Joel Young Blog.com

The person who has had the most constant and lasting impact on my life is my loving wife, Jenna. She is wise beyond her years, discerning in ways I never will be, and a great partner in parenting, church planting, and gospel centered living. Yesterday, after months of contemplating, she officially entered the blogsphere.

She’s been a guest blogger here on my blog before (“Get Your Hopes Up” – Jenna Young) but it’s time for her to spread her wings.

Her new blog is called “Soul Splash” and in her own words it is a collection of thoughts spilling from the life she is living. Nothing more, nothing less. You can say that I am biased, as she often does, but I think you all need to subscribe to and read her blog. It will be full of honest, genuine, and thought provoking posts from one of the best writers I know. User the link below to check it out.

soulsplash.tumblr.com

“We must lower the bar of how we do church and raise the bar on what it means to be a disciple.” – Neil Cole

Today as I read through the book Viral Churches by Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird I ran across this quote, and I’ll admit that I was a little thrown by it. I’m not the kind of guy that ever sees a good reason to “lower the bar” on anything I do. If anything, I’ll do the opposite because of my pure hatred for mediocrity. But the more I pondered this quote the more I saw the wisdom that comes from such thinking.

I’ve heard Neil Cole speak at different church planting conferences of the last couple years, and I think the philosophy that Neil has adopted is one we should all consider. Church needs to be more about following Jesus and the mission he has given the church, and less about what we want it to be or what we’ve told ourselves it has to be. Simply put, if we’re not carrying around unnecessary baggage we will be able to reproduce more rapidly and have a far greater impact in this world.

So, what does it mean to “lower the bar of how we do church”?

Does it mean that we stop caring about quality? Nope.

Does it mean that we become loose on our doctrine and preaching/teaching? Never.

What it means is that we take away all the unnecessary things about the way we do church. Things that should be in an open hand that we cling to tighter than bark to a tree.

Things like facilities that “we can’t live without,” but only use 10% of the time.

Things like the endless list of programs “we have to offer or no one will come”.

Things like Hollywood caliber production equipment that “we need to reach the next generation”.

Things we’ve convinced ourselves that we need to do church the way we have convinced ourselves it should be done.

As I’ve said many times before. I don’t think all of these things are evil, but why do so many of us view them as “necessities” in our churches? We can’t, or won’t, imagine life without them, and are often unwilling to set them aside for the opportunity to become more effective in the mission Jesus gave us as His church. I’m not saying that we can’t have facilities, or programs, or try our best to create inviting atmospheres. What I am saying is that we need to more carefully consider the priority we give to the mission of the church and the priority we give to the means by which we carry out that mission. Fall in love with the mission, not the means.

So, in light of the quote that started this all allow me to pose a few questions. What bars deserve raising in how we do church, and what bars need lowering? These are questions we can’t afford to ignore.

My family has decided that we’re going to take a beach vacation this year. Even though I’m really looking forward to it the trip going to the beach isn’t that big of a deal for me. I’ve been there many times before in my life. But, to my two year old son, Reed, going to the beach is a HUGE deal. He’s never been to the beach, and I sometimes think he spends all day thinking about what it will be like when we finally arrive.

Yesterday, my wife and the boys spent all day shopping for some of the things a vacation like this will require. Things like swimming trunks, sandals, water shoes, etc. When they got home Reed proudly displayed his beach swag in the living room, and his prize purchase was a small pair of blue sandals. He wore them around the house until he went to bed, and put them on first thing this morning as well.

As he was watching his usual morning cartoon lineup I noticed that he was kicked back on the couch with his feet propped up on a pillow (bearing his blue sandals of course), hands behind his head, and his eyes closed. I thought this was a strange method for watching cartoons so I inquired of my son, “Reed, what are you doing?” And he very calmly replied (without opening his eyes), “I’m at the beach.”

I looked at my wife, who was sitting next to me, and we had a good laugh, but then I became jealous. He was living the beach lifestyle, and he didn’t even need to be at the beach to do it. For all I know he could have been feeling the breeze on his face, and listening to the waves crash on the shores until I disturbed him with my silly question.

The ability to enjoy life no matter where we’re at is something that often escapes us as we become older, “wiser”, and more mature. So, my goal for today is to get to that beach…before we take our vacation. I hope you’ll do the same.

Ok, slap me on the wrist with a ruler…I haven’t been a very faithful blogger as of late. It’s really ironic that I haven’t written much over the last month because I’ve had more thoughts racing through my mind during this time than ever before. In fact, I would dare say that there is TOO MUCH going on inside this head of mine, at times, for my own good.

As I’ve been trying to process everything internally I’ve realized this:

The faster I move internally, the more sluggish I am externally.

In other words, until I slow down and simplify what is happening inside my head, my heart, and my soul I will never be able to allow it to take action. Otherwise, my life would look like a watermelon that has been packed full of dynamite and detonated; pieces of me flying in every possible direction.

What makes life difficult is not the quest to find things to do, but deciding what things are worth your time…your efforts…your thoughts and then proceeding with ONLY those things.

Who/what is winning that battle in your life?

Who/what SHOULD be winning that battle in your life?

It’s funny how God works on people with the same message at the same time. We’ve been exploring a lot of the book of Acts at Horizon lately, and I was blown away to see this post from my friend Mike this morning. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.” (Acts 8:4, NIV)

The apostles were the “church staff.” They didn’t leave Jerusalem when the persecution broke out, but the people of the church did.

Here’s what jumped out at me when I read these verses. It was the people who were doing the ministry. The members of the church were the ones preaching the gospel wherever they went.

It was the people. Not the leaders. Not the staff. The people of the church were empowered to do ministry. They were the ones sharing the gospel. They were the ones winning people to Christ.

If you’re a part of The Church, you need to go read the entire post.

“An Acts 8 Awakening” – Mike Edmisten

Recently, I have found myself preoccupied with difficult questions. Questions that are a result of questions, that are a result of questions, that are…well, you get the picture. What these questions really are is a result of my realization that the work of the church of Jesus Christ is everything that we do and everything that we are as Christians. Yeah, I know, “Not ground breaking Joel,” but in the field of ministry it’s easy to become fixated on one small portion of the church’s work week in and week out. This train of thinking has caused me to question everything I have come to accept as reality in the American church, and forced me to confirm everything I know to be truth, according to the pages of scripture.

One of my biggest frustrations has got to be the answer to this question.

Why do we allocate an overwhelming majority of our church’s resources to things that occupy such a small minority of the church’s work?

If you’re involved in a local church, let me ask you to consider some questions.

Where does the money in your church go? My guess would be: salaries…equipment…facilities…maybe some other various yet related things.

What do most of the volunteer hours go towards at your church? My guess would be: childcare…hospitality…facility maintenance…worship band…and maybe some other various yet related things.

What does your church use as a measuring stick for success? My guess would be: Sunday attendance…Sunday offering…Sunday involvement..maybe some other various yet related things.

See a trend here? If not, let me point it out…these things all revolve around our Sunday worship services.

While I can’t make a blanket statement about all churches (and please understand I’m not saying that I have every church in America figured out), and I know it’s not this simple my observation is that most of the resources that our church’s possess are leveraged to create a one hour a week of mountain top experience called a “Sunday Service”. It’s the big event for most churches, and it’s what ministry professionals live, die, and are judged by. Don’t believe me? Just ask a preacher how his church is doing sometime. Nine times out of ten you’ll get a Sunday service attendance, or some subtle variation, as an answer.

I don’t believe that Sunday services are bad. In fact, I LOVE THEM and to top it off they’re very Biblical. After the resurrection of Jesus the early church gathered on Sundays in honor and celebration of that reality and they made it a priority to devote themselves to the Apostles teaching and to remembering Jesus’s sacrifice through communion when they were together. But if you read the entire New Testament it’s plain to see that Sunday is NOT what defined the early church’s work or the influence of the Gospel message. It was their whole lives lived together and in the reality of Jesus’ life that allowed for the advancement of the Gospel and the work of Christ’s Church.

Maybe it’s time that we reallocate our assets and focus to more appropriately include the work of the church that is happening the other six days of the week. I’m not talking about starting a small group ministry or a midweek focus. I’m talking about changing our church culture so that we can see no defined boundaries between where church begins and where it ends. Simply allow the work of the church to live through us.

This is not something I claim to have all figured out or even know how to implement, but I think it’s a shift of focus that the church needs, and I’m willing to try.

Last week I had the privilege of being with over 3500 other church planters from all over North America at the National New Church Conference (also called “Exponential”). In years past it’s been a time of great encouragement and revitalization for me. I always look forward to hearing about what God is doing across the country and how he is using people to drive the Gospel message forward in our cities.

Though the gathering this year was all of the things it had been in years past, it was also a time of great confusion for me. Being deeper into the process of church planting than I’ve ever been before I’m starting to see that trying to figure it all out will drive you mad. Even if you’re the most organized church planter alive there will still be steps in the process that have to be taken in faith. To me, if you plant a church and never experience a moment of calamity where you look around and ask, “How did we get here, and what do we do next?” then you should be teaching the rest of us how to do it your way…because you’re special.

It might have been my situation or my perspective that skewed this, but as I furiously tried to soak up every ounce of wisdom that was being thrown my way at the conference it began to feel like every speaker was saying the same basic thing. “It’s time that we stop pretending to have it all figured out. It’s time that we confidently proclaim that we don’t have all the answers, but we serve a God that does!”

You see, I believe that one must possess a blessed mixture of confidence and humility to become a church planter. For many, the odds are improbable. Most will be short on money, time, patience, commitment, and resources. In order to even take the first step you have to be willing to submit to God’s provision in the face of a less than encouraging reality and lead with confidence.

Along my journey as a church planter I have consistently asked God to give me clarity, stability, and strength. But the more I learn about following God the more I see that what he really needs me to possess is a glorious sense of confusion. If I believe I have it all figured out I will begin to think I can, or have been, doing it all on my own. Then, that confidence that was once so essential turns into arrogance.

Read Matthew 28 sometime. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples on a mountain in Galilee and while they all worshipped him, some still had doubts and were uncertain about their future with Jesus. But, their confusion never stopped them from being fully committed to Christ,

With God, you will never be in a better place to serve him than when you are confused about what He is doing, yet are still ready to follow him anywhere.

This week we had a Board Game and Movie blowout at Horizon. It was a ton of fun, and my family had been looking forward to it for a while. My wife loves board games, I love competition, and as it turns our our oldest, Reed, was ready to go for a completely different reason.

He started saying, “I wanna go to church,” very early in the morning. He was persistent in his demand and eventually had a break down because there was still an entire day between him and “going to church”. As I was trying to calm the situation I just couldn’t help but ask, “Why do you want to go to church so bad?” Through his tears of frustration he said, “People LIKE me.”

At first I didn’t get what he meant, but after a while I started to see that he had began to view church as a place where people really LIKED him. Now, he doesn’t get out much, because he’s only two, but beyond our home in all the places he frequents he identified church as the place where people liked him. It was a place where he felt loved.

Two things…

#1: Thank you church for evoking this feeling in my children. I am both proud and grateful.
#2: Let’s make sure that everything we do is out of a genuine love for people, and desire for them to know and love Jesus.

Last night as I mowed my yard I decided to do it without the usual presence of my ipod shuffle and some motivationally rockin’ music. I decided instead to devote the entire hour and a half to prayer for others and their work in the Kingdom. I made it my goal to NOT ask God for a single thing for myself.

I thought this would be difficult to do, but I decided to do it anyway. However, when I was done mowing I found that I had a desire to spill this prayer time over into the trimming of the yard, and then the trimming of the shrubs and trees around the yard. When it was all said and done I got in three solid hours of prayer.

Now, understand that the point of this post is not for me to tell you how great I am because I prayed for three hours last night. In fact it’s quite the opposite. I didn’t really feel like doing this, and I didn’t even think I had the steam to get through half an hour, but once I was willing to make the change by praying only for others out of concern for God’s work all over the world, and not out of my selfish ambitions, God created a desire in me to continue. I’m not saying that asking God for things is selfish, because Scripture tells us we should, but rather I’m recognizing that my prayer life, as of late, has been pretty selfish.

“God, fix this thing in MY life…bless what I’M doing…remove this obstacle in MY path…and the list goes on.”

It wasn’t wrong for me to ask those things of God, but when they are my only focus it creates a very small lens through which to view the rest of God’s work in the world. What it was really doing was creating a delusion that God was only working through me, and that attitude, whether you’re aware of it or not, is a cancer that can kill The Church faster than anything else.

If the church is ever to become a place of unity among all who claim the name of Christ and desire to preach the truth of God’s word and The Gospel we first have to be willing to make the change. Or hearts, our minds, and our intentions have to show concern for the whole body of Christ, and not just the part we exist within.

I know my heart isn’t where God needs it to be yet, but I’m ready and willing to make the change and allow him to take me to that place.

Today as I emailed a friend I noted that my spirit had somehow been lifted by the influx of great we’ve been having here in Cincinnati over the past week. I told him how the atmosphere I lived in was having a great effect on my work, my attitude, and my outlook. While I believe that this is probably true on some level for all of us, as it pertains to the weather, I believe it is most definitely true for us all as it pertains to the people we surround ourselves with.

If we’re around people who are filled with a fire for serving God, and are lit up with passion to achieve his purposes in their life, it will have a definite effect on us. On the flip side, if we’re consistently around people who are fighting God’s direction for their life we will find it hard to follow it ourselves. But, that’s not where it ends. I believe that there is a third category that is often overlooked. The category of the complacent.

If we surround ourselves with people who are comfortable with their current level of dedication and service to God then it won’t be long before we are comfortable too. The best thing we can do for each other as we pursue God and His will is to create a Holy sense of unrest. Not that we’re always unsatisfied with everything, but that with a Holy purpose we never look upon our actions as enough. That there is always something more to be done, a deeper level to dig to, and a stronger sense of purpose of be gained from pursuing a Holy God.