clarity evangelist

Church Jobs of the Future

My daughter and I practiced her spelling bee words as I drove her to school this morning. Abby is a 10-year old. On the drive home, I pondered what Abby might do when she grows up. Every now and again you hear that most of the jobs today will radically change within a generation.  Most of the jobs available to me today will not be for my 5th grader. 

So what does that mean for church? What new jobs are we likely to see?  How will the best practice staffing continue to evolve? 

If we look in the rear view mirror we can observe a few trends in the last decade:

• The shift from senior pastor to "lead pastor" in describing the point leader 
• The development of the "teaching pastor" and the increasing use of teaching teams 
• The emergence of the campus pastor with the growth of the multi-site movement
• The ongoing importance of all things technology and media forging into top leadership

As I continue to visit with churches and watch the horizon, I believe that the trends above as well as others will keep fueling change. What will this look like ten years from now? Here are four new pastoral titles for the church of the future. I will provide some initial thoughts now and drill down with follow-up posts. 

1. The Neo-itinerant - The Neo-itinerant is a strategic outsider who doesn't work for one church, but many. There are many, diverse forms of the neo-itinerant emerging and each type will likely bring its own title. (See my post on Trends in Church Consulting.) This is the way the Auxano ministry works.  We consider ourselves "navigators" as we leverage learning and bring specialized help as strategic outsiders in the area of vision clarity. 
2. The Truth Jockey (TJ) - As the teaching function separates more and more from the leadership function, expect the use of team teaching and multi-media formats to find their full expression in the Truth Jockey. Why can't a leaders mix the best teaching and the best teachers for his congregation's time, place and life-stage? 
3. The Community Catalyst - How will the small group functions as we know them today evolve? To understand the role of a community catalyst, think of the fusion between a barista, a personal trainer and a chamber of commerce help desk.
4. The Pastor of Story - As the organized church gets larger and more complex, and the organic expressions of church become more linked, we will need better "meaning-makers" who connect everything to the larger story of God, in a both a personal and local way. 

Again, look for the follow-up posts as I explore these roles in greater detail.  I would love to hear your initial thoughts and any creative new jobs that you have heard about or are thinking about. 

I leave you with a final thought from Dan Pink, author of Whole New Mind: "The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers." He describes these people as "artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, and big picture thinkers." 

Great Prelaunch Vision Video on Local Predicament

Uncovering your Kingdom Concept is practice along the Vision Pathway to answer the question, "What can your church do better than 10,000 others." In defining this reality for each church we look closely at Place (Local Predicament), People (Collective Potential) and Passion (Apostolic Esprit). 

Jack Thomas is a church planter launching in urban Pittsburgh in May of 2010.  I not only love his cultural exegesis, but the succinct and quality way he is communicating his Local Predicament via video.

LifeStone Community Focus Video from Jack Thomas on Vimeo.

Missional Renaissance Notes from #Leadnet

Here are Reggie McNeal's highlights from the Leadership Network today. (twitter hashtag is #Leadnet) The Missional Renaissance Leadership Communities (LC) is a 2 year process where 10-12 teams from across the country gather for hard core collaboration, strategy development and accountability. I am here with Gloria Dei Lutheran church who is currently walking through Auxano's Vision Pathway. 

Reggie on the Missional Church

• Until we see the church as a who and not a what, we will be stuck and will not become missional.
• Missional definition: "The people of God partnering with God in his redemptive mission in the world" 
• The church in the NT is never smaller than a city. 
• The church doesn't have a mission, the mission of God has a church. 
• A great question to engage people- "How can I ask God to bless you today?" 
• God created us to cut us in on the deal of world redemption.
• We are tired of the thinking, "If we fix the church we will be able to impact the world." 
• In discussing the joy, surprise and new openness of someone who goes on a short-term mission trip, Reggie asks, "What if we saw our whole life as a mission trip."  

 Reggie on Apostolic Leadership (AD 30 Leadership)

• Reggie prays, "Lord help us to know what you have put in our backpack, so we know what road to be on." (I love that quote BTW with regard to Church Unique.) 
• Reggie prays, "Lord, help us to be captured by what captures you." 
• "Imitate me" is not hubris, it is the height of accountability.  Apostolic leaders go first and ask others to follow." 
• Apostolic leaders have the stink of Jesus on them.
• Apostolic leaders have five qualities: Visionary, Listeners, Risk-takers, Developers, Glad when others win (Kingdom-minded)
• Five actions to become more apostolic: 1) Face your fears, 2) Lose control, 3) Retool, 4) Reallocate your resources, 5) Go first!   

Gospel Clarity in 10 Words or Less

As a clarity evangelist, I can't think of anything more important to be clear on than the gospel. In the book Church Unique, I play with the idea of "10 words or less" when articulating the most important stuff of church life and church vision. The best leaders can and must communicate their biggest ideas in short, simple ways.  

I was excited therefore, that Demian Farnworth, who blogs at Fallen and Flawed, asked 12 fellow bloggers to articulate the gospel in 10 words or less.  The biggest ideas possible, and the grandest story ever told, put to as few strokes on the keyboard as possible. He asks us to consider this "micro-theology, petite-worship, and nano-sermons."  Here are the results: 

“Jesus’ death and resurrection completes God’s plan to redeem mankind.” Don Dudley, You See Dry Bones

“Christ’s blood seals God’s promise to reconcile us with Him.” Eric Ruhnow [Who Tends the Fire]

“Jesus’ blood calls, converts, cleanses, cures, carries the once condemned.”Abigail [abigail's leftovers]

“Blood-bought covenantal intimacy with God for sinners through Jesus.” Daniel Wilson [Desire for Spiritual Growth]

“Repent of your sins / trust in Christ alone for salvation.” Devotee of Francis Turretin [Thoughts of Francis Turretin]

“Christ’s death: rescued from self-made destruction, adopted as God’s child.”Emily Schankweiler [A Sacrifice of Praise]

“Restoring all things by the life and death of Jesus.” Nathan Bliss [bliss]

“Whole world sorted, put right, made friends again through Christ.” Andrew Jones [Tall Skinny Kiwi]

“Christ died for our sins, was raised and is Lord.” Trevin Wax [Kingdom People] quoting Martin Luther.

“Man must repent and believe in the Lord Jesus.” Michael Patton [Parchment and Pen]

“Be sick. Be loved.” Jon Acuff [Stuff Christians Like]

“Adoption through propitiation.” Kevin DeYoung [DeYoung, Restless, Reformed] quoting J. I. Packer

Craig Groeschel: How Much Do You Believe the Gospel?

Craig challenged over 3000 church planters at Exponential by considering three levels of belief in the gospel: 1) I believe the gospel enough to benefit from it. 2) I believe the gospel enough to contribute comfortably. 3) I believe the gospel enough to give my life to it. Then he brought the hammer. The clarity is not the identification of these three levels, but the realization that success in level 3 can lead you to cross back into level 2. Craig admitted his own struggle with this dynamic and challenged young leaders to be prepared for the temptation.

Innovation3 Highlights #i3

I had a great day of assessment today with Marty Nicholas and the team at Sugar Land First United Methodist.  One of the things that Marty mentioned is that he was bummed to have missed the i3 conference by Leadership Network last month.  Well many thanks to the folks at Leadership Network for their knowledge capture of the conference. Check out these one page links:

Risk & Failure  Turning Your Biggest Idol into Your Biggest Benefit (Tim Keller)  How to Zig When Others Zag (Stacy Spencer)  Righteous Risk & Repentence (Mark Driscoll)  Try. Fail. Learn. Adjust. (Craig Groeschel)  What is Failure? (Pete Briscoe) Shaping the Culture  Monkey and the Fish: An Alternative and Contrarian Way (Dave Gibbons) Courage to Change (John Jenkins)  Engaging Culture and Deeping Your Church (Matt Chandler)

The Dangerous Church 

Provocative Leaders for a Dangerous Church (Nancy Ortberg) 

20/20 Vision (John Bishop) 

The Church on the Other Side: What Does the Dangerous Church Look Like? (Ed Stetzer) 

Catching Up With the Rest of the World (Bob Roberts) 

Missional Community

Lovin' Every Minute Of It (Dino Rizzo) 

Challenging People to a Missional Lifestyle (Matt Carter) 

The Foundations of Missional Community (Reggie McNeal) 

What is the Church? (Neil Cole) 

Blue Ocean Churches

I am getting ready to speak tomorrow at the ChurchPlanters.com conference. Ben Arment will be there, Catalyst's Innovation and Experience Director. I like the way Ben thinks and his recent post on Blue Ocean Churches, reminds me why.  But before diving into his snippet let me remind you where the Blue Ocean idea comes from.  Red ocean is where the sharks compete for the same prey.  Blue ocean is non-competitive space.  In fact, this business book is so compelling, that Vince Antonucci, said is was his primary reference to church planters before discovering Church Unique.

Here's Ben's entry:

Occasionally, I get e-mails from people who think Catalyst is part of North Point Community Church. They ask about ourvideo venues, our assimilation process, even how Andy is doing. "Fine," I tell them. "He's in a good mood today."

What's interesting is only three of us attend NP. A few go to 12Stone. And a fairly good number attend All Souls Church down in the city. I've never been, but I hear All Souls is the anti-programming church. Overhead projectors, white sheets of paper with announcements on them, stiff liturgy... A surprising choice for staffers at the most programming-rich organization in ministry.I guess it's like working at an ice-cream parlor. You don't go home after a long day of work, sit down in front of the TV... and eat ice cream.

Got me thinking about Blue Ocean churches. I really believe you can only have so many churches in one community that successfully reach families with 2.5 kids, SUVs and a golf club membership. If your church is #4 or #5 in this genre of church-making, you're better off finding a new sociographic to reach or you'll continue to struggle year after year after year... after year.Do the opposite. Drop the rock band and intelligent lighting. Forget the climbing wall for kids and the KidStuf knock-off. Go with the opposite attributes and set apart your church for a new kind of community.

It will be surprisingly refreshing for a large number of people.  

Exponential Releases Free Leadership Tool

My friend and kingdom master-mind, Todd Wilson of the Exponential Network, has done leaders a favor by filtering and aggregating the best "nuggets of gold" from the blogs of top thinkers and leaders.

The name of the E-book which is the first of a multi-part project is Leadership Learning from Bloggers.

Contributions are from:

Ben Arment

Mark Batterson

Chris Elrod

Dave Ferguson

Mike Foster

Seth Godin

Craig Groeschel

Alan Hirsch

Scott Hodge

Michael Hyatt

Gary Lamb

Brad Lomenick

Shawn Lovejoy

Will Mancini

Tony Morgan

Perry Noble

Bob Roberts, Jr.

Ed Stetzer

Tim Stevens

Tullian Tchividjian

Jud Wilhite

Jared Wilson

Verve: A Church Unique Snapshot

On Friday I had the chance to connect with Vince Antonucci, who has just landed in Vegas to plant a church called Verve. Vince is the author of the book, "I Became a Christian and all I got was a Lousy T-shirt," which was written out of his innovative church work in Virginia Beach- Forefront. 

As a fan of the message of Church Unique, I really enjoyed hearing first hand the vision of Verve.  In light of my last post on language matters, here are a few of the terms that Vince has coined as he anchors his new work in Vegas:

• Stripping Church and Seeking Life (check out his website for further explanation of this tagline)
• In describing the kind of people they want to be: 
  • God stalkers 
  • Grace wholesalers 
  • Guerilla Lovers 

Since I heard these words on Friday, I can't get them out of mind. That's making vision stick! 

Risk-worthy Vision

I spoke last week at Leadership Network's, Innovation3 Conference. In the process of thinking more about the concept of risk, I enjoyed these quotes:

• "If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough."  - Mario Andretti

• "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."   - Helen Keller

• "The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."  - Goethe 

• "It is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture, its because we dare not venture that things are difficult."  - Seneca

• "He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being." - Paul Tillich

• "People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."  - Peter Drucker

• “Risk taking is the process by which you decide whether you take the chance of losing something you value to gain something that you desire.”  - Herbert Kindler