What is Relevance really about anyway?

The message of Jesus is relevant.
Love. Hope. Fresh Start. New Life.
We saw this type of excitement with the most recent presidential campaign. People fell in love with the promise of “hope.” They believed “Yes we can.” And we watched as people came out in droves to support a man/campaign that stirred emotion.

It moved people because it was relevant to their lives. It struck a chord. They had less money, felt greater pains, and wanted direction and someone to lead them to answers. It’s a great example, but it pales in comparison to the message and hope that Jesus brings.

That’s why I love Forefront. Because we take God’s relevant message of the Bible and present it to the people He has led us to reach in a way they can understand. It’s making sure we weigh the message and the method in an appropriate manner. A Biblical manner. Out goal is to not get them confused and remember their pecking order.

1. Message: relevant and life changing
2. Method: breaks down walls and opens people’s hearts

For instance, Forefront has a worship gathering every week. The message is to Love God, Love People, and Turn The World Upside Down. That is relevant to every person’s life that comes through the door. The method we use to break down the walls and hear that is more of a laid back atmosphere, music you hear normally during the week, worship songs that stir emotion/point to Jesus, and emotive/humorous videos that “break down walls & open people’s hearts” so when they hear the relevant message, they can be open to God moving them to change their lives and live for Him. Getting the two reversed can be trouble, because the message carries a boat load more weight than the method.

Because this is the case, we (the staff) celebrate the way we plan for things to make God/message first, method second:

• What’s The Reason: “What are we trying to communicate about who God is, what He does, and how He loves?” We look to the Bible to make sure what we are doing is beneficial for the community and people who need to experience Jesus.
• Expect A Response: “What is God going to do in people’s lives when we present this?” We assume God is going to do something amazing when we follow Him. The great part is, He never lets us down.
• Prepare For Response: “Are we equipped to handle people responding like this?” We evaluate our systems, people, and current structure to make sure we are equipped to handle people’s needs from what we’re counting on God to do.
• Dream The Design: “What does this look, feel, smell, taste like?” Now that we have something God-led, let’s creatively paint this in a way to make people willing to listen and experience this.
• Execute The Plan: “Everyone has a job? Well, then… do your job.” We divide and conquer to make this come to completion. Everyone knows the reason, so it’s important to them to see it through.
• Evaluate The End: “Did it produce the things we hold as important?” At Forefront, we don’t measure the # of people coming on Sundays or money (those usually drive pastors/staffs crazy). We measure baptisms, life change, community service hours, % of people involved in small groups, and is everyone “known.” If we can look back and meet one or more of these, we’re presenting God as being relevant to people’s lives.

It takes the pressure off. It allows Forefront as a church to thrive. It also allows us to give God 100% of the credit. The things we measure are up to God. It’s a great place to be and it’s what makes Forefront a great church to be a part of. This process allows us to start with the relevant message and transition into the method that breaks down those walls people have as they encounter the church’s services, projects, and outreach events. If you go to Forefront or are thinking of checking out Forefront, be assured we put God as the focus of all we do. And…

This process is definitely universal. Not only do we use this as a staff– but Carrie and I use this in our family, parenting ideas, when we work with other people, and counsel families, etc. So how are you starting with the message and moving on to the “how to’s” of making it happen? At home? Work? School? Your church?

Jason *over and out*

What is relevance?

I had a handful of really good emails, a couple concerned emails, and a few “likes” on Facebook concerning the last post “The New Stereotype.” First, let me just say I love the church. By that, I mean the church universal, not just Forefront. I love the culture that’s been created over the last 12 years here at Forefront. People are open, honest, and real about their struggles, flaws, and journey with Jesus. They serve him with reckless abandon and I love it.

Second, this blog is read by both Christians, Non-Christians, other pastors, volunteers, leaders of non-profits, etc. It’s a great bunch and love that we all can get along here on the blog. But, this blog isn’t themed specifically for Forefront Church. It’s not just about my family, and the goal isn’t just to be for other church leaders. It’s all those things depending on the posts, thoughts, and feelings as I humbly serve Jesus.

I say all that because although I love the church, I sometimes can get caught up more in the music being perfect, setting the excellent environment, making hilarious videos that bring down the house, and making sure people leave feeling like that place is so cool. Now, people thinking Forefront is cool makes me very excited. If people just think Forefront is cool and it stops there, that breaks my heart- because that means we’ve lost our focus. The cool factor shouldn’t define us as a church, it should be our impact of aiming people to Jesus.

We create an environment on Sunday mornings to break down walls/misconceptions that people might have when they come to Forefront. We do that so the message can be received in the best possible conditions for God’s Spirit to do it’s work on the hearts of people. If next year there is a huge shift in the people coming through the door & we realize that making that environment work means we worship by candle light and sing from hymnals (I highly doubt it, and hope not- but God is God and can do crazy things), if that needed to happen- we would do it. But it wouldn’t be done because we think that is being “relevant” to our audience. We we do that to make it a safe place- what is relevant is the message, communion, worship… the story of Jesus.

I would hate for Forefront (or any other church for that matter), to get caught up in “keeping up with the Jones’” and measuring their impact on the community by the best projector, rockin’ band, or funny/clever videos they create. That doesn’t make anyone relevant, it just means you have the money to get equipment. Again, those things are great and we use them all the time at our church, but that’s not what makes Forefront “Forefront.” Maybe it’s better to look at what relevance is:

Relevance is…

• meeting people in the community
• loving the homeless
• taking care of orphans and widows
• community outreach projects
• sharing a meal with your next door neighbor
• volunteering at your kid’s school
• coaching little league
• being a part of your work’s social events
• setting an example at work, home, in the neighborhood
• working through missions to aid the needy
• finding out how the people respond best to the message of Jesus and keep it at the “forefront” of all you do (pardon the pun)
• giving to people in need
• sharing community with people far from God and Christians
• living like Jesus

In the next post I’ll talk about some ways we (the staff at Forefront) guard ourselves from getting off track and making sure our services, missions work, and ministry projects focused specifically on Jesus.

Jason *over and out*

The state of the church today? (ht: marc johns)

The house lights dim, colored gels are illuminated as smoke machines fill the room. The first chord rings out as the drummer lays down a heavy beat. As the rockin’ ends- a video explodes onto the large HD screen with welcoming images of the theme of the day. As it fades to black, the lights come up to a hipster, faded jeans wearing, MTV’esk guy in his mid to late 20’s talking about… love. community. come as you are. welcome to (insert cool name that we have to look up in the dictionary)… church.

This has become the new tradition. The church has traded hymnals and suits for pre-worn jeans and multimedia. Is it bad? Not entirely. The church body at Forefront has many of these same elements involved in our weekly worship gatherings.

Is it sinful? No, it’s not a sin to have these things as part of your corporate worship experience.

Is it relevant? No. Though many would say yes, I’ve been debating the idea of relevance in my head for a few years now. What is relevance? Relevant is defined by Dictionary.com as, “1. Bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand; pertinent. 2. Tending logically to prove or disprove a fact of consequence or to make the fact more or less probable and thereby aiding the trier of fact in making a decision.”

As I see it, in light of this definition; the “church” should aim at being connected to teaching/educating/discipling people towards the truths about God & eternity. That is the matter at hand for mankind. That is what connects them to the message of Jesus. That is relevant.

Now lights, video, cameras, bands, multimedia, etc. are great. They help break down the stereotypes of a generation. A previous generation (not all but some) that focused on money, huge buildings, growing “their” church and not “God’s” church. But, for most of the country, the new stereotype is exactly like the opening paragraph. What is the reason we live and breathe as the local church? How are we relevant to the community and people who need Jesus? It’s not our band, videos, or hipster pastors the church planting organizations are pumping out. It’s connecting people to Jesus.

I think the church has a new image problem. It’s only going to get worse until we step in and make the changes necessary to show the world we’re done trying to “be cooler than your grandmas church” and strive to “be people who simply love like Jesus.” I have some ideas, well more just ramblings. We’ll hit it up next time.

But… what about you?
How do you look at relevance?
Does the local church in America measure up?
How do we change the current paradigm?
Let’s talk it out people…

We’ve batted around the how, why, pros, cons, and even a little glimpse into the process of what it takes to do a streaming service online. But, now to the real question at hand:

“Is the ‘online church’ experience- church?”

It depends. But in most cases- No.
Weighing the pros and cons against scripture leads me to believe a few things about solely attending an online service:

1. The Definition Of Church: The definition/picture of the “church” according to scripture points to live, face to face, living life together, rubbing elbows in service, worshiping the Creator together, kind of interaction. This does not happen with “online church.” Though some will debate this fact. There is no substitute for the local church. Now whether it takes form in the idea of “house church” or “congregational gathering style church,” this local gathering paints a clearer Biblical picture of how God’s church should move and breathe in the community.
2. The Accountability Of The Live Interaction: Accountability is almost vacant if not totally unavailable. Too many people we encounter through the ministry God’s called us to do here are introverted by nature and would attend online without ever saying a word, chatting a phrase, or interacting with the people involved. The argument could be made that these same people wouldn’t walk through the doors of your church. We have TONS of introverts and new people who attended every week. It’s all about the environment/culture you create. They won’t stay anonymous for long in a building with friendly people prompting them to move to another level with God.
3. The Practice Of Spiritual Disciplines: The practicing of spiritual disciplines is difficult even within the local church being together weekly and seeing one another face to face- with online church this grows exponentially. This new embodiment of the “online church” can restrain many  people from freely expressing and flourishing in their spiritual disciplines. Loving, giving, serving, worshiping, community, communion, and the list goes on. These are things done with others. Now granted being online, you have “other people” in the experience, but you are not interacting with them in the same way face to face discussion happens. For instance, I love my wife. We talk every day. We also use Twitter, Facebook, and texts to communicate. If I cut ties to all face to face interaction with my wife and just use technology- our relationship will fade (and I will fade). She is built for physical interaction and I cannot fulfill my duty as a husband if we’re cut off face to face. I cannot practice it. Likewise, I am built for acts of service and I cannot serve her the way God built me if we do not see one another. Our disciplines as a couple work better and we grow in them when we are interacting in real life. Online church does not afford people the opportunity to  flex their spiritual muscles and do what God built them to do.
4. The Idolatry Of The New & Improved: I love technology, but even in my own life I have to weigh the amount of time, energy, and resources that are being placed on computers, cell, mp3 players, TV, DVD’s, etc. It could go on forever. As we grow as a culture and advance ever so quickly into new and exciting technologies, my fear is that we could be whisked away by the shiny new toys of a culture heading away from the Creator. Now, I’m not saying any of these “things” are bad in and of themselves, but when we begin to rely on power, bandwidth, site analytics, user patches & updates, and tools that are supposed to make our lives “easier” instead of relying on the one and only God of the Universe… we are walking on dangerous ground. As a church we flirt with this technology line on a constant basis and have really had hard talks about what it looks like to scale back things so we can always know we’re relying more on God than the almighty Apple Computer. It’s a tough place to be in a “show” and “special effects” culture. People are waiting to see the glitz and glamor of something amazing, and as leaders many are trying to feed them what they “want.” but what if we stepped back and focused more on what they “need?”

I know some people who are doing streaming services and people’s lives are being changed. I think that is great. Any time people can encounter God- that’s a good thing. But, my fear is that we might be chasing the trends too closely and it could backfire on us as we try  to do the work God has called us to do. We should weigh everything against the Bible and see where it stacks up. As for Forefront Church, we won’t be going the live online route. In times of a crunch we will use technology as a way to keep the message from not being heard at all, but nothing can imitate or replace the local church.

Jason *over and out*

*I’ll take questions via Twitter, Facebook, & the blog and do a wrap up post from things you have interest in talking about

We’ll get to the conclusion in a bit, but we received a few emails asking what videos we played besides the live feed- and how did we do it? Well, Livestream allows you to insert your own videos (1gb or under) as well as YouTube video content. You insert those into a playlist and bounce between those and your live feed(s) you have coming in.

Oh and here are the videos we used during the online service:

We played this video after talking about people being home in their PJ’s, enjoying breakfast, eating bacon… MMmmmm, bacon!

We played this video right before taking our online offering (http://giving.forefront.org) and afterwards talked about our small groups, we call the “Gel Groups.” The promos like these are always fun and create a buzz about small groups that more often than not leads someone to check out a group for the first time. It can be pretty intimidating going into someone’s home you don’t know and sharing things about your life you’ve never shared before. Our prayer is that things like this take the edge off of their worries (we know people will say evil things [and have] about our church for showing/making commercials like this- luckily, God knows our hearts and intentions, so enjoy).

We’ve rattled off some of the pros of streaming church online, but what about the cons? We had overwhelmingly strong/positive feedback from our experience with it, but it still begs to answer the question:

“Is the ‘online church’ experience- church?”

Let’s look at some of the cons many people have debated for a moment:

• Gives people the opportunity to be completely anonymous. This allows the individual no accountability for things going on in their life. I’ve met one too many people (within the church who attend regularly and are engaged in ministry) who have a hard time with accountability. Amplify that exponentially when someone is sitting alone in their living room with no one to talk to except a chat client, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Lack of true community/gathering of the saints. This is where it gets a little tricky. The definition of “community” is being debated quite a bit in the Christians circles with the birth of social media. In my study of the Bible, where two or more are gathered, God is in their midst. That being said, online interaction is not the same as physical handshakes, face to face convos over coffee, discussions in a living room about faith, or worship service/gatherings where a collective body engages the living God. There aren’t many trying to argue that online services are “more engaging and impacting” than a live physical interaction with a church. It’s like the birth of “E-Readers.” I love the idea. Carrying around my entire library with a small device and read them whenever I want? Awesome! But, there is something about a physical book. The feel, pages, smell, turning to a new slice of information, the cover art, etc. It just gets me. The reading experience is more engaging to me with a physical book. In many ways, I lose the story & lifeblood when I turn to the “techno version.” In the same way, we lose a great deal of the engagement factor when we attend “online services” as opposed to a physical campus. We also turn away (to what extent is up the person) from the early church’s example for us to gather together weekly for communion (breaking of bread remembering Jesus’ death) and the Apostle’s teaching (Biblical doctrines for the church body, taught in the Bible). See here and here.
• Temptation to give in to your ADHD. You know it’s true. You watch some, pay a bill online. Watch some, check a few emails, update Twitter status, view friends statuses on Facebook. Watch some… you get the idea. One of the comments we got back was that the chat client to the right of the video was pretty distracting. Through the music portion we aimed at asking people questions about the songs and how God was moving in their lives. During the message we stepped back to we could… engage with the message. That is when the chat client went a bit out of control. People would hop in and it was like a scene from Cheers, “Norm!” the chatters would rave as people jumped in. Part of it was cool because it was a Forefront love-fest, with all kinds of comments about how “cool” “rad” or “awesome” the church is. I enjoyed that, but that is not why we are the church. Church moves, lives, and breathes to be about God and about others. And with the temptation to go to ESPN.com, check your online banking, or order a pizza to be there by the time service is over- it can be a bit too much to handle for many people. The focus can get lost. That is never good. God tells us our worship should be orderly (1 Corinthians 14), because everyone there might have something to say, a song to sing, a word to preach, etc. Let’s do this in a way that isn’t distracting the others around us. “Online services” have the capability (not always, but they can) to do just that, distract us from the true message.
• Confines people from truly practicing spiritual disciplines. I  might get blasted for this one. We were built to love, serve, give, and worship. A computer screen does not provide the same environment and place to express those. Want to serve in an area of ministry? A computer screen makes it difficult to serve. Want to love someone else who is having a hard time across town? It’s hard to know about it when physical proximity is only through a LAN connection. Want to worship God through song? Many find it awkward to sing to their screen, turning what is supposed to be our engaging with the Creator into a “spectator sport” much like the Super Bowl or the next show at the Norva (venue here in the 7-5-7). This was not meant to be. Want to give to the work of God’s church? Well, statically speaking- online services don’t produce much/if any giving by their weekly attenders (via LifeChurch.tv seminar with 4 leading churches doing web-based services on a weekly basis). We saw this to be true when we did our online service. Our weekly average giving is $9-10k a week to rent facilities, pay staff, rent office space, reach our community. When we looked at the final numbers, we received roughly 1/4 of that number. OUCH. How do we reach our community? Pay staff? Rent offices, etc? The trend with online services is that it deprives people from experiencing the full potential of practicing the spiritual disciplines God calls them to. We were built to love,worship, & experience God and spiritual disciplines allow us to move closer to God. They are not what save us, that’s God’s grace alone, but these practices help us draw near to Him.
• Stretches the definition of church to a place that is fairly uncomfortable… for many. With the things mentioned above, it begins to paint a picture of what the church is supposed to be (according the the Bible). With video venues, online services, and new technology birthing every day- we are going to see the definition of church discussed, debated, tampered with, and trampled on.

So, we still haven’t said one way or the other… “Is the ‘online church’ experience- church?”
You’ll get my conclusion in the next post.

Jason *over and out*