Posted on Wednesday, May 25, 2016

How our Searching Faith often Misses God

by Joshua Reich

Boasting is a tricky thing. It is easy to think we don’t boast because we are down on ourselves. We lament how things don’t go our way, how difficult our life has been or even how God could never love or forgive us.

The other side is that we think so much of ourselves. We puff up our talents, gifts, experiences, our behavior and how great we think we are. We have been told over and over that we can do anything. We get trophies simply for showing up.

Both of these views of ourselves get placed on God and have enormous effects on our relationship with God.

The first keeps us from experiencing God’s goodness in difficult times. We keep God at a distance because of our brokenness, never experiencing God as Father, never experiencing His grace or feeling His love. We are so afraid of betrayal, so afraid of God being “like we thought He’d be like” that we don’t trust the Bible. We don’t trust the promises of God. We don’t trust that God always does what is good, right and perfect.

Do you keep God at a safe distance?

The second keeps us from experiencing God’s joy and peace because we are always doing, always performing, always running, always making sure things are perfect, making sure we keep up with the Joneses in our lives.

Do you experience God’s joy and peace?

Both miss grace.

Both miss joy.

Both miss peace.

Both miss God.

How we miss God.

What we see in Romans 4 is that grace is extended. We are made right with God, not by doing something for God, not by being obedient to God, not even by believing in God (the book of James tells us that even the demons believe in God), but we are made right with God and experience His grace when we believe God.

Posted on Monday, May 23, 2016

The Letdown of Ministry

by Joshua Reich

It’s Monday.

Yesterday was a long day. Maybe it was a good day. Maybe it was an average day. But it was a day.

Some Sundays you preach your heart out, counsel, pray with people, trying to respond to the Holy Spirit’s movement, and it is amazing what happens. People respond, sin is confessed, people are saved, marriages are changed, people take next steps in their sanctification, and you think at the end of the day, “I can’t believe I get to do this.”

Some Sundays you preach your heart out, counsel, pray with people, trying to respond to the Holy Spirit’s movement, and nothing seems to happen. The music feels flat, your sermon seems to be missing something, people aren’t as engaged (they are there but somewhere else); you counsel people, and nothing seems to move the needle. You pray with people, and it feels like your prayers are hitting the ceiling. You lay down at the end of the day and think, “Why do I do this?”

It is amazing, the longer I am in ministry, how the feeling of a day can impact my memory of that day. My feeling of the day can also impact what I believe God did in that day.

This is important: my feelings and what God does are not always the same thing.

My feelings and what God does are not always the same thing.

Here are five things (and questions) to keep in mind, regardless of what yesterday was like:

5 things and 11 questions for pastors on a Monday.

1. Good or bad, did you give God all that you had? Sometimes our feelings of misery after a Sunday are deserved. We didn’t give all that we had in our sermon prep, we didn’t preach with passion, we didn’t preach from a transformed heart and instead preached some information we were hoping to pass on. Sometimes you preach with everything you have, and people just sit there and take it in. Okay, what then? Does that matter?

2. What do your feelings, right now, say about your identity? Is that true? What truth do your feelings about a Sunday reveal about what you are telling yourself? Is your worth wrapped up in what people think? How many people took next steps? How many people got baptized? What if someone heard your sermon on Sunday and became a Christian in 25 years? Would that matter?

What do your feelings, right now, say about your identity as a pastor?

3. Do you believe what you’d tell a friend in this situation? If a friend called you on a Monday and said, “I preached my guts out and nothing would happen,” you’d remind him that God’s word never returns void, that it always does its work. Now, do you believe that or are those just words on a page? Are those words just as authoritative and inspired by the Holy Spirit as Romans 8, Ephesians 1 or any other passage you love to preach?

Do you believe the advice you’d tell a friend in this situation?

4. God doesn’t need you. This should humble you. God can save every one of the people He intends to save without using any of us. He doesn’t need you or me for His gospel to be preached or for anyone to be rescued and enter His Kingdom. He doesn’t. He doesn’t need your words, your sermons or your songs. But He takes them. He uses them.

5. Today is another day. Get up, exercise, get some coffee, read your Bible and spend some time with your Heavenly Father. It is a new day. What happened yesterday, while it has an impact on today, happened yesterday. Too often we worry about yesterday. Let it go.

11 questions for pastors on a Monday.

Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2016

Take the Lid off of Your Church

by Joshua Reich

In every leadership book or at every leadership conference you hear the mantra, “Leaders are readers”, or “Growing leaders grow churches”, or something to that effect. In his book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber puts it another way: “The job of the leader is to know more than you do.”

“The job of the leader is to know more than you do.” -Michael Gerber

If you aren’t careful, though, you can put a lid on your church and its potential for growth.

Now before you email me and tell me that Jesus grows the church, he does. Yes, the Holy Spirit can and will do what the Holy Spirit does, often even when we are trying to wreck things with our pride and sin.

At the same time, there are consistent things that churches that are growing, healthy and effective do that others do not. The same goes for their leaders.

I meet a lot of pastors who unknowingly are not allowing their churches to reach their full potential because they are not reaching their full potential. For a lead pastor, eventually your church will look like you, good or bad.

As we grow, I am seeing that I need to spend more and more time learning, stretching myself, getting alone with God trying to discern what is next and not getting comfortable in what we already “know.”

Here are a few questions I am constantly going through:

For Revolution to become twice the size we are now, what do I need to start doing? What do I need to stop doing? What things will keep us from getting there?
If we were twice the size we are now, what things would we do differently?
What things are we doing right now that need to be tweaked? What things need to go to a new level?
What new leaders do we need to raise up?
What leaders need to be challenged to go to a new level?

“5 questions pastors of growing churches ask themselves.

Posted on Thursday, May 5, 2016

Are You an Insecure Leader?

by Joshua Reich

Insecure leaders scare me.

Before I tell you why, let me tell you what an insecure leader is. An insecure leader is…

How to know if you’re an insecure leader.

Someone who name drops. They know everyone, they know the top pastors, top worship leaders. They are always talking about who they know.

Someone whose past is greater than their present. They always talk about what they’ve done. It is always about their last ministry, church or job. The grass is greener in their past.

Someone who jumps on the latest bandwagon. They are up on the newest, greatest fad in church leadership. Each week it is a new vision for their church. This creates turbulence in a ministry because no one knows what the win is.

Someone who goes to the latest conference, reads the latest book and gets a new vision each time.

Someone who won’t stop talking about themselves. They always have a story about how great they are, why they should be on your team, how grateful Jesus should be they are a Christian and on board to build the kingdom of God. They tell story after story of their exploits.

Someone who is about building their kingdom instead of God’s. This can be difficult to detect because insecure leaders are very spiritual and manipulative. But underneath their spiritual veneer is someone who is more about people following them instead of people following Jesus.

Are you an insecure leader?

Insecure leaders scare me because they are hard to detect. They are “wolves in sheep’s clothes.” (Matthew 7:15) They come across as together, they know the right answer, they often have a lot of biblical knowledge, but they go about things and have goals that go contrary to scripture. I often call them the guns blazing awesome guy.

So what do you do if you’re an insecure leader or you encounter one?

1. Know yourself. All of us tend to be insecure in certain areas. We struggle to believe God will use us, or we don’t want to come across as prideful about the gifts God has given to us. So we need to be honest about who we are, what we can do and what we can’t do. You aren’t insecure if you say, “I’m not as gifted at that as you are.” That’s self-awareness.

2. Have a process. One of the best ways to weed out the guns blazing awesome guy is to have a process. This process also helps to develop leaders to help them grow so they aren’t insecure. A process tells people, “You won’t be a leader here right away.” This is good for people who are unsure, to make sure they are trained. This is good for people who think they are awesome because it guards the gate.

A leadership process protects the church.

3. Always talk to their last pastor. If a leader from another church shows up at your church singing your praises and bashing his last church, be wise. Talk to the last pastor they served with. Cover your bases.

4. Trust your gut. I could spiritualize this and say, “If the Holy Spirit tells you…”, and that might happen with someone you are considering for a leadership position. Sometimes your gut and the Holy Spirit become one and the same. Sometimes your gut is wrong, but I’m never mad when I trust my gut. If something says “wait” or “no” on someone, stick to that. You don’t always have to have a reason.

Great leaders trust their gut.

Posted on Monday, May 2, 2016

When your Church Should Move

by Joshua Reich

When it comes to real estate, the old cliche of location, location, location is king. Your location matters. There is a corner near my house that no matter what restaurant goes into that corner, it never survives. I’m sure you have something like that in your city.

The same is true for churches.

Location matters.

The location of your church is one of the most important decisions you make as a pastor.

Not only in terms of space and what kind of ministry you can do, but what and who is around you.

If you attend or lead a church, I want you to think for a minute about where your church is located and who is around that location. The people who live there, are they old or young? Hipster or middle age? Are they wealthy, middle class, below the poverty line, or a mixture? Think in terms of nationality and ethnic backgrounds.

It is easy to overlook this as a church and keep humming along.

A good missionary, though, thinks about who is around them.

Now the second question: Who are you as a church and as a leader best suited to reach?

This is a hard question and can feel like you are picking and choosing who to reach (which you aren’t). You are simply asking who you are as a leader and who your church is.

Often God lines up who we are with where we are.

I have a friend who planted a church in a bilingual community where almost everyone lives below the poverty line. Why? He grew up in a community like that and understood the struggles. I have another friend who planted in one of the most suburban places in America. Why? He grew up in one of the most suburban places in America and understood the idols and struggles of that community.

Here is the tricky part: What if who you are best suited to reach is not where your church is?

What if who you are best suited to reach is not where your church is?

This happens to older churches who watch a neighborhood change around them.

You have two options at this point: one, change things to reach those around you, or two, move to where those people and cultures live.

The question a leader and a church must answer is which path to take. Both can be right.

While this is something church planters and missionaries think through as they embark on their leadership, this is something churches and pastors must continually consider as their church grows and ages. This is being a good missionary as a leader, and as your city changes it will mean some changes to your church and maybe even some hard decisions.

Your church might be in the wrong location if…

Posted on Monday, March 28, 2016

Monday Mind Dump…

by Joshua Reich

What a weekend.
I realize every pastor is supposed to say that after Easter, but it felt that way in our new space.
One of my favorite things this weekend was watching people who have never done the stations of the cross go through it for the first time and seeing their reaction.
So cool.
It was awesome hearing the stories of change during baptism.
I love that those who got baptized yesterday became Christians at our church in the last 10 weeks!
It was awesome kicking off our series in the book of Romans.
I’ve been thinking about preaching through Romans for the last several years but never felt like it was the right time.
With where our church is, now is the right time to walk through this book of the Bible.
If you missed yesterday, you can watch or listen to it here.
It was cool yesterday to see so many people come from GTX, the crossfit box that Katie and I go to.
I started reading The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and her story is incredible.
I think it is easy for Christians to think about conversion in very sanitary ways, but meeting Jesus (when we are truly changed) wrecks us.
It’s been challenging me as I get ready to preach on the end of Romans 1 and God’s heart towards sexuality and homosexuality.
Those verse are bigger than homosexuality.
I also started reading In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin just to get a change of pace.
I try to read novels throughout the year just to give my brain a break and thought I’d try reading something historical for a change.
Katie and I watched Spotlight on Saturday night.
It was incredible and heartbreaking.
The abuse of power is gut wrenching.
I’m really excited for our first membership class to happen on April 16th.
We tried membership before at Revolution and I’m not sure we knew what we were doing, so we took it away until we could figure out how to make it more than signing a piece of paper.
I think it has been a missing piece at our church.
We’re assessing a new church planter to join Acts 29 this week in AZ.
Love that our network is growing in our state.
I also get to train some leaders in Phoenix this week on leadership and marriage.
Always love talking about those topics and the chance to help other leaders.
Well, time to get back at it…

Posted on Tuesday, February 16, 2016

How to Not Have a Big Day at Church

by Joshua Reich

Big days are crucial in the life of any church. They are a launching pad to something new. Whether that is a new ministry season, a new sermon series, sign-ups for small groups, classes, VBS, starting a new church, or moving to a new location, all of these are opportunities for a big day and creating new momentum.

That’s what a big day does. It starts something new. It creates or sustains momentum.

Big days don’t just happen. They must be planned for. If you aren’t careful, though, you can miss these crucial opportunities.

Yes, the Holy Spirit brings momentum that you can’t create and can’t explain. Yes, the Holy Spirit wants your church to grow and reach people who don’t know Jesus. This means there are things you can and should do to work with the Holy Spirit to have a big day. You can also do things to make sure you don’t have a big day.

Here are six ways to not have a big day:

6 ways to not have a big day at your church.

1. Don’t tell anyone. If you want to have a big day, if something new is happening at your church, tell people. Their lives are busy, they aren’t always thinking about church, the new series, new program or new opportunity. Many times this is how things happen in a church. New sermon series, no one knows. New groups are getting started, there isn’t a clear path to them.

If you don’t tell anyone about your church, no one will know you exist.

2. Don’t preach on a felt need topic. If you want to create a big day around your Sunday service, you need to preach on a felt need topic. This doesn’t mean you go gospel light or don’t preach from a book of the Bible. You can launch a series on Romans and make it a big day, but you have to be creative with it. People don’t show up to your church because you are starting a series called “Romans.” Think through: When the people from my church invite someone, what will they say?

What you preach on is a crucial reason people show up to your church.

3. Create zero buzz. Big days and buzz go hand in hand. This might be having a photo booth, a giveaway, food trucks, a baptism, anything that is different from a normal week to create a “this is special” feeling.

4. Just expect people to find your church. If you look at most church websites, it can take awhile for you to find where they meet. In fact, I knew of one church that moved into a new facility, and yet the front page of their website had their old address for several months as where they met, after they moved into their new facility. Most churches simply expect people to come looking for them. That rarely happens. Most people aren’t choosing church; they are choosing football, hiking, skiing, the lake, sleeping in or running errands.

Want your church to die? Expect people to just find it on their own.

5. Don’t give anyone in your church a reason to invite someone. The reason your people aren’t inviting anyone to your church is because you haven’t given them a reason to invite someone. I know you have told them, maybe guilted them, but people invite their friends to something worthwhile. If you can’t remember the last time someone invited someone to your church, or you can’t remember the last time you did it, ask why not? What is keeping them from taking that step? Are you doing something wrong as a church? Do your people feel weird about inviting people to your church?

If you don’t give people a reason to invite people to church, they won’t.

6. Don’t pray for it. New people, momentum, people beginning a relationship with Jesus, marriages being saved, and the chains of addiction being broken come from the Holy Spirit. If you don’t pray for it, a big day will pass you by. You can plan, be creative, give away a car and nothing will change.

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2016

How to Make Your Next Sermon Great

by Joshua Reich

When it comes to anything in life, whether it is marriage, parenting, leadership, or work, someone pays the price.

In marriage you can either pay the price at the beginning, working through all the junk you brought into your marriage; or you can pay it later when you are unhappy and married or divorced.

As a single you can pay the price to stay pure and wait until you get married to have sex. Or you can pay the price after you get married as you work through what it meant to give your body away before you got married. Or your spouse will have to deal with that thought.

The same is true for preaching.

Either the pastor pays the price in preparation, studying, praying, planning, reading, and listening to God; or his church pays the price when they have to listen to him stand up there completely unprepared, unsure of what his big idea is, as he wanders through his sermon aimlessly like the nation of Israel did on their way to the Promised Land.

Too many pastors make their church pay the price.

I was talking with a few pastors the other day who told me, “It’s Wednesday, I’ve got a title.” If all you have on Wednesday is a title, you are not paying the price for your sermon.

In preaching, someone pays a price, the church for listening or the pastor in prep.

Paying the price means you plan a preaching calendar, you think through where you are going as a church. You study, you pray through the text asking God to reveal to you what it is about, what your church needs to hear. You read commentaries and other books, you look into the context to better communicate the text.

Preaching every week is easily the biggest weight I carry and the biggest joy I experience.

On Saturday night I lie in bed thinking through my talk and the text for Sunday. At this point in my preparation I almost have the text I’m preaching on memorized and have thought through the ins and outs. I am now thinking more about who will be there, how I will communicate it. I begin praying for those I think of and those whom I don’t know, those who are coming to Revolution as a last ditch effort on God. This is the weight of preaching. If you do not feel this, I don’t think you should preach. Why? When you stand up to preach you are literally reaching into Hell and pulling people who are on the path to Hell (Matthew 7:13 – 14). I realize that is a paraphrase, but that is the spiritual battle of preaching. That is what’s at stake.

Sunday night I lie awake worrying if I said everything I should’ve said. Did God want me to say something else? Was I clear? I pray for those who made decisions, whether to get baptized, start following Jesus, or any number of next steps we talk through on a Sunday. I pray for the spiritual protection of those who made decisions. I know that night will be a very difficult night as Satan and his angels will be going to work on those individuals.

Pastors, do you pray for those who are coming and for those who make decisions? This is the price of preaching. This is the price of pastoring.

If you are not willing to pay it, then do something else. Lives are at stake. Souls are at stake. Marriages are at stake. Families are at stake. Eternities are at stake.

Pay the price.

Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2016

How to Figure out God’s Will

by Joshua Reich

Every time you say yes to something, you say no to something else.

This truth has had an enormous impact on how I live my life, how I make decisions, how we do our calendar as a family and how I lead Revolution Church.

But how do you know what to say yes and no to? That’s the most common question I get from someone who has read my book or has heard me say this in a talk. Honestly, it’s different for each person.

Too often we focus on what we want to do in the next day, week or month and then make a decision based on that. Let me frame it a different way for you: What kind of person do you want to become in the next month? In the next half year? One year from now, who do you want to be?

Will this involve doing something? Yes, but it changes the context.

For example, if a year from now you want to be closer to Jesus than you are today, a stronger disciple, then you will make the choice to say yes to community, yes to serving in your church, yes to reading your Bible, and yes to inviting people to church. That will then determine what you say no to.

Often we hope that something will happen. We will simply become kinder, more generous, thinner or smarter without putting in the work or even be willing to make a choice towards something. If you want to become a person who is known for ________, then you will have to make decisions for that to happen. A wish and a hope are not enough.

How to figure out God’s will for your life.

Take your marriage or another relationship. What if six months from now that relationship was stronger? It would mean that what you are doing right now would have to change. You would need to make more of an effort, you would have to say yes to giving time and energy to that relationship and saying no to something else (ie. golfing, sleeping in, working too late).

We often think we have no power over where our life goes, what our marriage becomes, the relationship we have with God or how kind we are. Yet we do. Every day we make decisions that get our life somewhere.

Here’s the problem: we never sit down to ask, Where do I want to end up?

How to figure out God’s calling in your life.

Posted on Monday, January 11, 2016

How Does Your Church Make Decisions?

by Joshua Reich

Most people don’t realize it, but the one thing leaders spend the majority of their time on is decision making.

I know you think you spend a lot of time on relationships and in meetings, but when you boil leadership down, much of it is spent on decisions.

Most churches don’t have a strong decision making grid that they look through. For many churches, decisions are made based on cost, if they will lose people (or make people mad) or who thought of the idea (if it is a person with power, that gives more weight to the idea in most churches).

Facing a decision at work? Here’s how to make the right one.

While there are some valid points to those, making decisions through that grid won’t always get your church to where God wants it or accomplish the vision God has given you.

Think of your decision making grid as the hills you are going to die on. These aren’t necessarily theological hills, because the theological hills you will die on should kill a decision before it gets too far.

This a philosophical grid.

Here are some questions to consider for your grid:

As you make a decision, will how that decision affects the next generation or empty nesters be the factor that pushes it over the edge?
Are the opinions of churched people or unchurched people more important?
How much does money factor into the decision?
How much risk are you willing to take?
Who are you willing to lose?
Who do you hope to gain?

A grid to help your church staff make decisions.