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Archives For January 31, 2014

Five leadership habits that will destroy teamwork

Meredith Flynn —  February 13, 2014

Pat_Pajak_blog_calloutCOMMENTARY | Pat Pajak

You might actually be tearing down the very thing you’re trying to build if you’re guilty of these teamwork killers:

1. Practicing the age-old adage: My way or the highway
When trying to build teamwork, don’t forget that everyone has an opinion. Oftentimes, the thoughts, ideas and suggestions that arise through team discussions can be helpful. Listen to and learn from your team, involve them in decision making, ask for their input, and embrace the reality that teamwork can often be better than “my way or the highway!”

2. Being all about the numbers
Make no mistake about it, numbers do matter and the bottom line is important, but it’s not the final measurement. The very best teamwork (strategies, goals, planning and effort) doesn’t always produce the expected results. Numbers become a problem when a leader puts so much focus on them that he or she forgets about the importance of the team – the people who are making those numbers happen. People matter more than numbers, and forgetting that fact destroys teamwork.

3. Talking without listening
If no one else can get a word in or share an opinion, there is no teamwork. A leader destroys the opportunity to build future leaders if he or she is always talking and never listening. If people are never heard, they will soon cease to share things that matter.

4. Changing things just for the sake of changing things
Change is good and sometimes necessary. But it must be based on a specific outcome. Any leader who takes this to another level by changing things just to let you know they’re in charge doesn’t really understand teamwork. Operating as a team requires a leader to explain why change is necessary, move carefully through the process, and be willing to admit that what the team is saying sometimes makes perfect sense. Failure to survey the impact, timing and necessity of change destroys teamwork. Get everyone on board before any change takes place.

5. Micro-managingThe quickest way to destroy a team is to micro-manage every decision, action and assignment. Team members know the difference between being given a responsibility, and being handed a predetermined to-do list. Leaders who care more about things being done exactly their way destroy the notion of teamwork. Are you really interested in building a team? Remember the word of Dr. John Maxwell: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Pat Pajak leads IBSA’s church strengthening team.

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She’s sharp: 10-year-old’s story raises $2,000 for Disaster Relief

Meredith Flynn —  February 11, 2014

THE BRIEFING | Meredith Flynn

Lily Eddington and Three Rivers Disaster Relief leader Ken Cummins picked up a new chainsaw after Lily wrote a story that raised more than $2,000 in donations.

Lily Eddington and Three Rivers Disaster Relief leader Ken Cummins picked up a new chainsaw after Lily wrote a story that raised more than $2,000 in donations.

The newest piece of equipment in Three Rivers Association’s disaster relief trailer came from an unlikely source: 10-year-old Lily Eddington.

The Shorewood fifth grader wanted to help the association purchase a new, bigger chainsaw for the team to use after disasters like the November tornadoes that affected many communities across Illinois. She wrote a story that has garnered just over $2,000 in donations, enough to purchase the new chainsaw, another smaller saw, and other needed safety equipment.

Lily has the inside track to knowing about such a specific need – her grandfather is Dan Eddington, Three Rivers’ director of missions. “She knew through my father that they needed help raising money for that,” said Lily’s dad, Matt. “And she came up with the idea of writing a story, and he took the idea and kind of ran with it. And it worked out really well.”

Her grandfather helped Lily publish the story in booklet form, with her own illustrations. The story centers on a family trapped in their home after a tornado. Sisters Megan and Brianna take shelter in the basement with their parents (plus their cat and hamster), but a large tree keeps them trapped inside after the storm passes.

“Then they heard a truck pull up,” Lily wrote. “On the side of the trailer they saw the words, ‘Three Rivers Baptist Association Disaster Relief.’

“Suddenly they heard, ‘Come on guys, we need to get this tree off the house.’”

Read the full story at IBSA.org.

Illinois workers join typhoon response
A team of Illinois volunteers is hard at work in the Philippines this week, helping rebuild a school damaged during Typhoon Haiyan last fall. The Disaster Relief leaders also are repairing rain water collection sites on Gibitngil Island, where there is no natural water source. The team starts each day with a boat ride from Cebu Island, where they’re staying, to Gibitngil. “People in small shack houses greet us all along the way and some have even posted signs on their homes thanking our team for helping to rebuild their school,” said Rex Alexander, state director of Disaster Relief for the Illinois Baptist State Association. Go to IBSA’s Facebook page for updates on the team’s work.

Barna: Majority of Christians unclear on calling
Less than half (40%) of practicing Christians have a clear sense of God’s calling on their lives, according to the Barna Group. And 48% of Christian Millenials (generally thought of as those born in the 80s and 90s) say they believe God is calling them to different work. That lack of clarity is the foundation for Barna’s three vocational trends for 2014.

Blog post puts church attendance under the microscope
Author Donald Miller blogged recently that he doesn’t attend church often. “…I don’t learn much about God hearing a sermon and I don’t connect with him by singing songs to him,” wrote Miller, who has chronicled his faith journey in “Blue Like Jazz” and several other books. “So, like most men, a traditional church service can be somewhat long and difficult to get through.” Miller added that he experiences intimacy with God through his work.

Southern Baptist professor and blogger Denny Burk was one of many who responded to Miller’s post, calling his decision “a recipe for spiritual suicide.” Miller responded, and Burk has posted the exchange on his blog.

Christianity Today lists 8 Olympians to watch
Check out CT’s list of Christian athletes competing in Sochi. “We don’t root for them because they’re on ‘Team Jesus,'” writes Laura Leonard, “but all the same it’s nice to see people at the peak of their field, on the world’s biggest athletic stage, turn the credit back to the One who gave us bodies to run and jump and spin on ice and imaginations to push the limits of those bodies to run faster, jump higher, and spin faster than we ever thought possible.”

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Bucking the trend and bearing fruit

Meredith Flynn —  February 10, 2014

Nate_Adams_blog_callout_2HEARTLAND | Nate Adams

Last month Directors of Missions and other associational leaders from around the state gathered at the IBSA Building for a time of leadership development, fellowship, and strategic thinking about how best to assist churches. Dr. Chuck Kelley, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, was invited to speak to us on “Fostering a Positive Baptism Trend in an Association.”

To set the stage, Dr. Kelley reminded us that the number of baptisms in SBC churches overall has been on a 50-year plateau, and has now actually declined six of the past eight years. Nationwide data for 2013 is not yet available, but in 2012 baptisms declined 5.5% from 2011, to only 314,956. That’s the lowest level since 1948, when SBC churches reported only 6 million members rather than the current 16 million. In fact, to give those numbers some further context, baptisms totaled 445,725 in 1972, and 429,063 in 1959.

Here among IBSA churches, baptisms were actually up 3.1% in 2013 to 5,063, building on the previous year’s 2.6% increase. Still, 2013 is our churches’ first year above 5,000 baptisms since 2009. And in 2005, IBSA churches reported 6,499 baptisms.

While all of us were eager to hear what Dr. Kelley would suggest, none of us were really surprised when he said there are no easy answers to reversing the current baptism trend. I was personally grateful to hear him underscore that we shouldn’t seek to affix blame or pass the buck. Instead, we all need to focus passionately and sacrificially on the urgent need to reach people with the Gospel in an increasingly challenging environment.

While I don’t have space here to recap everything Dr. Kelley shared with us, I can share his alliterated outline. He said we need to Focus on Filling (of the Spirit, or revival), on Fruitfulness (intentional evangelism), on Faithfulness (a return to true discipleship), and even on Fighting (embracing the inevitable conflict that comes when change is needed, yet with Christ-like attitudes and righteousness).

All of these points hit home deeply with me, and couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only are we beginning a new year of ministry here at IBSA, and in all our churches, but we are also beginning our planning and budgeting for 2015. We can’t keep doing ministry as usual and expect a much different result.

As Dr. Kelley urged, we must persistently ask God to fill us afresh with His Spirit, and bring revival to our churches and spiritual awakening to our land. We must focus much more intentionally on fruitfulness, starting new Bible studies and Sunday School classes and evangelistic ministries, and equipping believers to courageously share the Gospel. We must more carefully embrace true discipleship, investing God’s Word deeply in those who will be faithful to live the Gospel and pay it forward into the lives of others. And yes, we must be so committed to a different level of fruitfulness that we are
even willing to engage the conflict that often seems to come with change, even in churches.

Those of us leading and serving churches today have lived most of our adult lives on the downwardly sloping plateau of this baptism trend. In many ways we have been maintaining our processes and doing church in comfortable ways, and if we simply continue our current patterns in the face of a changing culture, we will soon see the downward slope of the current trend steepen dramatically.

So as we prepare to plot one more year of baptisms on the chart of history, it is this urgency of reaching spiritually lost people with the Gospel that must compel us, and our churches. Baptisms may not be the only measure of fruitfulness, but they are a measure that we cannot be content to see in even gradual decline.

Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association.

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Turning the tide on baptisms

Meredith Flynn —  February 6, 2014
CONVERSIONS COUNT – “We have to help our churches focus on bearing fruit, and to keep up with that as a measure of how they’re doing,” NOBTS President Chuck Kelley told associational leaders in Illinois. “Fruitlessness is becoming endemic in Southern Baptist Life.”

CONVERSIONS COUNT – “We have to help our churches focus on bearing fruit, and to keep up with that as a measure of how they’re doing,” NOBTS President Chuck Kelley told associational leaders in Illinois. “Fruitlessness is becoming endemic in Southern Baptist Life.”

The SBC’s declining numbers are real. But there are solutions, says seminary president Chuck Kelley.

NEWS | Eric Reed

Since he began studying and teaching evangelism more than 30 years ago, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary President Dr. Chuck Kelley, told associational leaders in Illinois in January, we’ve been quoting the same statistic: 30% of our churches are growing, and 70% of all Southern Baptist churches are plateaued or declining. “The difference today is the 70% aren’t so much ‘plateauted;’ our churches are declining. We are a convention at a crossroads.”

Kelley is one voice in a chorus of national leaders calling on Southern Baptists to end the decline in baptisms and missions giving in our churches that threatens fulfillment of our kingdom work and the future of the denomination itself.

The head of the convention’s executive committee, Dr. Frank Page, also delivered a stark address in January. “…You say, ‘What is our future?’ I do not know. I’m asked that every week by someone, and I say, ‘I cannot answer.’ If things do not change, I can tell you in 20 years we will be happy to have 27,000, not 47,000 churches,” Page said.

In a “State of the SBC” address at Midwestern Seminary, Page cited “fault lines” in the denomination, where pressure has built and the fabric of the organization is threatened. Among them are the arguments over the nature and authority of Scripture in the 1980s, and more recently the debate over Reformed theology, methods of funding missions, and democratic-based church governance.

The effect of these “fault lines” is seen in declining baptisms and a 20-year downward trend in missions funding through the Cooperative Program. “We have argued over issues that have taken away our evangelistic fervor to the point that now our baptismal rates have reached a low not seen since 1948,” Page said. “God help us.”

Southern Baptists baptized 314,956 people in 2012, the most recent tally available. That was a decline of 5.5%. The figure compares to the post-war baptismal rate, when Southern Baptists numbered 6 million, in contrast to today’s 16 million. A decade-long focus on evangelism after World War II produced the denomination’s greatest surge of conversions, peaking at 445,725 baptisms in 1972, and the steam to power the next six decades downhill from there.

Leaders are hopeful that a final tally on 2013 baptisms and Cooperative Program giving, due soon, will show a slight uptick, and perhaps end the slippery slope. And in Illinois, baptisms and giving are up for 2013.

Still, national leaders are now talking publicly and regularly about the SBC as a denomination that is plateaued and declining, mostly declining.

Page’s speech, now being viewed widely on the internet, comes on the heels of “an open letter” from LifeWay President Thom Rainer calling on members of what is still the largest Protestant denomination in the United States to recapture their zeal for evangelism.

“Where is the passion in most of our churches to reach the lost?” Rainer asked. “I thank God for our affirmation of the total truthfulness of Scripture. I thank God for orthodoxy. But I pray that it is not becoming a dead orthodoxy – an orthodoxy that has lost its first love.”

“I have no proposal,” Rainer summarized. “I have no new programs for now. I simply have a burden.”

Kelley’s proposal

The history of every church and denomination is growth, plateau, and decline, Kelley told associational leaders meeting at the Illinois Baptist State Association building January 27-28. Pointing to Methodists, Presbyterians, and other mainline

denominations, Southern Baptists for many years expressed thanks we weren’t following their decline. Now we are. “We are seeing a growing gap in the rhetoric about Southern Baptists and the reality of where we are,” he said.

And the declines are in all parts of the U.S. “We’re losing the South,” Kelley said. “You need to be aware that the South is becoming more like Illinois; large blocks of unreached people, and churches that are smaller.”

And a new generation that is not following their parents’ lead by staying in church after they reach adulthood.

Kelley likened the denomination’s downward turn to an airplane in a tailspin: beyond a certain point, the pilot can’t pull the nose upward and right the plane. “We’re nearing that point,” Kelley said.

He identified four factors in this precipitous decline, problem areas that also point to possible solutions:

Elephant 1: Awakening

“We have a power problem,” Kelley said. “We have gotten so used to working without the filling of the Spirit of God, we don’t know it’s not normal. Kelley called for church leaders to encourage prayer for spiritual awakening: “This is like stacking the firewood for God to light the fire.

“We need to have solemn assemblies, for our people to seek a move of God… If God isn’t moving, there is an issue within us,” he said, pointing to the need for repentance.

Elephant 2: Conversions

As the numbers have dropped, Southern Baptists have moved away from publically counting baptisms as a measure of our fruitfulness. While Kelley acknowledged there have been misuses of the system in the past, he said our churches must return to a focus on fruitfulness. Specifically, we need to see conversions as a measure of “what God is doing in our churches.”

“Many of our churches have the Sunday school attendance posted somewhere, and last week’s offering,” Kelley said, “but I have been in very few churches that have in a public place how many people they have baptized – and even fewer that have a public goal of how many they want to baptize.”

He offered three measures of fruitfulness: beyond conversions, churches should measure ministry to the community. “Most churches do not have a muscle set for ministry to the community,” he pointed out, but it is community ministry that opens doors for evangelism.

And churches should measure church planting, their own participation in the reproductive process that brings healthy new congregations into existence, with members fueled by the salvations of their lost family and friends.

Elephant 3: Discipleship

While the rhetoric in our high-point decades was about evangelism (“A million more in ’54!”), the real genius of the period, Kelley contends, was in our dis

ciple-making mechanisms: Sunday school and training union. These methods focused on making new believers into disciples, who then led more people to Christ.

But, he said following extensive study, “Every methodology has a shelf life, and as the methodology wore out its shelf life, we did not replace it…. Our discipleship processes have been dismantled, not intentionally, but by attrition. Our discipleship has become a patchwork that is reinvented every year. It’s a series of things, not a cohesive strategy.”

In the last 20 years, Kelley said there has been a “megashift” in SBC life from the priority of discipleship to the priority of worship. One result is under-educated people who call themselves Christian, but whose lifestyles are little different from unbelievers.

“When I grew up, we still had a sense of being a stranger is a strange land. We were counter-culture…. I’m not calling for a return to the sixties. I am saying we have to find for today what a distinctly Christian lifestyle looks like and teach our people what living distinctly Christian lives is, so that we have evangelism that will impact our society.”

One of our needed conversations is how we will lead our congregations to spiritual maturity in this new era.

Elephant 4: Fighting

Finally, Kelley pointed to a significant shift he has witnessed from the seminary campus: “Today’s seminary students are not interested in going into existing churches, because they are scared. They have seen the results and heard the horror stories of church fights,” Kelley said.

Yet, that’s where the need is, in existing churches that are plateaued or declining. “If a pastor comes to bring growth, there will be conflict. We need to have conversations about how to have conflict.”

Kelley said leaders need to help their churches process conflict in ways that bring positive change and do not harm the Body of Christ. “Not all church fights are the result of failure on the part of the pastor, or of having ungodly people in the pews. It is the result of change. Leading change creates conflict,” Kelley said.

It also turns declining churches – and denominations.

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One pastor’s exit interview

Meredith Flynn —  February 6, 2014

Mark_Warnock_blog_calloutCOMMENTARY | Mark Warnock

I resigned in December from my church, First Baptist Columbia, to return to my home state of Florida. God has burdened me with the vast lostness of South Florida, and impressed upon me a duty to be closer to my aging parents. I’m moving down to join a church planting movement in South Florida, and to shine my little Gospel light in that darkness.

This move brings to a close 17 years of ministry in Illinois – six-and-a-half years in Chicagoland, and eleven years in the Metro East. I leave behind a host of people at my church and throughout the state that I love and respect. As I leave Illinois, I see both a lingering challenge and a great hope.

The primary challenge I see is the same one the church faces everywhere: selfishness. On a personal level, a church level, and a denominational level, we must fight constantly the Satanic gravity of our own selfishness that wants to make our lives all about us, our churches all about us, and our denomination all about us.  Jesus our Savior came not to be served, but to serve, and He calls us to deny ourselves, to take up our cross and to follow Him.

God formed a church to be a light to the world, for His glory. He has graciously allowed us to cooperate as a denomination to pool our efforts to fulfill the Great Commission, for His glory. So to the leaders in Illinois: Do not stop calling us outward, to the lost. Remember Luke 15, and the priority of God our Father: “…there is joy in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who repents.”

This fight to keep our eyes outward is not in vain, because there are signs of hope everywhere. Here are three I see:

Planting churches. I learned during my time at Columbia that one key to a healthy church is a steady stream of new converts. Like families, which continue to exist only if new babies are regularly born into them, churches begin to die without new spiritual life, and denominations begin to die without new churches.

I’m encouraged that God is calling men and women to devote their lives to starting new churches, and that IBSA is giving great priority to new church starts all across the state. Even more, I’m encouraged that increasingly, established IBSA churches are beginning to discover the joy and adventure of partnering with, supporting and working alongside church plants for the advancement of the Gospel.

Thinking students. I began teaching high school students at IBSA’s Super Summer in the late 90s. Many of the students I had in the early years are now pastoring or leading in churches across our state. I have been consistently impressed with the quality of the students in Illinois. They are passionate about the Gospel, hungry to be taught, and eager to love God with their minds. If our churches fail to equip our students with a clear understanding of the Gospel and the intellectual tools to be apologists in a hostile culture, we are in deep, deep trouble. The good news is that when presented with the challenge, our students – our future leaders – consistently rise to it.

A saving God. The real reason I have hope for the Gospel in Illinois and in South Florida? God keeps saving people. In my Monday night men’s group in Columbia, God kept saving some of the most unlikely men. In my first Sunday at my new church in West Palm Beach, I met a woman who came to church without an invitation, just stirred by the Spirit, and not knowing why she was there. She came to faith that week.

Consider Jesus’ answer to the scribes in Mark 2:17 who asked why He was eating with unlikely dinner guests – sinners and tax collectors. “Those who are well don’t need a doctor, but the sick do need one. I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

No one is as passionate as our God to save sinners like us.

So to my colleagues in the Gospel across Illinois: Thank you for 17 years of friendship and love. Don’t lose heart. Let your light shine in the darkness. Keep speaking of Jesus. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep holding out the Gospel, because our God is willing and mighty to save.

Mark Warnock formerly served as associate pastor of First Baptist, Columbia.

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Illinois volunteers help rebuild school in the Philippines

Meredith Flynn —  February 4, 2014
Six Illinois volunteers, arriving in the Philippines this week, will help rebuild this school on Gibitngil Island.

Six Illinois volunteers, arriving in the Philippines this week, will help rebuild this school on Gibitngil Island. Photo is from the project’s Facebook page.

THE BRIEFING | Meredith Flynn

A team of six Illinois Disaster Relief volunteers will travel to the Philippines this week to help rebuild after last fall’s Typhoon Haiyan.

The group, composed of “blue cap” leaders from around the state, is part of a multi-week, multi-crew project to rebuild a school on Gibitngil Island. The team is the first from Illinois to join the long-term relief effort in the Philippines coordinated by Baptist Global Response. Keep up with their project here.

Other news:

Forum to focus on biblical sexuality
“The Gospel and Human Sexuality” is the theme of a Nashville summit planned for pastors and leaders this spring. The Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission will host the April 21-23 meeting on marriage, family, purity, morality and culture.

“So many of the questions pastors grapple with today deal with situations that would not even have been possible a generation ago,” said ERLC President Russell Moore. “…We’ll talk about these questions, and how we can be faithful in ministry, Gospel-focused in engagement and Christ-shaped spiritual warriors in the ways we seek to wrestle with the principalities and powers of this age.” Read more at ERLC.com.

Blessed are the … athletic?
Just before the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics took over our TV screens, Americans weighed in on whether God rewards faithful athletes with health and success. Opinion is evenly split, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, with 48% saying yes and 47% disagreeing. But among white evangelicals, 62% believe God rewards faithful athletes. Read more at ChristianityToday.com.

Military’s religious climate questioned
The U.S. military has long been serious about protecting the religious freedom of its troops, said retired Gen. Doug Carver in submitted testimony before a House subcommittee last month. But Carver, who directs the North American Mission Board’s chaplaincy ministry, noted a climate within the military that could restrict religious liberty. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R.-Ohio) summarized the prevailing concern: “There is a fine line between accommodation and respecting all religions and restricting religious freedom and that’s the line we are walking on here.”

Subcommittee chairman Joe Wilson (R.-S.C.) called for another hearing on the issue in the next 60 days. Read more at BPNews.net.

Bible-themed movies coming soon
2014 may well be the “Year of the Bible,” says culture writer Jonathan Merritt. At the movies, at least. Merritt lists five movies that will have the Bible front and center in the country’s consciousness, beginning with this month’s “Son of God.” Biblical biopics “Noah” and “Mary, Mother of Christ” are due late this year, along with “Exodus.” And although “Heaven is for Real” (April) isn’t based on the Bible, Merritt includes it on his list because “it will likely riff on popular Bible themes such as heaven, Jesus, and salvation.” Read more at JonathanMerritt.com.

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Fishers of men in West Africa

Meredith Flynn —  February 3, 2014

BIG_pic_0210HEARTLAND | It had been a long, frustrating boat ride.

Mark Emerson and Harold Booze were just off Africa’s west coast, trying to locate a people group everyone seemed familiar with, but no one could find. With evening approaching and no place to stay for the night, Emerson knew they needed to go back to Kamsar, the city they had left a few hours before.

Go to IBSA’s Facebook page for a slideshow from the trip.

“The crushing blow is, I’ve had to turn this boat around, and I haven’t gotten to give the Gospel to anyone,” he said.

Emerson and Booze had come to Guinea with three other Illinois Baptist pastors to share Bible stories with people in the mostly Muslim, largely illiterate country. The group had split up, each with a missionary guide and an interpreter, and each in search of people groups who haven’t yet been engaged with the Gospel.

On the boat, “I’m going to give the Gospel to somebody,” Emerson decided. Along with the boat captain, two other Guineans were also on board. Emerson started telling “every ship story of Jesus, one right after the other,” he said, laughing at the memory.

On a later visit to an historic village, the Americans took a turn as listeners, hearing the story of how the people had come to settle there. When they finished the detailed account, the villagers said, “You tell us a story.”

Emerson replied, “I’ve got a great one.”

The International Mission Board will host a Base Camp training conference March 28-29 at FBC, Woodlawn, Ill., for churches interested in engaging unreached people groups of Sub-Saharan Africa. E-mail MarkEmerson@IBSA.org for more information.

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