Along with some of the awesome members of our core team, I spent the majority of this past weekend hanging out in a tent at a local town festival.  This was our first opportunity to really introduce ourselves to the community.  The following are a few reflections on the experience.  

1. We want to be present (and have a noticeable presence) in our community.  I would (and we will) do this again in a heartbeat.  As a church, as much as possible, we want to be present where people are gathering.  An evaluation question for us is, “If Graceway Church ceased to exist in this community, would anyone notice?”  Our scorecard for success is not solely based on how many people we can eventually manage put in seats on Sunday morning, but is based also (and more primarily so) on the kind of impact we are having in the broader community.  If we are helping people grow in their faith then we believe that the evidence of our transformed lives should be reflected in the community around us.  This weekend was a place for us to start building the relationships that will allow for this kind of opportunity.


2. Keep it Simple.  If there was one negative (outside of the rain) this weekend it was that we strayed a bit from our value of keeping it simple.  At our booth, we sold fair trade crafts from Ten Thousand Villages.  This was a reflection of our core value of “serving the world”, but for this event I wonder if it was too much.  Ten Thousand Villages makes doing a one-time festival sale pretty simple, but the primary purpose of us being at this event was to have the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the community.  It may have been more effective to simplify our booth to do something like an iPod giveaway to go along with our freebies (we gave out 500 super-cool light up yo-yos with our logo and website).  I don’t regret doing the fair trade sale, I just wonder if it made our primary purpose more labor intensive then it needed to be.


3. If you give something away, make sure it is something people want.  There were a ton of people giving stuff away at this festival.  What was interesting was to observe the response different booths got to what they were giving away.  There were all the things you might expect… bookmarks, fans, pens, rulers.  We gave away light up yo-yos.  Whenever you go to an event like this, there is usually one thing that is being given away that every kid in the place is playing with… making others wonder where they got it.  Our goal was to be that booth with that one thing.  I would say we succeeded in this.  As the weekend progressed we had people sending others to our booth to get the yo-yos.  Once night fell, you could see little red lights going up and down all over the park.  Pretty cool.  What was unexpected, however, was how many adults wanted yo-yos.  It was a new toy that some kids had never tried before, but for some adults it was a reminder of their childhood.  They shared stories of the “yo-yo man” coming to their school every year, and tried to do their old tricks, etc.  Pretty cool.


4. The conversations/connections were worth the effort.  Because we are not gathering regularly at this point, and we are very early in the process of assembling our launch team I get very little one-to-one time with the folks who are the “early connectors” to our community.  This event gave these folks something tangible that they could participate in and it also gave me an opportunity to have some extended conversations that I had previously been unable to have.  
   

   Some of the biggest highlights of the weekend came in the conversations/connections we had with folks who we had not yet met.  We met the director of organization called “Birthday Blessings” that provides birthday parties for homeless and impoverished children in our area, we met a woman who has dedicated her life to childhood cancer research through an organization called Cure Search.  We met a middle school kid who thought our booth was the coolest at the festival.  He ended up hanging out for over an hour and helped hand out yo-yos!  We met folks from other area churches, folks who have no church connection, displaced Lutherans… It was really great.  

I have been thinking a lot lately about the kind of leader I am becoming and the kind of leader I hope to be. Over the next several weeks (and as additional things surface over time) I will post particular challenges I am facing in this space and invite your input as a way to be challenged and stretched to grow.

Here is my challenge for the week:

I do not always answer the question I am being asked. I have a tendency to make things more complicated for myself by, instead, trying to answer what I perceive to be the question behind the question. For example: At the pastor’s conference I attended this week there were several occasions where I was asked, “What style of worship will you have at Graceway?” This question bugs me anyway (that’s another blog), but people want to know. The assumption that I often make, however, is that people (particularly other Lutheran pastors) are asking because they are passing judgement. The result, then, is often me stumbling through some kind of unintelligible description using every 10 cent word I can think of to make it sound like, despite the fact that we will not be using any of the liturgical settings or much of the music found in the Lutheran Hymnals that I am not somehow “dumbing-down” worship and that, yes, our worship will be “Lutheran.” Truthfully, that may sometimes be the motivation behind the question, but then again maybe it isn’t always. Maybe the way I answer has more to do with my need/desire to be accepted/respected by my colleagues and my peers. Would it not be better for me to ask the question that I have been asked and then if the “real” question is something else leave it up to the one asking to actually ask it?

Would love your thoughts, insight, stories, etc.

Well… if you have been waiting for the “Christian” version of Guitar Hero it is finally here for your mac and pc.  http://www.guitarpraise.com  I’m not opposed to stuff like this, although some may just dismiss it as derivative junk.  I can respect that some people want to play a fun game like Guitar Hero without having to listen to 80’s hard rock songs.  Let’s be honest, some of the content of those songs isn’t exactly kid friendly.  Stuff like this, however, always makes me think about missional living.  How do we effectively guard against things in this world that fill our eyes and ears with words and images that aren’t healthy for the soul while truly maintaining missional posture.  There are “Christian” movies, music, TV shows, board games, theme parks, etc.  We have created this whole Christian subculture that, while maybe well intentioned, could also end up isolating us from the very people we are called to reach with the message of the gospel in the nme of staying safe.  How do we really follow the old adage, “be in the world, not of the world?”  There is stuff out here that is toxic for our hearts and minds and souls, but then Jesus comes to us, not after we have left all that stuff behind. He comes to us as we are…where we are.  How do we follow his lead and stay safe?  Or maybe following Jesus isn’t safe at all.  Hmmmmm…

As we prepare for the launch of this new church, I think a lot about how we want to present ourselves to the community.  One of the primary entry points for the community is our worship gathering… which leads to the challenge of effective musical leadership.  Came across this list of “Worship Leadership Pet Peeves” that, I think, highlights some common challenges/barriers we can create through the way we lead.

http://churchrelevance.com/top-10-pet-peeves-about-worship-leaders/

I’d love to know what you have experienced that has caused stumbling blocks in your worship experience.