Let's Reach Out!

We live in a sea of people who do not yet know Christ. There are enough people in your community to fill up every church in your town fifty times. This is one reason that we find transfer church growth so distasteful. God gave us Connecting Points when we began to hunger to reach the lost and not just to grow our church. It is critical that we are more interested in reaching the lost than growing our church. We are not sure how interested God is in growing our church; but He has proven how He feels about reaching the lost. He proved His heart at Calvary. It is a matter of priorities. Let’s face it, if we reach the lost we will not be able to stop our church from growing. If on the other hand we strive just to grow our church we may find ourselves wandering lost in the forest of other peoples’ methodologies and miss altogether God’s plan for reaching the lost in our own culture and more specifically in our own community. When we speak of community we are not just speaking of people who live near your church. In today’s society, community has more to do with culture and less to do with geographic proximity. We believe God wants to reach the lost in your community more than you do. If this is true then it stands to reason that He has a plan to reach them. We believe that the principles of Connecting Points will lead you to that specific plan. God help us to Reach Out!

Our Purpose

Purpose has become quite vogue in the church of the twenty-first century. This is a good thing. Rick Warren from the great Saddleback Church in southern California has impacted the body of Christ in a powerful way with his book The Purpose Driven Life. I truly believe that this book is a word from the Lord for the church of Christ in these days. This book did for the people in the church what his previous book (The Purpose Driven Church) did for the church as a whole. For too long too many wandered aimlessly through life with no real sense of purpose. This “purpose driven” emphasis has greatly energized those who have embraced it. Steve and I can say of a certainty it did our churches. We worked together to do “Forty Days of Purpose” in our churches and it was a great success in almost every respect. It was during this time that we were first dealing with the principles of Connecting Points. The purpose of Connecting Points can be summed up in two words. Those words are communion and community. This is God’s purpose for the church. Communion has to do with connecting with God and community is connecting with each other. This principle was illustrated beautifully by Christ in Luke 10:27. When asked about the most important commandment, Jesus responded with a two-fold answer. Love the Lord with all that is within you and love your neighbor as yourself. In many respects all the law is summed up in these two expectations. Life is certainly more complex than just this one concept, but when it comes to the church we can focus on these words of Christ as our purpose. What are we to be doing? We are connecting people with God and with each other. The work of the church is connecting, connecting with God (communion) and connecting with each other (community).

Defining Leadership the Hard Way

Recently I started my Doctoral program at Regent University in Virginia. We were required to do a two week residency to start things off. There were over 100 Doctoral students there studying leadership. All of them are leaders in their respective fields. When I saw the instructions for our first assignment at residency, I thought to myself, “This will be trouble”. Casting eight or nine doctoral leadership students who have never met into the crucible of expected productivity is a recipe for chaos…and chaos we had. Personalities clashed as these leaders rattled around the project. The real issue: who would lead and who would follow. As time moved on, we became a productive team and achieved our goals with excellence. I see this as a portrait that can help us define what characterizes both a follower and a leader. One component is key to success in both the leader and the follower. It is servant hood. Calvin Miller in his book “The Empowered Leader” pointed out the value of servant hood by pointing to the teaching of Christ in Matt. 20:27. Here Jesus inserts servant hood as a prerequisite to leadership. There was conflict yet we became productive as a group as each one began to serve others in order to achieve our goal. By the tenth day, the conflict had evolved into laughter and friendship. Bruce Winston, in his book” Be a Leader for God’s Sake”, points out that “peace is not the absence of conflict but it is the manner in which conflict is addressed”.