I was spending some time in the library as I do every now and then, and after checking out my normal sections, I wandered the aisles looking for something that might catch my eye.
You see, I believe you can judge a book by its cover. To a degree. While you may not be able to tell how good a book is just by looking at it, you can tell, just by the cover, if a book is marketed for you (or towards you). This is one of the ways I discover new-to-me authors.
It’s not really rocket science. If you are a Christian, your leader, your shepherd, your King, has already given you a vision.
It sounded like this: the Kingdom of God is like…
And then He lived it in a way that you could imitate.
Boom! Vision! (what the future will look like if you follow the leader)
But just as importantly, within the red-letters is the story of who we really are and what we’re really about. To the degree that our lives are shaped by that story is the degree that we form the tribe of Jesus.
Interested in bite-sized thoughts, try my Tumblr: I wish I had time to write about this.
There is great power in our metaphors. The words we use to think about things shapes what we do.
In many of the circles I move in, there is a growing resistance to referring to the church as a business. I’m not opposed to that; however, it is one thing to deconstruct a failed model, it is another to be able to explain and point to the correct model.
I believe family is the God-ordained model, but family is the correct metaphor for church only to the degree that we have a correct view of family. I have a few caveats before we jump in with both feet.
Church staff attention and focus is a precious commodity. Every church staff person wishes they had more time. In the communication areas, although a huge investment of time is required for social media, it often gets relegated to the time that’s left after everything else is done. Large churches may have a person (or teams) devoted to social media campaigns, but for most of us it is a line item on an already over-crowded job description. And it’s a lot of work!
Time is precious. Where we spend that time is critical. In my role as Media Director, I oversee Technical Production, Information Technology, and our Communications Department (which I have recently been framing as both Creative Arts and Public Relations).
Social media —how the church engages in it, where we put our energy, and what we bring to the conversation — are not small considerations.
Excellence is taking a hit. In my opinion, it’s a cruel task master and more and more people are noticing. The correction is a necessary one. Anytime we are using people to build church, we’re upside down. In the Kingdom of God, we don’t tap into people like batteries and discard them after using them up. Many techs I know have been burned by churches who seemed to have had that attitude.
Technically Thinking 