Though not typically engaged in advocacy, a church recently wrote an open letter to the BC Minister of Health and Chief Medical Officer about church gathering restrictions, and I was inspired by how well it was crafted. This letter is interesting to study because a) we all can identify with the issue it addresses, and b) there isn’t the wealth of research and background support material to draw upon as there is for the traditional advocacy causes. That means the authors had to put a lot of thought into constructing an argument based upon reason. Given that, the open letter did a great job of laying out a challenge to the governing authorities and supporting it with reason. We can learn from the letter about how to address other issues we may face.

In my post Advocating for Legal/Public Policy Changes, I outlined four possible responses to actions taken by those in authority:

1. Comply with the law either because you agree with it or want to show goodwill if you don’t.
2. Consult with the appropriate authorities when they are agreeable to discussion.
3. Challenge the authorities when they are not agreeable to discussion with either a protest or a legal challenge.
4. Disobey the authorities when circumstances are so egregious and the authorities are so resistant that this is the only option. 

This post is about making an initial challenge—one that is the least confrontational in that it is based on reason rather than pressure. If it is not successful, the challenge can be escalated by adding pressure through public protest (ranging from petitions to demonstrations) and legal challenges.

Scripture gives a great example of advocacy that is respectful and based on reason, yet makes a forceful case. Paul, spoke up for a runaway slave and challenged his owner to receive him back as a brother. In making his appeal, Paul walked a fine line in which he mostly asked for what he wanted, but there is a hint of “you owe it to me to give me what I ask” in his request that comes from the added pressure of his intention to visit the slave owner and see firsthand how he responded to Paul’s request.

The Example

Westlynn Baptist Church in North Vancouver, BC challenged the provincial restrictions on church gatherings.

• If you prefer to read, here is their six-page open letter.
• If you prefer to watch, here is a video of Pastor Sam Chua reading the letter. The video is 17 minutes long, but it is worth watching to catch the spirit in which the challenge is made.

Why This Letter Is a Great Example

Here’s a list of what makes this appeal by Westlynn Baptist Church such a good example:

• To minimize the confrontation, thus improving the likelihood that those in authority will be more open to their message, the church:
  • Respected those in authority
  • Demonstrated goodwill by caring for those in authority with regular prayer and even shared what they were praying for
  • Agreed with what they could: the policy goals
  • Gratefully acknowledged what the government has done well and that government policy has benefited the province
  • Assumed the best intentions of those in authority
  • Followed the very rules they want to change and did even more than is required in order to show goodwill and support the government’s goals
  • Refrained from using inflammatory language
  • Remained factual
  • Asked questions rather than making strident demands
• The appeal should help the government understand the church’s case because it provided new information that highlighted the unintended consequences of the province’s rules. Specific examples of glaring unequal treatment of religion based on truly comparable scenarios made a compelling case for the desired change in policy.
• The church displayed a strong moral conviction about a public good that the government was overlooking. Their argument wasn’t centred on themselves and their rights but on the good being withheld from others who need their help.
• The entire presentation was very well researched and backed up by proper citations.
• The “ask” acknowledges there still needs to be suitable COVID-19 safety protocols, which they committed themselves to observe. The church is making a reasonable request giving due care to the broader community.
• The challenge does reference Charter rights as a gentle reminder that there is the possibility of a legal challenge, but it is very much a secondary argument given minimal attention at this time.
• The church has framed the argument in a way that will do minimal damage to the reputations of the church and Christianity because it is focused on the welfare of the community, not of the church. The church needs to do everything it can to ensure the community hears this other-centred message.

Whether Westlynn Baptist Church will be successful in getting the government to change its policy is not yet known, but they have done an excellent job in challenging the government in a well-reasoned way that is the most promising approach for achieving the desired outcome.

Discussion

CCCC members can discuss their ideas for effectively challenging governing authorities in The Green. Let’s study and learn from each other’s advocacy work.

Key Idea: Using reason to persuade when challenging governing authorities is an initial challenge with a good likelihood of success.

The post Challenging Authorities: Using Reason to Persuade appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Everyone was amazed by the many miracles and wonders that the apostles worked. All the Lord’s followers often met together, and they shared everything they had. They would sell their property and possessions and give the money to whoever needed it. Day after day they met together in the temple. They broke bread together in different homes and shared their food happily and freely, while praising God. Everyone liked them, and each day the Lord added to their group others who were being saved.
Acts 2:46-47 (CEV)

“Everyone liked them!” Or, as other translations put it, “They enjoyed the favour of all the people.” Considering that only a short while before this time, the crowds were calling for Jesus’ crucifixion and the apostles were in hiding for their lives, the turnaround in public opinion is amazing. While not everyone accepted their beliefs about Jesus Christ, they did respect his followers, the first Christians.

What strikes me as a message for the church today is that the ancient church was able to preach the truth without compromise and yet win the favour of the people by how they lived. If we could but do the same today!

The Obstacle: They Made No Compromise

You would think that the key to popularity would be to preach a nice, agreeable, non-offensive message supported by good deeds that people would appreciate. But this is not what the ancient Christians did. They performed good deeds, but their message was anything but nice, agreeable, and non-offensive! It seems very strange that the public held Christ’s followers in high esteem in spite of some pretty blunt preaching. Peter certainly didn’t pull any punches in his sermons, saying,

Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know….And you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross….Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.¹

The ancient church did not compromise or sugarcoat its message to win people to Christ. In those days, death on a cross was clear evidence that Jesus was not the Messiah, because everyone in that society knew that the Messiah would not die but would be victorious over Israel’s enemies. And no true Messiah would surrender to an execution so horrible that it was reserved only for slaves and outcasts. There couldn’t have been a bigger obstacle to public acceptance than the cross!

But the ancient Christians didn’t avoid talking about the cross, the very thing that the public believed most powerfully argued against the Christian faith. The church countered that argument against Jesus’ messiahship with their own much more powerful argument based on his physical resurrection and the hundreds of people who had seen the risen Christ. Their preaching didn’t cater to the audience but seriously disturbed them to the point that “they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

We need to speak to our audience in a way they can understand, but we shouldn’t downplay aspects of our faith which we think they might find troublesome.

For example, in today’s culture:

• The idea that there is only one way to God and it runs exclusively through Jesus Christ is offensive to most. They want to find their own way to God.
• The idea that there is a personal god is rejected by many, because that brings accountability into the picture. They’d rather have an impersonal force or principle that they can manipulate to their liking.
• The idea that there are moral absolutes offends many people today who believe there are no absolutes, everything is relative. Moral relativism allows them to justify their own morality. We need to remember that we don’t have a better way to offer, we have the only way to offer.

A fellow elder at my church heard a pastor leading people in a sinner’s prayer at a seeker-sensitive evangelical church. The prayer completely avoided mention of sin and the cross and effectively made Jesus not much more than an inspirational person we aspire to be like. If people make a decision for Christ under those pretenses, they may later feel they were the victims of a bait and switch when they find out the whole truth of Christian faith.

Like the ancient church, the church today needs to speak truth, not avoid it. There are wise and unwise ways to preach the Gospel today, but the whole truth needs to be preached.

So, be unabashedly evangelical in proclaiming the Gospel!

A Powerful Attraction: They Practised What They Preached

As a community, they lived such attractive lives that they enjoyed the people’s favour. They preached love for one another and they demonstrated it. They preached a new way of living with justice for all, and they lived it.

At that time, they expected Christ’s return in the very near future, so they weren’t thinking long term. This led at least some of them to liquidate assets to care for each other, something that is not sustainable over the long term. (Or maybe that’s a sign of our lack of faith that our Father will provide us ‘our daily bread’ as we need it.) Nevertheless, Christians as a group are still the most generous people, who are ready to share their resources to help others, often non-Christians, who are in need.

As part of their spiritual growth as a disciple of Christ, Christians today should ask themselves how they could demonstrate more of their faith in their lives. What have we received from God that we haven’t personally given as fully as we could to others?

• His unconditional love?
• His provision?
• His integrity?
• His willingness to sacrifice for others?
• His constancy?
• His kindness?

What could you do to demonstrate God’s traits in your life so that others could see them at work in and through you? What could your ministry do? If we believe something about God, then we should find a way to act on that belief and pass the fruit of the belief on to others.

So, let’s make our church congregations a true community seven days a week through individual acts of love both within and without the community.

An Impressive Result: They Walked in God’s Power

Miracles and wonders accompanied the apostles as they did their work because God’s power flowed through them. The results were impressive, as the book of Acts records. Their secret was that they believed Christ would be active in their world through the Holy Spirit, and they expected to see things happen. So they did! They were bold and confident as they went about their daily business, sharing the Gospel and doing good to others.

Are we as bold and confident today? We will develop boldness and confidence when we have our own personal, life-transforming, meetings with Christ. When we know what God has done in our own lives, we will have faith and boldness to tell people what he can do in theirs. This is why we should be doing everything we can so that every Christ-follower is alive to the spiritual, theological, and missional components of Christian life. When they are plugged in to God spiritually and understand who he is and what he is about in this world, they can then express their faith in word and deed to the world around them.

So, be open to and expect the power of the Holy Spirit to be at work in and through you each and every day.

Conclusion

Let’s take our faith to heart and make it real in every aspect of our life and being, so that others will be drawn to the beautiful difference that Christ makes in each person.

Key Thought: The church needs to fully live up to Christ’s intent for it and walk as his disciples walked – in love and in power and in community.

The post And Everyone Liked Them… appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 The Message

The point of this beloved passage of Paul’s is that of all the things we could do, loving people is the most important. Why?

• Because God is love, and we are to be like him.
• Because Jesus demonstrated love to the marginalized and outcast, and as his disciples we are to be like him.
• Because God searches for people after his own heart to work through and we want to be vessels used by him.

Love & ‘The Other’

There was a time in the recent past when many Christians did not show much love, but relied on power to do God’s redemptive work. As we saw in my post Note to the Church: Mistakes Not To Make Again!, as a community we made bad decisions how to respond to social and cultural change from the 1970s through to the 1990s by choosing to limit our engagement strategy to what we thought would be the supportive power of public opinion, the courts, and politics. What was lost in those years was our witness to God’s incredible love for all humanity.

Christians cannot be carrying out the redemptive work of Christ when they are treating ‘The Other’ (people not like us) as an enemy to be defeated. The enemy is not other people. The enemy is the evil power of this world that seeks to pull people away from God and life the way he designed it for us.

So, given that God is love, when there is no love evident in us for ‘The Other,’ we have to ask what that says about us. There is a place for speaking prophetic correction to society, but as Paul writes, “If I have the gift of prophecy…but do not have love, I am nothing.”¹

But do we really have to show love to people who absolutely reject Jesus and even curse his name? For sure there are lots of verses in the Bible about loving “one another” (that is, people within the church), but do we really have to love those other people as well?.

Well, yes! When Jesus said that one of the greatest commandments is to love your neighbour, he was asked, “And who is my neighbour?” His answer was the parable of the Good Samaritan, which makes the point that we are to love the person who is not like us — ‘The Other!’

Okay so we have to love them, but how much? There can be only one answer: as much as Christ loved us before we loved him. Paul is very clear about the depth of Christ’s love for us: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We should likewise love sinners even while still in their sin.

Love and Power

It is true that God works through whomever he pleases. The Bible shows us God working through pagan kings to chastise Israel. He worked through Jonah with smashing success even though Jonah did not love the Ninevites. But the point of the book of Jonah is the point I’m making here. Jonah should have loved the Ninevites. He should have seen them the way God sees them – people who need to repent and who can be redeemed. We know from the history of King David that God looks for men and women after his own heart, people he can trust to use his power wisely. So while there are exceptions, we are safe to assume that we will more likely be used powerfully by God when we make ourselves look more like him by loving people as he loves them. I don’t think we can go wrong with the following principles:

1. If we want to walk in God’s power, we need to walk in God’s love.
2. If we want to have God’s power flow through us, we must first have God’s love flow through us.
3. Power without love is a recipe for abuse, and exercising power without love is no witness to God’s relationship with humanity.

How might our current relationship with the secular world be different had we engaged differently a generation ago using these principles?

When it comes to the law and politics, there are times when (like Paul) we should make use of the civil institutions which have been provided to us for our protection. But it is a terrible mistake to think that these should be our primary tools for change! The real power of our faith will for sure be manifested when we love all people, while standing up to those who would misuse power against the less powerful.

The primary goal of Christian leaders, particularly pastors, therefore, is to disciple those within their sphere of responsibility to live as excellent representatives of Jesus Christ expressing his love for all people. When we live like that, we are most useful to God and most likely to walk in his power to accomplish his purpose.

To Change the World

Our ‘go to’ tools for changing the world must be those used by Jesus: love, prayer, spiritual discernment, and deep engagement with people who need to experience God’s love and care.

To use these tools well, we need to be mature Christians, which brings us to the topic of discipleship. If we were really serious about changing the world, we would be really serious about discipleship.  Before trying to change the world ‘out there,’ let’s first do a better job changing the world ‘in here.’ Discipleship should have the goal not just of personal growth, but of mobilization – helping rank and file Christians engage the people around them with love, prayer, and discernment.

Discipleship and Spiritual Formation

The problem, according to some, is that discipling Christians isn’t thorough enough. We have faith, but our lives are formed much more significantly by our secular culture than most realize, which weakens our witness. James Davison Hunter wrote about discipleship in the church today in To Change the World:

If, for whatever reason, the culture of a local parish and the larger Christian communion of which it is a part does not express and embody a vision of renewal and restoration that extends to all of life then it will be impossible to ‘make disciples’ capable of doing the same in every part of their lives. In formation, it is the culture and the community that gives shape and expression to it that is the key.” ²

So the church should model living faithfully in every aspect of its life and train its members to do the same in theirs. If Christians are to be true Christ-followers, effectively representing Christ to their world, we must preach in our churches what salvation is for during our present life here on earth.

What the Church Can Do

Here are some elements of a robust discipleship program.

Formation

• Help people learn how to think as a Christian. As already mentioned, many Christians are being formed more by our culture than by our faith. We must learn how to discern which aspects of our culture to affirm and which to challenge. This is NOT a list of “do’s and don’ts”, but understanding the principles that apply so Christ-followers can independently reason for themselves which is which.
• Teach people what God’s vision is for human society in the present world. What should society and culture look like and what can we, as individuals and as a group, do to move our world closer to that vision? Resources related to God’s mission and Christian ethics would be helpful. One book that addresses both is Let Justice Roll Down.
• Help people confront their own resistance to living a Christlike life. There is a cost involved. We all need to do the right thing, even when we want to do something else. For example, it is costly to invest yourself in relationships when you’d rather use your time for your own purposes. A helpful resource about making personal choices is Andy Stanley’s book The Best Question Ever, which I’ve blogged about. There are all kinds of Bible studies on submitting our lives to Christ and giving him full reign over us.
• Teach people how to make full use of Christian spiritual practices and discernment. My series Hearing God Speak and the category Spirituality of Leadership both have helpful posts in this regard. Christians must be able to discern God’s leadership if they are to live as faithful Christ-followers.

Mission

• Teach Christians how to help other people for the other person’s long term good. So often we respond to immediate needs and do things that we really should be helping them do for themselves. There is a dignity in allowing others to play a significant part in overcoming their own problems. Often, by doing it for them, or giving aid that is only a short-term solution, we create a dependency on aid. When Helping Hurts and Poverty Inc. are two resources that have many principles that can be applied in any helping situation.
• Train people to share their faith in a natural way. Propositions are not likely to work with most people today. People will respond to hearing your story after they have experienced compassion, love, and mercy from you. One of many helpful resources is Just Walk Across the Room.
• Get people to practice engaging others. This is what the local church is ideal for. In the world outside our churches, we are in the midst of ‘The Other,’ those people who are not like us. How do we prepare for meeting such people? Fortunately, Christ gave us the church. Because the local church is open to anyone who wants to attend, we have ‘The Other’ right among us. We need to practice loving them and drawing them into our lives. Who are they? Well, depending on your own demographic, they might be:
  • the young or the old
  • the rich or the poor
  • the immigrant or the multi-generation Canadian
  • the employed or the unemployed
  • the single or the married
  • the one with doubts or the one who has resolved their doubts
  • the well-educated or the less-educated

If We Were Serious…

We need intentional discipleship programs to develop church members into mature Christians who know how to relate to, and love, the people whom God has placed in their sphere of influence.

Key Thought: When Christians love ‘The Other’ as Christ loved us while we were yet sinners, then we will walk in God’s power and change our world.

The post If We Were Serious About Changing the World… appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• Is an organization Christian because it works on the Christian mission?
• Is it Christian because it employs Christians?
• Is an organization Christian because its corporate life¹ models the way of Christ?
• Is it even possible to speak of an organization as being Christian, or can only people be identified as Christian?

I believe a ministry is authentically Christian when its corporate life models the way of Christ, which means that it

• points to God,
• manifests his character, and
• models his kingdom on earth.

This has really important implications for how we lead our ministries, and that is what this series of posts explores.

God’s Purpose for Corporate Life

I don’t know about you, but when I think about a Christian ministry, I think of what it does. It’s as if the ministry has no purpose other than to advance the Christian mission. But while God does have a mission for each ministry, I believe God has an even greater purpose for it — to be a light to the nations through its corporate life.

Corporate Life as Christian Witness

The Bible tells how God created a corporate body, Israel, to be a light to the other nations. Its governance and corporate life were not just part of its witness, but the main witness. This is why, in Deuteronomy 17:18, God required the kings to write out a copy of the Law in front of the priests, to ensure they knew his laws, with the expectation that they would rule by them.

In the New Testament, much is said about the corporate life of churches. In Acts 15 we see one case where church leadership is a good witness by modeling how to work through issues, and in 1 Corinthians 5:1-2 we see another case where church leadership is a poor witness by failing to deal with issues in the church.

Our life together in a corporate body is one of the best witnesses we have as to what life in the kingdom of God looks like. And in this regard, the staff and volunteers of a Christian ministry can be either its greatest asset or its greatest threat, because people give an organization its corporate life, for better or worse.

A ministry can be alive to the fullness of God’s daily presence and a credit to our community. Or it can be so spiritually dull that it is no different from a secular charity and possibly even a blemish to our community. Which it will be depends very much on the attitudes and beliefs that guide the behaviour of its people.

Behaviour Preaches Beliefs

Both Christians and non-Christians see Christian ministries as representing the Christian faith in action, so many people will form their opinions about our faith based on the behaviour of our ministries. How you do things is as important as what you do.

And that brings us to the crux of the issue: your directors and staff are responsible for the public witness of your ministry. I’m not talking about your programs, but about how the directors govern, about how decisions are made at every level, about how issues are dealt with. What happens when things get tough? How do you respond to people, even within the ministry, who don’t act Christ-like?

Faith and Ministry Practice

So what if we paid attention to the witness given by our corporate life?

• What if we fully exemplified the Sermon on the Mount in our workplaces?
• What if we exhibited all of the fruit of the Spirit at work, all of the time?
• What if we perfectly exemplified God’s character?

If we attain this lofty vision, how would we answer these two statements about how we run our ministries?

• We would…, and
• We wouldn’t…

And the real question is, What’s holding us back from achieving this vision except our willingness to honestly examine our corporate behaviour?

Where We’re Going

Over the next four weeks, we will be discussing four threats to our corporate witness and four great truths that will overcome them and allow us to present an authentic Christian witness. If we live and work by these four great truths, we will be empowered to achieve far greater mission success.

My goal is that your ministry will truly operate in the power of the Holy Spirit as we not only work on the Christian mission, but honour Christ by how we do it!

I have an older post, How Christian Is My Ministry?, that is now Part 2 of this series. It describes how you can reverse engineer your theology by examining your ministry’s practices. In other words, it will help you see what your ministry’s corporate witness actually is through the fresh eyes of an outsider who is watching what you do to figure out what you really believe. I suggest you read it before moving on to next week’s post, which is Part 3 of this series.

————————-

1. I am using the term corporate not in the sense of a business, but in the sense of people coming together in one body to do something together.

The post What Makes a Christian Ministry Christian? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Someone (I’ll call him Paul) showed me a graph on Canadian Food for the Hungry International’s (FH) website that showed the percentage of donations that go into poverty-relief programs, not only for FH but also for ministries that donors might see as its ‘competitors.’ Given that FH had the ‘best’ ratio, Paul interpreted this graph as a bid to attract donors away from the other charities, and he had already said in in a post (that no longer exists) that this was bad behaviour between Christian ministries.

I wanted to blog about this, so I called Ben Hoogendoorn, president of FH, to find out what was going on. We had a very productive conversation, but I don’t want to speak for Ben and FH.  That’s not my place. What I can say for me is that I was impressed that Ben was in the midst of talking to the leaders of all the charities that were named.

When a real or potential conflict arises, a Christian should confront the issue and deal with it humbly, in love and with grace, in order to bring about reconciliation and peace. This is what he and the other leaders are doing. I think this is a marvelous demonstration of selflessness: giving relationships priority over any possible personal advantage.

And I think it speaks volumes that FH quickly changed its website so that it now shows the percentage for just FH alone. Also, FH realizes that the real issue is trustworthiness and integrity, so it mentions that FH is a Certified member of CCCC (it is a member in good standing that has earned our Seal of Accountability). FH also lists four commitments the ministry has made to its donors. Bravo! Integrity is not about just a single number, but about a way of being, and these four commitments are worthy of support.

But this whole episode has a redeeming aspect to it. Getting away from FH in particular, I want to move to the general topic and build on comments Paul wrote in his post:

Competition and Performance Measurement

“I’m sure it will create some good conversations and competition (which I think is a good thing) around how much of a charity’s funds should be directed towards programming…If FH Canada really want to get us talking, why don’t they take the lead with the other charities they mention and create a dashboard for international development charities so that each can evaluate themselves on the same basis, and communicate to the public in a transparent way? “

The underlying issues are: 1) competition between Christian ministries; and 2) performance measurement. I’ve thought about both of these issues quite a lot, so I’ll jump in with a contribution to keep the discussion started by Paul going.  In this post I’ll deal with competition. In the next post, I’ll cover performance measurement and what I think CCCC can do to help ministries benchmark their performance.

Competition Between Christian Ministries

Back about 2005, I recognized that although CCCC has no single competitor doing everything that we do, everything we do has someone else doing it to some degree. Even though CCCC makes an important contribution to the church due to its uniquely comprehensive and affordable package of services, competition is just as much a threat for us as it is for any of the inner city missions, relief agencies, seminaries, evangelism ministries and, dare I say it, churches that exist in proximity to each other. My natural response to competition is to do a competitive analysis and then strategize how to ensure a triumph over the competition, but in 2005 I gave the issue sober second thought from a biblical-theological perspective and came up with a position paper on competition that still guides me today.

I suspect that a strong factor contributing to a competitive stance is a belief that God’s provision is limited. It is a theology of scarcity in which God has provided a set amount of resources (one pie to share) so that if another agency gets a donation, it makes one less donation for you.

The alternate stance, which I believe is the biblically-correct stance, is that God will provide as much as is needed and will expand his provision (he’ll bake another pie) to support the full range of activity undertaken by his people in response to his call. This is what it means when the Bible says that we were created in Jesus Christ to do good works, which God has already prepared for us to do (Eph 2:10), and that God will provide us with an abundance, beyond what we can ask or think, for every good deed (2 Cor 9:8 and Eph 3:20). When God calls, God provides.

We also need to recognize that our ministries are part of Christ’s one church, all serving the same God to accomplish the same mission in a myriad of ways. To compete against another Christian ministry is to harm the unity of the one body of Christ.

A Christian Way Forward

So my suggestion/challenge for ministry leaders is to come up with your own position paper on competition. You probably think you already know what you will write, so why bother? Well, unintended things happen when we assume we know what we think and don’t crystallize it. Vague or fuzzy intentions leave lots of room for unwittingly wandering into territory you otherwise would avoid. Writing out your position on competition makes it explicit, ensuring you will more likely abide by it.

Where I end up on competition is that I will focus on my ministry’s mission and pursue it as best I can. To the extent that I feel competition at all, I choose to use it to stimulate ever more excellence and creativity at CCCC to better accomplish our mission. I figure God has called my fellow believers to their ministries just as he has called me and my teammates to ours. Christ will look after his own ministries, so what have I to worry about? As long as I’m preoccupied with our mission, and not our so-called competition, God will continue to support CCCC. I consider competition to be a means that we use to spur one another on toward love and good deeds (Heb 10:24). That sort of competition is good and healthy. Competition to win at the expense of another ministry is not.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17

The post Competing for Donors appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

If you believe that action speaks louder than words, and that we should preach the gospel at all times (using words if necessary), then what are you preaching through your ministry’s actions? This is a really important issue because Jesus said in Mat 5:16, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” If that’s what happens when they see our good deeds, what will happen when they see our bad deeds?

In my next post I’ll discuss how this idea applies to how you engage people outside of your ministry, but in this post I am focused on how you work with your own staff.

Casting off Secular Restraints

In Ontario, holders of religious office are entirely exempt from the Employment Standards Act (which provides minimum standards for notice of termination). Some churches think that because the legislation doesn’t apply to pastors, they can treat them any way they want! But they forget that Common Law still applies and the result in court will be what is fair and reasonable, not the minimum set by the Act.

In another province I was told the church counted on the pastor not going to the courts to sue fellow believers. But the bigger issue is, churches that terminate pastors without notice are showing that when secular restraints are cast off, this is how Christians choose to treat fellow Christians!!! What a terrible witness.

HR Practices Are Our Christian Witness

If you say you are a Christian ministry, then the way you work together as a team better be an excellent witness to what life is like in the kingdom of God. This is not only your responsibility before God, but it is also your responsibility to every other ministry that works in the name of Christ. Everything we do should reflect the righteous ways that God wants us to have with him and with each other.

How can we transform society if we can’t get our own Christian societies right? People should look at our churches and agencies and say, “I want a society that looks like that!”  All of our communities, whether a family, a church, a social network, or a work team, should bear witness to the kingdom that is coming and that has already broken in to our world. After all, this is the Good News and I don’t want anybody to look at us and say, “Thanks, but no thanks!” Job 31:13-14 says it all:

If I have denied justice to my menservants and maidservants when they had a grievance against me, what will I do when God confronts me? What will I answer when called to account?

Tough Decisions Do Have to Be Made

There are times when employees need correction and development, and these should be done in the spirit of helping them better use their gifts and pursue their call, rather than punishing them. After all, what employer doesn’t want all of their employees to be highly successful?

There are times when ending the employment relationship is the right thing to do, but this should be done in the spirit of helping them find a place that better fits what they have to offer. I don’t know, but I expect that the cases that justify immediate dismissal for cause are far fewer than what many employers think.

My approach to difficult situations (of any kind) is to try to understand how God could redeem the situation for all parties. As hard as it may be, especially when people are emotional, I have found that in difficult situations there has always been a way that leaves all parties feeling better about the situation. I wish I could give examples, but for obvious reasons, I can’t. All I can say is, it is worth the time praying about and reflecting on what would be a good outcome for the other party.

In A Passion for Your Mission, I said you need passion for the work of your ministry. Well folks, this is my passion for CCCC’s mission: that all ministries should operate in a manner that is worthy of Jesus Christ, in whose name we serve. May what I do in leadership never, ever bring reproach to the name of Christ! Amen.

The post How Christian Is My Ministry? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The Chapel served more meals in a week than any restaurant in Akron. They had a feeding program for everyone it seemed. They had an entire three storey WING just for youth ministry. They didn’t have a singles group; they had singles groups for single and widowed, single and divorced, single and looking, and single and happy to be single. They didn’t just have a support group for people dealing with issues. They had support groups for cancer (three different kinds of cancer, as I recall), for grief, for broken families and on and on. And the library! They had a very large, impressive library, but then in an adjacent room were all the resources a pastor could ever want, including a rare book collection with at least one first edition of a 200 or 300 year old commentary. It was AMAZING.

Large Ministries Are the Minority

Regional churches such as this one are large enough that they can specialize and provide programs that few smaller churches could possibly provide. (In 2003, 74% of all Canadian evangelical churches had fewer than 150 attendees.) The large concentration of people enabled the church to move beyond providing basic services to offering very specific, targeted services that met specialized needs. It is, in fact, a resource to all the churches in Akron. And that is an advantage to being big. I never again felt that large churches were out of place. Large churches and agencies help the church fulfill its mission in ways that smaller organizations can’t. Large and small churches both have their places.

Very few Christian ministries in Canada are large. In my last post I gave some statistics showing how small most Canadian ministries are. Based on the 22,000 T3010’s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC, here are some stats for the larger ministries:

• Only 1,179 ministries (6%) report more than $1 million in total revenue, and only 96 (0.6%) have more than $10 million.
  • As a matter of interest, about half of the ministries with more than $1 million are members of CCCC (and all but 14 of the ones over $10 million are members)*.
• Only 6.5% report 10 or more employees, and only 317 (1.4%) report having more than 30.
  • I’m highly suspicious of this number because a huge number of charities leave the line for employees blank. Do they have no employees or are they not filling the form out correctly? Nevertheless, the stats are what they are.

Advantages of Large Ministries

Here are some of the advantages that large ministries provide to the mission of God and some of the responsibilities that go with their size. It is possible that some smaller ministries may have some of these benefits too, but it is not likely that very many would.

• A small ministry works hard just to run its programs, but then it also has to fundraise, do all the administration and look after the myriad of other things that have to happen to make the ministry work. (This is one reason why the CCCC exists—to help charities of all sizes with these supporting functions so they can concentrate more on their core missions!)  A larger ministry not only has the staff to do all of that, but it can also have staff who work on the ministry rather than in the ministry. I got that idea from a secular business writer, Michael Gerber, who wrote The E-myth Revisited—required reading for any entrepreneur, including ministry entrepreneurs. I’m not completely sold on everything he writes in the book, but I do think he’s got a gem of an idea as it applies to organizational leadership! Larger ministries can have people with the time to think deeply about their mission and become thought-leaders in their fields. In a ministry that overlaps with the secular sphere’s interests (such as relief work), they can speak out and be respected in the public sphere.
• Larger ministries have the capacity and infrastructure to take on a leadership role in much larger projects than most ministries could handle. In overseas development work, for example, their ability to handle large, comprehensive projects that cover a region and not just a neighbourhood gives them credibility that may open doors to leverage Christian donations with government funding. Rather than dealing with fifty small organizations, government funding agencies can deal with one or two large ones.
• Not only do large ministries have the people to handle larger projects, they also have the ability to raise significantly more funds than a small ministry can, and therefore can respond to more complex, expensive opportunities than a small ministry can. There are a number of very large inner-city missions across Canada that I’ve toured that have developed some very exciting and comprehensive programs, but they required millions of dollars to implement them.
• While large ministries undoubtedly have more management overhead, good management results in more efficient operations. And since there are more programs to allocate the overhead to, a large ministry is likely more efficient than a number of small ministries each running just a few programs, especially when one evaluates outcomes rather than simply outputs.
• Beneficiaries benefit from large ministries too. Looking again at a large inner-city mission, it can provide its beneficiaries with a complete solution, such as a shelter combined with training for job skills and addiction counselling.
• With size comes responsibility (Luke 12:38). Their size makes large ministries a highly visible witness to the world of Christian love and compassion at work. This may be a side of Christianity that many people aren’t aware of, and these ministries may be the only Christian witness these people encounter. Large ministries should make sure their Christian identity is known.
• A corollary of the last point is that since they do have such high public visibility, they will be seen by the public as representative of Christian ministries. This means that all the more care must be taken by large ministries to protect the reputation of our faith. If their practices are unbecoming a Christian ministry, all Christian ministries are discredited to a degree because of our shared identification with Jesus Christ. So for this reason alone, even if there were no biblical basis for accountability to the body of Christ (which there is), they are accountable to us (and, of course, to the Lord himself!).
• Christian agencies provide a means for people to work together across denominational boundaries. They provide “neutral territory” based on a common belief in the essentials of the Christian faith. They are therefore a powerful witness to the unity of the people of God. The large ministries, which are more likely to have a broad cross-section of the church represented among their staff and volunteers, should be sure to add to their primary mission a secondary mission of demonstrating the unity that can be achieved while respecting the diversity of denominational distinctives. At every opportunity, I tell reporters and others that the CCCC membership reflects a broad cross-section of our faith and not just a few particular denominations.

So both large and small ministries have something to contribute to the work of the church. This begs the question, if I have an idea for a new ministry, should I start my own or try to get an existing ministry to take it on? I’ll address that in the next post.

*I revised these stats after looking at the actual list produced by the database. There were, in fact, a number of non-Christian charities included in the stats as originally published in this post.

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