropped the ball.

What I find interesting for Netflix from a leadership perspective is the changes they continue to make. It is almost like they are searching for the magic bullet, much like leaders who go to a conference come back and implement the latest plan they just heard about, only to implement a new plan and direction after the next conference.

Raising prices, starting a new company for their DVD through the mail service. It seems like they lack some clear direction and vision. All companies have competition. So do churches, we compete with anything else that happens, NOT other churches. The ones that grow and make an impact are the ones that do what they do regardless of the world around them. Google does it one way, Apple another, TOMS shoes one way, Starbucks another. The point is that companies and churches can set the tone or they can try to keep up with the tone setters.

Netflix was a tone setter who has now drifted into keeping up with the tone setters.

This Weekend @ Revolution: Uprising Kicks off in 2 Days

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Ever since we put the series Uprising on the calendar, I’ve been excited to kick it off. This series really begin in the hearts and minds of our leaders over a year ago. I’ve talked about it in other places, so I won’t rehash it now.

I believe this series is going to be one of the most pivotal and defining series we’ve ever done at Revolution. The transition we are in as a church to be more intentional about mission, community, gospel, discipleship and leadership development will shape us and the city of Tucson for years to come.

In this series, we will answer one of the questions many people ask when they walk through the doors of Revolution, “What is different about Revolution? Where is Revolution going and what part do I play in that journey?” Whether you have been attending Revolution since we started or just started coming, this series will lay out who we are as a church, where we are going, what that means for you and how you can be a part of it.

This week we will look at the point of the gospel. We talk a lot about the gospel and how it is bigger than just how one gets to heaven, but has the power over sin and death, but also has a purpose. If you are a follower of Jesus, what does that mean besides going to heaven? Does that mean anything for right now? If so, what? Many people live in such a way that they miss what God set them free from sin for, consequently, they live boring, mundane, adventureless lives. Which leads them to think that faith is simple, boring, riskless and that following Jesus is as interesting and exciting as watching grass grow.

What if, wrapped up in the gospel was not only the opportunity for freedom from sin, freedom to spend eternity with Jesus, but also freedom to live a life, have a faith that you never even thought possible.

As if that wasn’t enough, we are also celebrating baptism this week. When you strip everything away at Revolution, the stories of lives being changed, rescued and transformed by the gospel is what it is all about. If you want to be baptized, please contact Mike Miller.

So, do whatever you have to do to be at Revolution this week (and bring someone with you, you never know how a simple invite can make an eternal difference). An easy way to invite someone is to send them an e-vite.

Remember, we meet at 4:15 & 6pm at 6620 E 22nd St.

See you Saturday.